Oetting: Growth Hardtech Needs Risk-Tolerant Infrastructure Project Financing
Drew Oetting · How 8VC Builds Billion-Dollar Companies | Palantir, Addepar, Saronic · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Aug 22, 2025 · at 50:31
Drew Oetting, Founding Partner at 8VC, discusses the structural financing challenges hardtech startups face when funding large physical assets like manufacturing plants or shipyards.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There's a big gap between using venture capital and the private credit markets that are more traditional and sort of profit oriented. And there really needs to be an basically infrastructure financing or project financing for growth stage businesses. That's a little bit more willing to take risk.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Drew Oetting
Oetting: Genomic medicine will transform economy and lives almost as much as AI
“I think there's going to be almost as much of a change in, like, the way that our economy and our lives work from genomic medicines as from AI.”
Oetting: AI Productivity Will Substantially Mitigate US Debt in 20–30 Years
“I believe over the next 20 or 30 years it will make a huge difference. Yes. I just think in the short run, there's investments that need to be made to realize that. And I think that, you know, the way that our system deals with that is by adding to the debt.”
Oetting: 30% of 8VC's deployed capital goes to internally co-founded companies
“It's now 30% of what we do. All of our capital employees and, you know, 30% of it goes into companies we co-founded.”
Oetting: Sutter Hill has done venture incubation better than anyone
“I mean, Sutter Hill has done this better than anyone.”
Oetting: OpenGov's ~$2B exit rivals Palantir on a relative basis
“On a relative basis, like, I think having like a nearly two billion dollar exit for state and local Government software is like probably equivalent to like a Palantir type outcome or something.”
Oetting: Bonus depreciation tax incentives fail to help venture-backed startups
“Bonus depreciation is awesome. If you're Boeing, It's awesome if you're a real estate developer. And that's great, but it doesn't do anything for a startup because they're a C Corp. So it doesn't pass through their investors. They have plenty of net operating …”