YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Jurvetson

lines on the record: 199
first: 2018-05-31
most recent: 2018-05-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Seeing the connectivity in things as a child would and avoiding the strictures and mental ruts that academic disciplines foster and job sort of tracks, think about discipline, track. Those are both two things I don't like. I'd rather have less discipline and less tracks, right? I'd rather be exploratory and creative. And so I found children to be a wonderful opportunity. And it's such a win-win. You're connecting with them, you're mindful, you're present. And that later rolls into reading with them. And I spent a lot of time and tried to whenever I'm with them do what they like to do, right? Engage with them in the kinds of toys and things that they like and then push that a little further with all kinds of. Put it tech infused adjuncts to what they might normally be playing with.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's almost like a mantra that came out of parenting, which is I could see how, and this is something, by the way, that harkens back indirectly to this book, Scientist in the Crib, that babies are like scientists. They form conjectures and hypotheses. They test the world to putting things in their mouth. They're playing with everything. Sometimes it frustrates a parent, but when you see them as scientists doing experiments and learning how the world works from a sort of bootup face, it is metaphorical for what we lose oftentimes after many years of traditional education that kind of beat the creativity out of you. And I think the best engineers and the best scientists have that kind of a childlike mind. You can see it in the writings of Feynman and even Einstein and Newton and others like Newton, I think, once famously said, I felt like nothing but a child playing on the shishore, that there's something deeply resonant about”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invigorating and metaphorically, I think a lot of engineer scientists and people close to that field, like even venture capitalists, would do well to try to be creative like a child, to engage like a child does with the world in that child-like wonder, right?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up the brain. So it's like if you have visitors, you go, hey, watch this open. And then during phonian development, meaning learning and language, practicing sounds because it's sort of, we take it for granted, but we learn how to speak by watching others. Like, what are you doing with your lips to make that sound, right? It made young childhood development easy. Then I got into my groove, which is like my power alley, which is playing with kids getting down at their level, whether it's Legos or blocks or whatever, and just exploration and fun. What I loved about being a parent in the early years was an excuse to rediscover mindstorms NXT or first Legos in general, then mindstorms, which got so much better. The toys have gotten so much better, drones and everything, right? So when the kids are older, but basically playing with kids to me is super”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really get manuals on how to do it Sort of thrust into it, and you find your own way. The only thing I did to prepare for being a parent was to read scientists in the crib by Alison Gupnick. It's not a parenting book. It's basically about the neuroscience of infants and up through two and three years old that made it fascinating to study and I mean literally this incredible creature when they were pre-verbal. It sort of created a bond that some dads lack I think when they don't have that physical connection in nursing or what have you that a mom might have and yet to marvel at this creation that is in front of you things like how they pick up language how they vision system develops it actually gave me a strange rat hole here but it gave me strange experiments to run like pushing the bassinet on the first day of life under a light overhead that was an L-shape and the baby's eyes would open immediately every time one of there because you could actually see it through the closed eye and any edge detection just fires.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's amazing. So hearing that, and then he had complications a few weeks later that he passed from. But just knowing how much that meant him and how much time I did get to spend with him purposely was... Really took the edge off. Like, if we were estranged, if I was at odds with him, then I'd really, I think, be torn up with guilt of having not come to closure. And we had nothing. I mean, he's my hero. I've only had positive thoughts about him throughout my life, so I made it easier, ironically, to lose the guy that I had the best relationship with.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just around Thanksgiving and came out of it, and I was told by the nurse who first saw him when he came out of it, was that because there was a chance he wouldn't make it even through the procedure. Get to go to Ted again.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So maybe the thing that I took solace in that I'll share for others is it's not what you do in the weeks before someone passes that really defines your relationship. It's what you've done over your life. And so I have been going to the TED conference. I brought him with me. It was one of the greatest joys of his life for years prior. The fact that we had all those weeks together, sort of these one-on-one times of intellectual pursuits. And in a way, almost to welcome him into my world, like take dad to work day in a sense in this sort of virtual world of like ideas and science, technology. When he went through a pancreatic surgery procedure.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't I didn't have a playbook of what to do and what seemed most natural and it may have been the habit of mind was to focus on my mom and helping her. Who survived him, who was there to decide when he passed of a heart attack. And so it's one of those things where like, wow, you're trying to revive me. We're chronic call 911. I was like, my heart went out so much to her and how her situation was worse than mine in a way that that consumed almost all my thoughts for some period of time dealing with, you know, I'm the only child in that family, dealing with what needs to be dealt with. I wanted to sort of almost non-emotional operations mode. And it may have been sometime late that night or the next day that I finally was allowed myself to cry and really face what I had lost. Part of what gave me incredible solace is perhaps some wisdom I could pass on to others who worry about parents who go. And I know Tim Urban and others have written some wonderful pieces about, you know, think about your parents if you're anyone near our parents' generation. Like, how many days do you have left with them? Yeah.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, that really someone did me wrong, give me. I've been betrayed, as opposed to, yeah, you know, life has its cycles, and I can feel sad about the passing of a dear loved one, but it's a different category, I think.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know I mean, my whole high school, I could say, but that was a long retracted series of pain of just feeling insecure and like that was a late bloomer. I mean, I can tell you about tough times, but there wasn't like a shock to the system. There wasn't like... I mean, I was deeply hurt when my dad died. I mean, that was tough, but it was something that's life. It was a natural cause. That qualifies, though. But it was tough. Yeah. I mean, remorse. And so I've gone through some tough things, but nothing that was quite like this, which is...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the people who've done you wrong, with the media, because you know you can set the record straight. It's like I've wrote pages of stuff that I never used. Yeah. Let's just set the record straight. My mind played for months would play through, you know, well, here's what I would say that would just either A clear it all up or B, get back at the person who I know is being dishonest to prove they're being dishonest, right? Fess up. How about you own this one? So that is the most difficult. I really have a hard time with that. Because in every after aspect of my life, I don't have to do that. You can speak openly about, like, I disagree with you. Well, that didn't really happen, or that's a science based fact, you know, or something. I'm an ex-scientist. I hate that.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in every single case, like with zero crack of, there's another side to this point of view, it's like you say nothing. You do not point out the obvious flaws in these false accusations in the research supporting this is disturbing but true, that anything you say, even definitively proving your innocence will only worsen people's perception of you at large. Just the mere recanting or resurfacing of that topic to then say it has been decidedly proven false will make people think worse of you on average. Now from media perspective. So in private conversations, that's not the case. And I've asked psychologists about this. I don't know all the studies, like real clinical slash science-driven studies show that you do not want to say anything even to prove your own innocence. So that's horrible, right? It's like, that's where you're torn up with all the virtual conversations you'd like to have.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about that for a second. The thing that jumps to mind is how supportive my fianc ⁇ e Genevieve was throughout this. I mean, she's a fighter, and she lives at my side throughout. In some ways, it was incredible. And I'm incredibly thankful for her support throughout this. At the beginning of what you were saying, the part that was going through my mind as you were asking the question is that one of the toughest things, and it relates to advice other people gave me was the advice to not say anything. The advice to be just mum. I got advice from people who focus on PR. I got advice from people who've been through similar situations.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They published that I even knew they were putting something together coming in my defense and like female entrepreneurs of all types. You're like, no, it's anything but this happened at this event. And we'll be eternally grateful for, again, when time is really tough, you find out a bit more about people's character and you find out who is really someone who knows you. Because someone who knows me knows is not true, right? And what's weird is that I thought that'd be obvious for the larger set, but at least the ones who really know me, they don't even need to ask about it, right? They don't know. Oh my God, dude, what's going on? This is crazy, right? Yeah, right.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Felt really betrayed, and there were, and it wasn't just the single journalist that I've highlighted, like, wow, what happened to professional journalistic ethics, like just fact-checking and caring about the truth. That's one branch of disappointment. The other was a little more invisible. I'll keep this anonymous, but there were a number of people I noticed who would immediately lend support to this idea online, like either simple things, like retweeting something without checking with me. People who ostensibly know me, that was really disappointing. So I felt betrayed by, luckily only a handful, I mean, a remarkably small number of people who just, and frankly, there was some of my least well-known contacts. So these aren't close personal friends that are like, let's say other venture capitalists, let's say, just as a category, you know, on the other side, I was blown away by the outpouring of support by people who do know me. So a couple of coworkers of ex-employees that I used to work with came out with blog posts that in every case it was after.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure these things happen. I literally never been invited to the one. It's not my thing. So I don't want to sound too preachy because it's just not my thing. And it does feel weird to have a room full of tech executives and some of our closest business colleagues, scores of them maligned in this indirect way. The way I felt, though, is I...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so despite the initial burst, almost like a defensive, aha, this is funny. And then when I really allowed it to sink in, it probably took some number of hours. I'm like, wait a minute. For example, there's 150, probably more in total, but 150 that really knew there was nothing there and they were there the whole time. They had to explain to their spouses and others like, no, I really wasn't at a sex party. It's really embarrassing. Those poor people. Totally innocent. Anyway, and again, not to condemn a sex party. Never been invited to one. I never held one. I don't want to say it's a terrible thing. Let's just say if I haven't been the one, I don't want to be accused of one.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then turn around and use your leverage and your bully pulpit on Twitter and elsewhere to gain support for your book because you know people want to continue working with you and you're going to be. To the journalist of record in the tech industry at one of the biggest news organizations. It's kind of unfair.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even though she never said we had a sex party, she would retweet other people who did so some other publication in Europe would say, oh, the orgy, right? So it starts to grow. The orgy at our house. And she retweets it. I'm like, really? You know this isn't true. And I know she knows it isn't true. But she keeps retweeting it because it sells more books. And I know executives, for example, who've been pressured by their PR people to say positive things about the book because of her ongoing role as a Bloomberg reporter. She had this weird. Conflict of interest when you want to sell books in salacious stories sell to propagate something that's not true, even if you didn't say it yourself.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Elamus is like, this is irresponsible journalism or something to that effect. And he condemned the writer. And it's kind of bizarre because I know this author. I've been on her Bloomberg television program many times. She knows my email. She knows my cell phone. She never called me for a fact check, which I didn't realize in book publishing today in what's ostensibly a nonfiction category, that the publishers do no fact checking. That's just a fact now that's transformed from decades ago. And they leave it up to the writer, and the writer just didn't even try to see if it was true. And more disturbingly, would retweet.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, the thing that's even more it derived from a book that came out in February where there's no such claim that we hosted a sex party, but it's in a chapter about sex parties.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Self talk and things like that. So maybe it's an elephant in the room, but in the last couple months I have faced the most surreal experience of my career, which is, you know, 23 years of venture capital and many before that, all positive press experiences. And then I faced a bizarre. Almost autocatalytic, self-generating theme that I hosted a sex party with my fancy in Silicon Valley. And at first I laughed. I thought this was hilarious as an ex-Geek, you know, growing up my whole life with glasses and braces and what have you, I mean, my first date was in college. I really thought that was hilarious at first. And then it got a little more serious. I'm like, wait, this is ridiculous.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm kidding. No, no. No, you don't want seven people on anything productive. No development team, actually five is the ideal number. Five plus or minus two. Boards of directors, development teams, creative groups. That's one of the secret advantages of the small companies is that they have less people. And they get shit done. When it's a big company, it has hundreds of people and sclerotic layers of management, they've lost the small team dynamic.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's also, by the way, Jobs was very proud of, and that's what his greatest creation or greatest contribution to the world, his greatest invention, his greatest. Thing on his deathbed. It was Apple, the organization, and it was really the process learning coming back to something I was starting to talk about earlier. He was focused on physical space design, keeping the engineers and the marketing people, thinking about where the bathrooms art pixar, so you have to walk by certain areas to get to them. He was maniacal about architecting the way people communicate, kicking people out of meetings if they're too big. So he had an intuitive sense about team size long before I did.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he's amazing. So, folks like that really come and prove that they're some of the most valuable investors out there. Antonio.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back, create a version on Earth to study it here and more rapidly terraform Mars. He's like, you know, that's great. He said, I can't take that phone. Only half our phone call. One day that will be important. Right now, I got to get a falcon heavy to fly, or there won't be that need for me to be doing that. So I'm like, I would love this half hour phone calls or three of them. He's like, I can wait a few years. And it can, right? Yeah. And that remarkable ability to push aside all these interesting things when there's, I got to get XYZ to ship or fix the problem. And so fixing the gross margin problem back in 2008, getting a CEO, which turned out to be himself, in place and solving all the myriad problems that were in place was battle mode. And he would also lean on confidence and friends. So to be fair, there were others like Antonio Gracias and others who really rolled up their sleeves, got on the faculty floor.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, everything else needs to be gone, and I have to solve this problem. I witnessed this, for example, in a more subtle way, more recently, when I was setting up, or trying to set up rather, a very interesting phone call between the Marsara person or the Mars Exploration Program for NASA, Craig Vander, who's a pioneer in synthetic biology and gene sequencing and gene synthesis. And I want to just get Elon on a half hour call because the sort of idea had occurred amongst us that we could do a much cheaper Mars return mission. In other words, if there's any life on Mars either archaic or currently living, the best way to explore it would be not to send it back from Mars, which is very difficult, but send a gene sequencer to Mars, sequence it locally, beam the data back, and create the living organism on Earth. That actually is doable. And I thought Elon should certainly be interested in this because in the next phase of Mars exploration, terraforming, finding out what organisms do live on Mars or not, if they mutate on Mars and actually start thriving, send the data.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the smart CEOs and entrepreneurs I've worked with, some of them share attributes that I have in Spage, which is I'm interested in many things. I'm easily distracted by something, and sometimes I'd rather avoid the tough crisis in thinking about it when there's something more fun to spend time on, right? And so I'm almost the opposite of this, just to give credit to how valuable this is. When, let's say, Tesla has faced various manufacturing challenges, these sort of production hell times that he's described. He physically sets up his office on the production floor in a very visible area with no walls. So everyone can see that he's there through the weekend. The vice president see that and that ripples out when he's calling a supplier, let's say who's often the cause of a problem, he's like, and he's like, well, I'm here in the factory, where are you? Why aren't you here solving this for us? It has a lot of impact, right? That personal attention to”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's soul crushing. Soul crushing. So he has said some things because I don't want to speak out of school, but there is something I can share that might be helpful. He has spoken himself and it was like eating glass, that this was really terrible times. So he's made some comments personally. I'll just let him speak for what it felt like for him. But I would say that what I've observed in that crisis and other crises that we generalize is that he goes into a battle mode of focus that is really remarkable. In this battle mode allows him, I think, to ignore distraction and to have a laser focus on what needs to get done. So it'll sometimes be, I'll observe it as these sort of thoughtful deep moments of like, wow, you see it on his face and you want to give him space to think. Because I think there's like for people, there could be times when you're generative and thoughtful and brainstorming and thinking about all possibilities and the wonder of the world. There are other times when you're like, you've got to like solve a problem and like focus in. And in those modes, he can avoid distraction like no one else I've seen.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm not going to relay any specifics, but I can try to get to the gist of the question. I won't relay any specifics of the phone call. And to be fair, I don't even really remember the specifics because there have been so many calls over so many times. So with the caveat of, because if you look at”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not directly. I didn't want to. I liked it. This is great. It just felt like the right thing. I could see the Fear going to greed. By the way, in tough times, you sometimes also learn who is going to stand by you and who won't. And so that lead investor. And then also maybe I won't mention the names. There's at least one board member who was like, oh my gosh, they showed their stripes. And there's nothing like a crisis to know if you're in the trench with the right person”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He, in retrospect, was perfectly right. Everything went exactly according to plan. This is going to change the world. It's going to be an enormously valuable company. This was an incredibly good investment to make at the time in retrospect. At the time, it seemed like the riskiest thing I've ever seen. I've never seen an entrepreneur fund their own company. First, when no one else would, second, go net negative by $20 million.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hope to get to the next phase of actually building the Model S car if all that falls in our favor. Let's be part of it. So our $2 million check leverages the $40 million check. I'm just saying too arbitrarily. So if all you can do is write $2 million checks, you would never just write a $2 million check. That's like a pier. It's not a bridge to something. It's like, you know, and that's what Elon was willing to do in December all by himself. And then B, he was willing to do another one all by himself. I've never seen anything like it.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to be part of that. What does he see that I don't see? And to be fair, there is a dynamic, which I'm sure you've seen, which is you can have a bunch of people around the table like we were. DFJ was very enthusiastic and wanted to invest, but we can't do the full 40 million. We need somebody to be the lead investor, and we'll do our full share. We actually did more than our full share. But somebody's got to step for this missing nut when your largest insider won't, and you don't have any outside money. Someone's got to step up. So he stepped up and said, I don't care. I'll do the whole thing if need be. Who's with me? And we took as much as we could. We brought our growth fund in for the first time. And it is an easier decision to say, will I write a check, let's say for $2 million? Let's say you're just one of the random investors there as part of 40, knowing that at least there's 40. At least we're going to get through this roaster cost problem and be able to turn some cards, if you will see, does the government come through? Does the Daimler relationship actually happen? Because there's verbal conversations going on, we'll get resolution at least those major things. And so there'll be.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he spent every penny he had. So, what does he do? He borrowed $20 million and he said, okay, our lead investor is not here. This large investment bank has failed. I'm going to invest the $40 million that's needed. He didn't have $40 million. I'm going to invest the $40 million that's needed to hell with all of you. Here are the terms, not to hell with all of you, but like I'm doing it. Trains leaving the station. And it flipped the zeitgeist, if you will, from fear to greed, right? And this is...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you had your largest inside investor. This is a term of art in the venture community. There's a lot of symbolism when your largest investor is or is not supportive of what you're doing. It doesn't mean they actually have a thing they can lever they can pull to kill you, but the symbolism's bad because they're in the trenches with you. And if they're refusing to write a check, that's a really hard fundraising environment. And the largest investor was as hostile as I've ever seen an investor. They did not want Elon as CEO. They did not want anything to do with the company. They wanted to pivot to a different business strategy that seemed a little too cozy that it would support one of their limited partners. It felt really icky. And they were openly hostile. So, oh, and he was going through a divorce. And SpaceX rockets were blowing up, by the way.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proposition was why the CEO was let go. It was like, oh my God, contrary to our belief, we're actually losing money on every car. And that's not easy to fix, by the way. Sell more cars does not solve this problem readily.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So 2008, for those that might remember, was financial crisis was happening, for context at that time, Tesla had just gotten rid of a CEO, Elon had not been the CEO up until then. And it was tough. A large investment bank, one of the most prestigious, had just failed to do a fundraise. This is where you hire them, pay them lots of money, go out and get us the money. You expect it to come in at the end of this process. They're like, sorry, we have nothing for you. And the company was rapidly running out of money. In fact, it was heading towards December 2008, and it couldn't even make payroll. And so Elon wrote a check personally for $3 million just so they could make the December Christmas time payroll of the employees. But like January is going to be just as bad and there's like no money anywhere. And by the way, for context, there was no government program. There was no Daimler investment at this point. It was just a company that had a roadster that was negative gross margin, meaning every car you sell, you lose more money. It was a surprise discovery how bad the”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's one way I could say it externally. I've never seen an entrepreneur go all in for his companies, and I say plural, as Elon. Like some entrepreneurs will take risks. They'll quit a job. They'll spend their entire life savings on some idea. They'll do whatever, right? The personal commitment, personal sacrifice. I've never seen anything like Elon. And I think this story came out where I was referring back to December 2008.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question because I think it's passed through the filter of the observer. We perceive risk, incredible risk in some of the things he's done. I don't know that we have perfect vision on how could we on really does he perceive the risk the same way we do, right, as external observers. And so I think part of the answer, and his brother made a somewhat similar statement once, so I feel comfortable at least talking about this, not as if I'm speaking out of school, that”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you think about just one element of that and how miraculous it is, to be able to go into a number of industries, you know, commercial banking arguably with PayPal, the aerospace industry with SpaceX, the automotive sector, the energy competing with utilities with the solar city idea, really left field. Now it's part of Tesla. But when it started, it was really a left field sector. It wasn't one industry. That was like, well, that's energy generation. That's even more miraculous in some ways. It's like everyone can have a big dream, oh, yeah, like thousands of people could have the dreams that Elon has. Almost none of them can paint a compelling picture how to get there.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The similarity, I think there's one area in design where the maniacal attention to detail, I described it as this visceral agitation that almost painful to Steve Jobs to see things that were not right, there's a bit of that in Elon as well. I interviewed him once about design and it sounded so spookily similar in that regard, but in a completely different wrapper. Meaning you wouldn't really know or see it as a similar vector of... Both think it's just easy. And maybe it's a sign of brilliance that there are certain parts of this whole space that are intuitive and they do naturally. And I wish I knew how to do it myself and B, spot it in others. So everyone also wants to ask, like, how can I raise my kid to be like Elon? Or how can I find entrepreneurs that are like him?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In any case, what you can do though is avoid meetings. Imagine it's the company holiday party and you just don't want to go. No one's going to double guess. Like if you're a normal CEO and normal company and you avoid your own holiday party, like, what really? What better things did you have to do? But this is awesome. You can basically avoid time-wasting meetings. And you have to delegate more. And so in both cases, it's an intriguing thought experiment that being CEO of more than one company has some interesting benefits for both companies.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've heard that sentence too. CEO of two companies, each of them independently. CEOs of two companies. Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX. You got Pixar and either Next or Apple, depending on time frame. To be fair, Jobs was really not quite the CEO at Pixar, but he was by title.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can iterate more quickly. Like, this is going to be an awesome business opportunity if we can get rid of all the buttons. No, buttons are ugly. Get rid of them. That's shit. That design is shit. He would say, but he wouldn't really give this like, ah, I get it. That's the master plan, right? Whereas Elon is like master plan part one, master plan part two in the French. He lays it all out and he's basically executing according to the master plan. There's actually a really well thought out series of steps to get from here to colonizing Mars, a series of steps to get rid of the petrochemical economy, which is pretty amazing. And it's all there for anyone to read. That's like night and day difference. Now, similarity is simple. And, you know, CEO two companies, I think that's interesting structurally. Not too many people have the shut-spot to do that. And I think, by the way, in both cases, it allows you to focus, interestingly, in a way that you couldn't otherwise.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Well, let me start with differences because I think it's tempting to draw an analogy, and I've been tempted, trust me. But I think it's really important to keep in mind, as I'll start there, there's pretty big differences. Jobs was a marketing-centric individual with very weak engineering shops. Elon is more of a physicist turned engineer slash computer scientist, basically, deep engineering chops, thinks of everything for first principles of what can be done from the physics, and then scales up to the product vision. Jobs, it's much more of a almost Zen Buddhist approach to parsimonious design and the visceral agitation of imperfection in design space. The famous calligraphy font thing and getting rid of all the buttons from the phone. There's all these maniacal missions he's had where at no point did he clearly lay out like, well, here's the business strategy. Like you get rid of the buttons, everything moves in the cloud. You have software services.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was a fun called Technology Crossover Ventures I think formed with that insight in mind that says if you can pick some winners still private and have a judgment from seeing the track record, the passion of the entrepreneur over a number of years and then load up the boat either just pre-IPO or at IPO you could put a large amount of capital work in that. But the key was it was those prior years of exposure that really gave you confidence. So like my years with Elon allow me to look at him in a very different way than other entrepreneurs, right? And if you just literally had no prior data and he just walked in off the street, how would you really know?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I just like when I made this decision, and also around the same time to give it all to charity. That was another thing. I created a living trust to give everything but a small fixed dollar amount to the kids, everything else going to go to charity. Then when you have major crashes, it's not like, I know this is going to sound weird. I don't stress that I just lost 90% of my net worth because that happened once. It's like, oh, the charity just lost 90% of its net worth. And so I was able to write it through and it came right back because I didn't panic and sell when I literally lost 90% of my net worth.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To hear something like that. And the second thing is, looking back over his whole career, he wished he had never sold anything. I had a similar reaction. What do you mean? He goes, well, I tried to time the market. And if I had just held on to my Apple shares, right? And who cares what had happened to everything else? Like the as-if held value today would have trumped everything else. I would be a much richer man. I would have avoided all that anxiety. And that echoed in the back of my mind to this day. So in my, I won't share the specifics, but in my personal portfolio, there's a similar power law. There is a single company that's worth more than everything else combined because I've never sold a share. And then if I look at number two, I should go back and do the math. Number two plus number three probably that kind of thing about a long tail exceeds everything else combined. So it's like a traditional power law. And that is pretty amazing.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT