Eli Dorado

Head of Strategic Investments, Astera Institute · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investoranalystexecutiveauthoracademic@elidourado ↗LinkedIn ↗elidourado.com ↗

Eli Dourado is an economist focusing on accelerating economic growth and funding breakthrough hard technologies. Prior to Astera Institute, he served as head of global policy and communications at Boom Supersonic and directed the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

8statements → 7claims → 7claims resolved → 86%fully supported → 3.5/5average certainty → 2.12/5average debate potential →

6 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 6 assertions · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Eli argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Dorado: A two-kilogram drone causes human injury once per 187M flight hours
“And for a two kilogram drone, I think we found that there might be a human injury once every hundred eighty seven million years.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:51 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Dorado: Drone collision risk with commercial jets is once per 41B hours
“And then if you look at commercial jets, it's even smaller. I mean, it's, I think I got, I think the last number that we got was forty one billion years of continuous operation which is, you know, three times the Age of the universe.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:02 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
80% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

270 words/min while actually speaking · 39.3 um and uh per 1k words · 50.5 false starts per 1k · 32.2% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Eli Dorado: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,212 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Eli Dorado said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Dorado: A two-kilogram drone causes human injury once per 187M flight hours
“And for a two kilogram drone, I think we found that there might be a human injury once every hundred eighty seven million years.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:51 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
Assertion Contradicted
Dorado: Drone collision risk with commercial jets is once per 41B hours
“And then if you look at commercial jets, it's even smaller. I mean, it's, I think I got, I think the last number that we got was forty one billion years of continuous operation which is, you know, three times the Age of the universe.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:02 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
What-if
Dorado: Early internet program managers would have permitted commercial use initially
“If they knew where we were today, they would have allowed Commercial use from the inception.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:12 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
Prediction Held up
Dorado: FAA permanent commercial drone rules will be released in June 2016
“They're still not out, but they're coming. It'll probably be sometime next month. There will be some permanent commercial drone rules.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:17 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
Assertion Supported
Dorado: Hollywood film productions used commercial drones before it was legal
“What's interesting to me about the Hollywood application is that they actually were some of the earliest adopters, and they adopted it even before it was legal for them to do so.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:04 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
Assertion Supported
Dorado: Fewer than half of US consumer drones were registered in 2016
“I think there's something like a million plus consumer drones, and only 400,000 have registered.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:16 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
Assertion Supported
Dorado: Under federal statute, paper airplanes are legally classified as aircraft
“Under federal statute, paper airplanes are aircraft.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:51 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform
Assertion Supported
Dorado: Pilot error causes 75% of general aviation accidents
“In general aviation, something like three quarters of all accidents are pilot error in, in commercial aviation. I think it's about half.”
Eli Dorado Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 37:32 a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform Jan 2, 2019 10m
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