The Ledger
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Fishner-Wolfson claims OpenAI and Anthropic have confidentially filed S-1s
“SpaceX is the big one to kind of start this, but, I mean, as you mentioned, like, OpenAI and Anthropic are both valid. They're S-one's confidentially, so it's gonna be a pretty interesting, you know, few quarters in the public markets.”
Fishner-Wolfson claims SpaceX was the only good space investment in 20 years
“We looked at probably every SpaceX, or every space investment for, I don't know, 1520 years, and the good investment was SpaceX, and I think a lot of people thought, well, we should go invest in all these other things, and the answer is, you should invest in S…”
Facebook's early secondary policy inadvertently caused employees to quit to sell stock
“Facebook got big, and it turned out that the company kind of couldn't buy all their shares that were, that people were selling, because the dollar amount just got so big, and the volume got so high, and they basically started telling people, like, if you sell …”
Fishner-Wolfson notes SpaceX's launch business has been profitable for years
“Well, I mean, they were, I mean, they were profitable for a very long time, and the launch business was, I mean, they were doing things that no one in the industry had accomplished, right?”
Fishner-Wolfson says SpaceX equity creates life-changing wealth for shop-floor workers
“They've really shared equity across the entire company, which is incredible. And to your point, they have lots of people on the shop floor who literally make all of the stuff that matters. So the fact that this is life changing for so many people, I really thi…”
Fishner-Wolfson argues VC debates over ownership percentage targets are distracting
“Getting to an argument about ownership percentage is like sort of distracting.”
137 Ventures has invested in SpaceX roughly two dozen times
“When we started OneThirtySet Ventures, we continued to invest really many times over the last 16 years. So, I don't actually know what the total count is, but we're, we've probably made two dozen investments in the company since we started the firm.”
Fishner-Wolfson: Facebook went public primarily due to 500-shareholder reporting rule
“The major reason why Facebook ended up going public was this 500 shareholder count rule that basically required companies Once they hit a certain shareholder account to publicly report. So it was sort of all the negatives of being a public company with none of…”
Fishner-Wolfson says SpaceX upended aerospace via fixed-price contracts and reusability
“They flipped the business model in the industry because historically it had been cost plus and they had transitioned to a firm Fixed price model. And so a combination of a business model shift and then making, you know, the Falcon nine partially usable fundame…”
SpaceX will launch close to 200 times this year, says Fishner-Wolfson
“They're going to launch, I don't know what to me this year, but like something close to 200 times. Like no one else in the world is launching even 15, 20 times, right?”
Fishner-Wolfson says Starlink became clearly viable and modelable by 2019
“And it was probably 2019 or so when, you know, they launched probably a couple of Starlink satellites, and it was, I think, pretty clear for people who had known them for a long time that, like, they'd figured it out so this was gonna work, and therefore you c…”
Fishner-Wolfson says 137 Ventures has entirely avoided major foundation models
“I mean, in all honesty, like, we haven't, you know, invested in any of the, you know, big foundational models.”
Fishner-Wolfson says traditional VCs fail to concentrate and follow on
“Most people are trying to write, like, one large check at the beginning, you hit a certain ownership percentage, and then maybe they do their prorata or something, but they tend not to continue to follow on and concentrate over time.”
Peter Thiel won the early Facebook deal by accepting a 10% stake
“A lot of the reason that he originally did that deal was because most people wanted a much higher ownership percentage, and he was okay getting 10% of the company, which obviously was like clearly the right decision, and all you had to do is sort of adjust you…”
Fishner-Wolfson says SpaceX's launch-and-learn ethos transformed the hardware ecosystem
“And I think SpaceX has done it incredibly well where it's like you launch and you learn, and then that, that ethos has kind of gone out to a large part of the ecosystem.”
Fishner-Wolfson: Founders Fund was SpaceX's first outside institutional investor
“Back at Founders Fund, we did the deal in, in, in, in that was sort of the beginning because at that point, Elon had mostly funded it himself. And we were really the first outside institutional capital.”
Fishner-Wolfson: SpaceX ran employee liquidity tender offers up to twice yearly
“SpaceX always sort of allowed liquidity for their employees and they were running tenders, you know, once a year probably back then. And then that kind of sped up to twice a year. And so like these were always company organized programs.”
SpaceX fixed the Falcon 1 by simply adding a stage separation delay
“That was the one where the second stage had hit the first stage, and so, you know, it wasn't fully successful, and I remember, I think I was standing next to Gwen or something, and she, you know, I was like, oh, you know, what, so how are you guys gonna fix th…”
Fishner-Wolfson praises Gwynne Shotwell's calm problem-solving under extreme stress
“Gwen really just doesn't, like, there's like no problem that you just can't work, right? It's just like, no matter how stressed everyone is, it's like, if you can be the calm person in the middle who can just help people Get to the right answer. That's incredi…”