Justin Fishner-Wolfson, managing partner at 137 Ventures and former partner at Founders Fund, explains the investment thesis behind Founders Fund's early bet on SpaceX.
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“There are a lot of big players. They built their business on a cost plus strategy, and they had no interest in turning rockets into airplanes. And that's fundamentally what needed to happen in order to increase access to space.”
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More from Justin Fishner-Wolfson
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Fishner-Wolfson: 137 Ventures structures liquidity as loans to preserve 409A valuations
“We structure these things as loans, so we can avoid repricing the foreign day of the business. We can make it more tax efficient for folks. We can allow people to maintain voting control.”
Fishner-Wolfson: 137 Ventures offers non-recourse convertible loans against founder equity
“Most of what we do
Which are the loans that you're alluding to is basically a non-recourse loan. The person we're doing business with is going to put up some shares as collateral for that loan. The loan's non-recourse. And so they're not taking risk beyond the…”
“I still come back to the growth answer, which is that if you have companies that are growing 200% a year, that you can overcome changes in interest rates... A normalization of interest rates to being positive, I think won't matter for very high growth companie…”
Fishner-Wolfson: Founders Fund was not a premier VC firm in 2007
“In all fairness, Founders Fund wasn't one of the premier venture funds on the planet back in 2007, right? There really had been no new venture funds It was not like a trivial thing to raise that fund. People were a lot less famous. Facebook was a much smaller …”
Fishner-Wolfson: SpaceX, Gusto, Flexport, WorkRise, and Curology are 137's top holdings
“The biggest position obviously goes back to the time I was a founder's fund with SpaceX. You know, we're large investors in Gusto and Flexport and WorkRise. I think Curology rounds out probably the top five portfolio companies for us today.”
Fishner-Wolfson: Record IPOs do not reduce private tech liquidity demand
“I'm not sure that the fact that there's all these IPOs really changes people's need for liquidity or is dramatically changing the duration that companies are staying private for... So the IPO market isn't fundamentally changing the need or desire for liquidity…”
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