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

“Are like these sort of power laws of compounding potential. Would you want to be punching out? And you wouldn't, right, at Facebook or Google ten years ago, God, that would have been really a bad mistake, right? And actually, let me jump to point number two. Some of the very first advice I got when I was entering this field was from someone who had spent their entire career at the Rockefeller group, I forget which foundation or something. His name was Peter Crisp. And I remember him vividly because we were, I think my first week on the job, it was our first pitch to people who give us money. And here I met someone who has just coming off a long career, sort of winding down slowly off a long, illustrious career, investing some of the best companies you can imagine. And his two comments to me were, wow, first I'm super envious, this young group of people that starting your career right now. This whole second wave. So I just here am changing careers, as we mentioned earlier, not sure which careers were made for me.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'll give you another answer to why I do this in a moment, but let me just flush this one. This has been wonderfully goal aligning with entrepreneurs. Because if I'm thinking, when is the time to punch?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Never sell. It's a wonderfully liberating stance. And at first, people are like, yeah, I can see your fish. That doesn't make sense. Buy low, sell high is a kind of a mantra. Yeah, no, I've never sold a share. Now, let me add the caveats. When I have control. So the vast majority of time in our business, this would apply, which is we invest in a startup. It either has an IPO or it gets acquired. Those are the two outcomes where it has a liquidity event. And IPO at some point after the IPO, years later, or at least 80 days later, a venture firm will distribute those shares to its investors. So I, as a general partner, get shares. So I get shares of Tesla. I get shares of, you name it, right? Now, what I choose to do that is my own personal decision. And from that point on, I have never sold a share. Now, what I do is give them the charity over time. And some might argue that's kind of a sales decision, but not entirely. Partially because it's not like I'm trying to time the market. I'm betting on them in perpetuity.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back. They wanted to be redeemed at cost because of a little spat they were having, but the founders not getting a new CEO. Not well-known fact. Or one of the major venture investors in Apple sold their entire stake pre-IPO. They still brag about being an investor in Apple, of course, but people lose faith in the greatest companies they've ever invested in.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, hotmill It was spelled with a capital HTML. So it was, oh, we're going to do web-based email over HTML. It's big H, small, O. Yeah, exactly. Is that dorky? And that was it? Yeah. And even more interesting, because they were offering free email, they put a lot of effort into the free aspect of this. So they located in Fremont, California on Liberty Avenue. They launched on the 4th of July, which is a national holiday, so they got no news pickup. That's really, Vivi. So anyway, those companies were widely regarded as bad ideas. Severe of Hotmill famously was turned down by 21 venture capitalists before he found us. And I would say, without a doubt, because I've met a number of these venture people at the time, the Series A was happening for eBay and Google, the vast majority of venture capitalists would not have invested in the Series A. In fact, after the Series A of Google, the two primary investors demanded to get their money.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great idea. Actually, I would say when I first invested in Hotmail, I felt this. I felt it when we first invested in Skype. Side note, really quickly.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So on the market size, I think a lot of venture investors in the early stage would have the following common answer to your question. I invest in good people, pursuing big ideas in enormous markets, right? Okay. But sometimes they actually won't execute on that because enormous markets usually means that it's something really radical that's changing. There's a lot of unpredictability. So if you're investing in ride sharing, as you did, before it was obviously a good idea, it was not obviously a good idea. And most people probably thought it was a really bad idea. Well, there was a”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a purpose for what they're doing. So on the people side, I increasingly have become enamored with purpose-driven businesses, as I was mentioning, or mission-driven businesses, where making money is not the prime objective. It's the byproduct of the way they intend to change the world, to usher in the transition to sustainable transport and clean energy, to colonize Mars as a couple of easily understood examples. Those are both unique. There aren't any other startups at the time proposing to colonize Mars. Nor is it something that you get done in a short period of time. It's like the star on the horizon that galvanizes so much action. Do you want me to look back, though, to the overall categories, the process stuff and the other? I'd love to hear about some of the...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another one I love to ask is so what does this business look like at 10 years and 20 years out and what is mind-boggling is unfortunately how this weeds out the charlatans and the arbitrage-seeking opportunists like nothing else that they just like dare in the headlights they'd never thought 10 years or 20 years out they don't have any idea and it's not because things change so rapidly that you can't predict 10 or 20 years out it's that they don't have a mission they don't have a purpose for why they're starting their business right if you ask Elon Musk that he knows right away if he ask Planet Labs he knows right away you ask Zuckerberg he knows right away you ask Larry Page and Larry and Sergei Brennan they know right away what their business looks like in 10 and 20 years and you know they have a mission statement that they hold to throughout their entire life and it galvanizes the team it motivates them to you know that's why they're in business other people that are I call them arbitrage seekers when people flock from some industry because there's gold in the hills you want to weed that out that's a great way to weed that out right these people don't tend to have long-term visions if they don't really”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My career into the present day. So the startup phase is a little different than the steady state. So now that we're in a steady state, I can realize, okay, there'll be some failures. That's fine. And what I then look for is a combination of some personal attributes, market attributes, and weirdly of late sort of process technology attributes. So I would have in the past said, oh, technology breakthrough. Of course, there has to be people, huge market and something disruptive in the technology domain that like to nanotechnology or something that we couldn't have done this five years ago. Oh, that's another question I always ask. Every entrepreneur, either explicitly or implicitly, if I know the answer, I don't need to ask it, which is could you start this business five years ago? And if the answer is yes, then I don't want to invest.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah. So the last one hung me up, but part of the luck I had in starting in the best inner sort of sort of Chuck parted this up to luck, but the side effect then lasted is that I didn't have that fearful moment. I didn't slog through 10 years of just banging my head against the wall of failure, failure, failure, failure. It just was like shooting fish in a barrel to start, right? So that, I think, helped me, A, build enough track record that people would give me a bit more slack to pursue something, right, within my partnership, for example, to pursue ideas. I can't imagine what life would be like if I was stuck in a partnership that wouldn't give me credibility or let me run with some ideas, right? And they certainly would push back, believe me, space bunch of companies like, really, you're going to invest in rockets. Are you kidding me? So I'd have to defend some of these, but I didn't get the no, no, no, you can't do this, right? So that, if I hadn't had that capacity to, in other words, to avoid the inner voice of doubt and the overt critic, right? Both internal and external, I don't think I could have done what I did in the subsequent years. So fast forward to, let's say, midway through.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also speeds right into that. Well, you can see maybe that's the origin. I hadn't connected those dots, but it seems obvious now as I say this to you that that desire to seek something new may have been a The driver of that simple rule that I've been living my life by, which isn't something that you haven't seen before.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All these things are being said because everyone knows in their heart, I can't tell them any value. How do I know if it was me or them? It's usually them. We can't really sing our own praises that much. So I love the diversity of management consulting. I didn't like the life balance nor the agency. And so when finally I discovered venture capital and learned what it was about, it was like the perfect combination for me.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“on one little narrow area of actually neural networks would have been my thesis area specifically neural networks applied to parallel processing computers was what i was starting down i would have been fascinated by that but it would have been 20 years too early anyway same thing in any operating job it's like i would be either job hopping the way some people do who have this problem i have or i'd have to be unhappy i think in my job because just the pace of change in learning would stagnate so quickly i could see these patterns over months not years that i'm not learning as much anymore i'm just executing the same thing over and over again and so management consulting was an interesting way to play to that like all kinds of different client engagements it just didn't have the same agency of making a meaningful impact you could point to for sure very vicarious very diffused and ambiguous whether you've accomplished anything and so that's why all the management consulting firms say we you know we're adding value always talking about measuring how much value we added”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just doing it to learn the best way to do something. I was engineering through and through, which is I want to have an impact. I don't want to design a widget that's going to sit in a room and never get used just because I'd like to design widgets. I really would love to have something be meaningful in the world. And so that's why I thought about that. And yes, there was a big disdain for marketing amongst the engineers that I worked with. And I did finally get a chance I wanted to work with Steve Jobs as well. So I got a chance to work at Apple and Next Software. It was called Next when they were moving out of the hardware business into software only, but Next, as it was called. And that really wasn't for me either, though. Something just didn't click about, I think it may have been my short attention span and my interest in diverse things that hunkering down to any one thing and committing to do it for five years seemed anathema to my course. That's why I left the PhD program after two quarters. I'm like, I'm not going to write a thesis. That's like spent four years.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, was getting frustrated, even though it was not there very long on what I saw all around me, at least at HP, which was promote from within culture. You know, over 20 years, you'll become an engineering manager. And like, you know, most people, they were lifers, as we call them. And that seemed kind of long. It's like, Irene, we're going to dedicate the rest of my life to that career path. And then I said, well, how can I accelerate this? And that's when the first idea came, well, if I somehow got into marketing and had, you know, it seemed like the boss has more than just one narrow functional domain. Like, maybe I should get some experience over there and then I'd be more of an engineering manager if I could know more than just my narrow band of engineering. I thought being an engineering manager was the end goal and learning a bit about marketing and product marketing because that was the mystery. How are all these decisions that seem to implicate they sort of impact our product development cycles and products getting canceled, things succeeding or failing in the market? That seemed important on what I was doing. Not just did I make a breakthrough. So I wasn't, I guess you could say, I wasn't a scientist in my profession of, oh, I'm”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In different firms use the terms differently, but I was open to both. In some cases, it's more engineering rich, other cases it's whatever. So when I was at HP, I was doing chip design and marketing was in a different building as it often is. And I”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, one last thing on this. Oh, I gotta tell you. NVIDIA summarized something amazing and also out of Google did a paper. The majority of code at Google now is built by a computer, not by a human. Because that's one weird way of summarizing this is when you train a neural network, you're not coding if, then, else. You're setting up the same thing you set up every time. It's defungible. It's a very fungible skill set, by the way. And you train it and the computer's generating its own executable at the end of the day. The majority of programming is that way now by a factor of 10. It's a wild. And every product that Google embodies it from search to, you name it. It's like that is the key technological thing striving across every Google product.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely. So that's a very computationally intense task. And so it moved definitely from Intel like CPUs to GPUs, but then it even went further. Then I went to these field programmable gateways and then to custom chips designed from scratch. Sort of it quickly went down that path. And deep learning chips will as well. That was one of my investment themes over the last three years is that deep learning is doing the exact same thing to custom chips.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so all the applications there are in speech processing, visual processing, which is the simple stuff, the edge of our cortex. And then naturally it's going to start moving into emotional systems and the frontal lobe and the rest of our cortical systems. And so that's why I think it's the obvious path to AI in the broadest sense.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, they'll recreated from scratch. It's an analog. Sorry. Because you're just training it like a baby. It gets born, opens its eyes, starts learning, right? That's the same general thing going on with these neural networks. The fact that it has similar layers in its visual system as our babies do, it's just like, that's when people like me like, oh my God, this is incredible, right? So back to the GPU thing. What I think is poetic is that something that in a sense is meant to be as realistic as possible to our vision system has the kind of computational systems we need to in fact do vision systems in like let's do let's recognize cats on the internet or let's recognize cancer in a you know pathology slide that those general constructs occur because our brain has evolved to do data reduction and pattern recognition in the world in a way that is optimal for what we do so that when we build these neural networks what are they really good at all the same stuff”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about rendering three-dimensional worlds and making the photorealistic, you're doing something our brain does exquisitely well, right? We get an avalanche of information on a retina in our cortex and we downscale that to image recognition, building over there your face, the symmetry of your eyes. And much like a neural network, when you train them, it recapitulates our biology. It builds edge detectors and then symmetry detectors. And then I face things because you can probe what's been built a little bit and get a sense, oh my God, it just recapitulated the sensory cortex in an artificial system. That's when the...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But somewhere along the way, people realize, well, wait a second, there's other areas in the scientific computing world. By this I mean, let's say modeling the weather, you know, modeling nuclear explosions occur in government labs where they're like, you know, we do a lot of that matrix multiplying add two. Can we try to see if we could use it? And so it was like a Skunkworks project. Management had no resources against this. I knew actually one of the first four customers working in this R&D area of all things to model how neurons fire scientifically. To model how a neuron actually, how actual biology of a neuron down to as much detail as possible. Company called Evolve Machines. And they were using GPUs. And I remember years ago saying, wait, you just bought for $2,000 at the local. Yeah, Fries Electronics Store. You just bought more power than any supercomputer of just two years ago for $2,000 because of this domain, right? So this incredible computer resource was pushed to the limits from gaming. And I think almost poetically.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resolution you have in your game. And so in a very interesting way with a different objective function, not do a program that a human wrote faster and faster, but take the same damn simple math of basically, it turned out to be what's called matrix multiply and add. Multiply a whole bunch of numbers together and add them up, multiply, add them up. It's like that core sort of mathematical operation, the more you could do, the better your graphics were. And so they had an economic incentive to really push the envelope where if you asked, let's say in the 80s or 90s, what else could that be used for? The answer was, well, nothing, right? That just does graphics. It is like totally optimized for rendering graphics, right?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the 80s, good luck. You could spend your whole career trying to get a good data set to train these neural networks with. Plus, we didn't have digital cameras. I mean, it's like, it's crazy. If you think how little data we had in the 80s, okay, so data is the first. The other is GPUs from NVIDIA. They started about 10 years ago as a side project in scientific computing, realizing GPUs, graphic processing units. So any gamer would be like, I want the latest to play my video games to do all these polygon renderings offloaded from your main computing chip, the Intel chip usually, off on this side. What used to be a peripheral processor, a co-processor, an afterthought, if you will, that only gamers cared about if you were a business computing user, you did it in the old days and the 90s. You didn't care about your GPU, right? You only cared about was your CPU. The thing that computes your Excel spreadsheet or whatever your database. But the GPU people are like pushing a whole different kind of computational math forward, which was a lot of math, like a lot of polygons. The more polygons, the more sort of...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essence of what's going on here. And the essence is something activates, it fires, it's connected in a network to some others. And if there's enough inputs that are firing beyond a threshold, then downstream neuron will fire too. So the simple idea is to recap is neurons fire, they're wired to other ones. You sum up all your inputs, everything that's connected on the input, and there's like thousands of inputs. And if it crosses some threshold, then you fire. That's it. Then you just layer on tons of these. And so the deep learning is having more and more of these layers. Instead of just like one or two or three layers, having scores of these layers and a variety of other algorithmic advances. But really the biggest breakthrough has been that we have a lot of data today that we didn't have back in the 80s from the internet, from mechanical turk, you name it, all kinds of data sets to train on. Like if you wanted pictures of cats with the label, that's a cat. That's a dog. I mean, that's obvious today. We take it for granted. Like, of course, you want a million of those. You want a billion? How many pictures of cats do you want, right?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in fact, neural networks, I think, could be a more generic term for all this. It's inspired by the brain. It's a way of simulating a brain-like subset. So not the whole brain, but imagine you were to take a little tiny chunk of your brain, a cortical column or some area, and say, well, what's really going on? Well, you have cells that connect to a bunch of others, and our brain is usually a fan out of a thousand or so to 10,000 connections from each one. So a huge fan out. Each cell connects to a bunch of others. And when one fires, it sort of goes down the dendrite and the little synapse fires and it triggers another one. We all have some vague sense of, okay, neurons are in our brain and they sort of wired together and they fire together. So now if you want to simulate one of those in a very simplistic way, in a way that you imagine the programmers back in the 80s when they had pretty not very powerful computers, well, how could you make a computer like brain? Well, we don't need all that complexity. We don't need all the details of ion channels and synapses and all the neurotransmitter chemicals that are an artifact of our biology. What really is the...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're synonymous. In the 80s, they were called neural networks and deep learning. There's a reason the word deep came in. Well, first you want a new name when something kind of came and went in this passe couple decades ago because I studied neural networks back in the 80s, I like to give it a new moniker. But there is a reason, deep in the sense of more layers. So what do they have in common”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, specifically engineering since the scientific method itself. Way back when engineering might have been random, like I think astrology is true. I think this is true. And then you have a scientific method, at least the method of compounding knowledge over time. This is a different way of, in a sense, growing solutions to problems instead of purposely designing them. You can build things that exceed human understanding. We're doing this all over the place in molecular engineering, in software design, in a variety of fields. We have sort of reached the limit in many cases of what a human, any human, or even group of humans, can put their heads together and design. And now we can push way past that and build things beyond our own understanding.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Developing these neural networks, whenever you're training, let's say, these little AIs, and I think this is the path to AI in general, so it's important. This is how it works. You can't understand the thing you've made, nor can you predict as you train them further and further what you're going to get. There's a bit of discovery, emergence, if you will. It's kind of like raising a teenager or parenting more than it is programming. You can learn about the process of creation. Like I know how to make a teenager, but I can't tell you exactly how it all works, right? And I certainly can't go in there after I'm done and tweak a few neurons to make them smarter or French speaking or whatever. It's like, no, that's a really weird artifact that works really powerfully, but it's not purposeful design. It doesn't do what I tell it to do exactly. It can learn to do what I train it to do, but with some edge cases, it's a little out of control. And that's what I think the AIs of the future will look like.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll have some other, you know, I'll do something. And in most cases, it's very boring. It's just like the whole thing's black or it's got like a nice pattern of triangles. But in a few cases, like rule 31, it unpacks into this incredible complexity that is not repeating. And there's no way to jump to, let's say, the 40th or the 50th or 100th layer of this unfolding. You have to run the experiment. And the reason I find this so philosophically interesting is this is the same thing in evolution. It's the same thing in neural networks. It's the same thing in all these new engineering modalities where you can't mathematically get a shortcut to the answer. You actually have to just run this little algorithm, oh, no, no, no, again. So you can't, like, for example, you can't reverse evolve. You can't figure out where did we come from in any just direct way. It's sort of lost. You can run the tape forward, but you can't run it backwards. You can't do a mathematical shortcut across it. And so an example of why this as a thought experiment is important is whenever you're”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it sort of unveils. So you have this little simple rule, almost like a Turing machine that says, I'm just going to go left to right and look at the dots above me. And if the dot above me, I'll look at the three dots above me, one directly above me, left and to the right. And based on all possibilities of those three dots, which is two to the third power possibilities, I'll have either a dot or not a dot here. And so you would think that such a simple rule that just says, look at the three dots and there's literally only 16 possible things that I'm going to conditions that I could be seeing up there.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think deep learning, or let me just call it machine learning broadly, because there's a bunch of sub-branches of this. It's everything from generative design in sort of the autodesk CADCAM sense. It's studying solar automat out of the way Steve Wolfram does. It's genetic program. What are cell automata? These are simple little mathematical construct that just says if you're going to draw, oh my God, you're probably going to edit this out of the final thing because it may not relate to anything other than it created this book, a new kind of science, and really a series of epiphanies for Wolfram and others that the world is really interesting when you look at iterative algorithms applied millions and billions of times. So cellular trauma is just, imagine you start with a random dot or two on the next line”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To put a cap on it. Nanotech, you know, if you look back at it today, well, no, there isn't any Nanotech industry. It would be like saying, well, where's the thermodynamics industry? Well, shit, you know, there isn't one, right? But there sort of is. Like thermodynamics as a concept, you know, there was a time when actually companies named themselves Thermoelectron and thermetics or all these ones that it's just now subsumed into the fabric of science and engineering. So as a geek, I've always been fascinated. Are there sea changes in basically how we do science and engineering? Maybe that's the simplest way of saying it. And I think today deep learning is the best example of that fundamentally different way of doing engineering.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Health and food. And then more recently, deep learning neural networks, what we might describe as narrow AI, that whole field is widely applicable. I think every company will use it eventually. So again, we can come to that later, but that's like a platform that's not, yeah, sure. Today there are some quote machine learning companies. All they do is stuff related to machine learning, but much more interesting is all the industries that will be changed by the use of machine learning, the vertical industries. And so”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, an industry. It isn't a sector. It doesn't describe a company. There's no such thing as a nanotech company unless you're building tools to service that industry in a weird way, manufacturing equipment, maybe, but not in any attractive sectors. It more was a set of science and technology capabilities that would strike across many industries. So even today, there'll be companies that I'll meet with and things that were unique in that era will play out like, well, the value of simulation on any molecular system. Like, well, how good is your simulation on any physical thing you're building in general? These questions are process questions, like how do you do innovation? How do you do entrepreneurship? That carries through, but that platform technology, which let me just tell you what I mean by this, nanotech was like a platform applied in many areas, new ways of doing material science, if you will. This whole field of synthetic biology, like if you can manipulate DNA with CRISPR or other technologies, what are all the things you could do with that capability? And it's very broad.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a bit of a mistake, but it was a mistake in retrospect. But the only thing I felt I differentially knew better than others. It was hearkening back to, which fortunately wasn't that many years prior that I'd been studying some really hard technologies like molecular modeling and chip design. I did some chip design at Hewlett-Packard. So I had enough as I looked at the venture landscape differential knowledge there to say, well, there's something I could harken back to that's not the internet because the internet anyone could do at this point and the angel investors are flooding in like, you know, every banker consultant's flooding in. It's like the landscape littered with capital and people investing in that sector. Well, there's nothing going on in nanotech. I had been exploring at the Forsight Institute and a number of other sort of think tank-like conferences the radical potential this had to revolutionize a bunch of things. And the one part that I think was indicative of what's to come later in my career, it was not really an”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I avoided a lot of pain. If you add up every internet, remember we did so many of them? If you add up every internet company we invested in that lost money, add them all up. It was less than single deals lost from other firms, like Buy.com lost more money than everything we've ever done combined because we didn't load up the boat, sort of drink our own Kool-Aid too deep in any one of them. And every one of them was unique. So there wasn't like this sector risk. So you get diversification for free. By definition, you're diversified in your portfolio. And it had me moving. It has me throughout my career always on the lookout to learn something new knowing that I'm going to have to hop to a new sector. Not saying I'm going to spend my whole life as a semiconductor investor or as a consumer software investor because that is so limiting. That might have a good 10-year run. But if you're not continually learning something new at the edges, pivoting from the edges of what you already know to something slightly different, you're going to become obsolete.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This shows you how absurd it got to say take the economy and the internet changes everything. We're going to divide up the economy in weird ways that hasn't been divided up before and make that a business. That's when I knew this is crazy. And I started investing in nanotechnology, like total left field shift. And there's a reason I picked that particular sector. But the important point is I didn't keep investing in the internet companies long past their prime, not because I was smart on when the correction would come, but because they weren't unique anymore. There's like every viral marketing idea that I at the time that I could find had come. Now to my.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the benefit for my career was it has me perpetually searching for the next great technology wave. So just when the dot-com boom was getting to its fevered pitch, I wasn't smart enough. I know that this is the case. I was not smart enough to predict a crash. I know that I wasn't because I was contributing in writings and other things at that time saying, oh, the boom is just starting. It's going to go up, up, up, up, right? I believed that I just wanted to, that it's going to keep going and that we wouldn't have like a correction. But on the other hand, I was not finding anything unique. I saw four business plans for selling pantyhose on the web. Like all we're going to do, gazelle.com. Got venture backed, like three others, like really like four business plans to sell pantyhose or just balls.com. Wait, what is just balls do? Oh, yeah, just balls. Venture-backed. Just sells balls. The name was awesome. We got just.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enormous opportunity is it seemed to me that A, they're describing an enormous market, but B, here's the killer. No one else has done it before. And so the simple rule I've used without my entire career of investing is I want to invest in things that are unlike anything I've seen before. And there's all kinds of correlators that come out of that. The first is, yeah, you're investing in some unusual things like D-Wave, you know, back in 2002. There were no other quantum computer startups, zero on the planet Earth. There was not a single company claiming to build a quantum computer, big or small. Actually, for about five years afterwards as well. So that one was like the most extreme. maybe for good reasons no one was doing it back then when hotmail first came there's nothing like it that we'd seen when i first invested in skype there was anything quite like that the the the way they did peer-to-peer voiceover ip and similarly with tesla and electric vehicles and i can get into why that one maybe is the most corner case of well wait there are a lot of electric car startups why is that one special we can we can talk about it but certainly spacex you know would qualify as well as unique ideas at the time in the startup domain”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Selling your opportunity because normally entrepreneur is trying to sell to the maximum extent possible to predict the largest possible addressable market, to think, well, phase one of my business, I do this, then phase two, I take over the world in some way, right? And then to actually try to push them further and then want to invest in them is an interesting adjunct because then you're on the same page. So I credit Tim Draper, I credit the internet. And then most importantly is there was a simple rule I started implementing and I don't remember when it started. It just seemed like the natural thing to do around early stage investing. So when I thought about this, I was like, okay, most things fail. If they win, they've got to be huge. Okay, check. They should change the world. They should be disruptive. You know, those are words people use. Well, how would I know if something really is big and disruptive? Every entrepreneur claims it, right? Like he'd be doing a payment processing thing for back end whatever, you know, payroll systems. Like, we're going to change the world of payroll, right? Okay. What really is going to make?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all internet investing industry-wide. Wow. Like the entire venture industry. And that quickly changed in say 86, 87, and excuse me, 96, 97, and when Netscape had its IPO, boom, everything changed because now there was an example of a winner. This pattern will come again in space investing and everything. As soon as you have a single winner, then the sheep phenomenon in the herd mentality kicks in, right? So you have scores of people then investing in a sector after it's had its first win. So to your question Being under the tutelage of Tim Draper to say, hey, actually, let's try to think big. I mean, I credit him for being my mentor into the industry to say, not let's think about it the way bankers do. Let's not be fearful. Let's ask the entrepreneur how they're underestimating the market size, right? To think how much bigger might this opportunity be than even the people pitching it are imagining. That's a thought experiment I often like to go through. And there'll be times when occasional, not often, where I'll be like, wow, you are so un”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was Well, first it was a stroke of great luck, which is the dot com boom, as we now call it, you know, was just starting to happen. And I was ready for that and open-minded enough. So I didn't have the scar tissue, which is, by the way, scar tissue for traditional investors was if you invest in anything that was like entertainment or media or shrink-wrap software, as they called it, which is low priced software for consumers, that would be the consumer software segment. It was just a horrible place. Games, hit-driven business, it still is a horrible segment, is to do non-internet consumer price point stuff. It just, it's a death zone. So they thought the internet was that. They didn't realize it's an entirely different business model. The whole what we now know around cloud computing, around subscription services, around viral marketing its potential. None of this was known at the beginning. And if you put it into a prior bucket, it would be, oh, those are bad sectors. So unbelievably, one of the biggest investment opportunities, probably the venture industry has ever seen was largely avoided by most venture capital firms. And when I started in 1995, we did about a”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too many scar tissues. But that's not really the thing I'm talking about. I think about new entrants to the venture business, people who you would think would take a strategy of differentiating myself from my peers, like having a basic strategy, let's say, to say, why would an entrepreneur want to work with me versus all the other firms? And if it's like, well, I'm investing in the hot sector, pick whatever it is de jour, you know, consumer internet or social this or blockchain that it's like, well, it's the hot thing. Well, yeah, but there's also 100 other people who had the exact same idea you just did. It's the hot thing. Like, why are you different? And there's like no answer, right? So this lack of strategic thinking about a, and also lack of thinking of a long-term strategy, like, okay, whatever you're doing today, is that going to work 10 years from now? Whatever that strategy is. And like, I don't hear strategy from anyone. Like, okay, here's how I'm going to stand out over a sustained period of time. Here's how I will, you know, either, and it can be simple things like I'll have a niche. I'll only do X, Y, Z, and I'll be known.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For not investing. Oh, it's crazy. It's way too early. It's a science project. No traction. Yeah, there's no product. I mean, so first off, almost everything I'm doing, there's no product, no customer yet. It's an idea. It's in prototype stage of development or there's no even prototype yet. Or they just don't agree the world is going to change in this way. And in often cases, conventional wisdom would support their point of view. Like, let's not invest in any automotive company because every investment since Henry Ford has failed like 100% of them. They're just roadkill. I mean, scattered on the highway. And there's been, by the way, many, many startups funded well over $10 million. So like back decades ago, that's a lot of money in the automotive sector, all of which have failed. Many in batteries, many in solar. I mean, just scores. I mean, maybe hundreds of companies have failed. So when you've, let's say, lost four times in a row, you just give up on the category. So sometimes it's the more experienced Grazille investors like, well, that whole sector, I'm just going to like steer clear of it because I've”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who will say something like, Well, we have a strategy try not to try not to lose any company as if that's like we're in the trenches, you know, every company will succeed. And if you've just been at this game for a few decades, you'll realize that's just folly, right? The earlier you go, the higher your death rate's going to be as startups. The majority will fail. Just give them time. And that sad reality took a while to sink in for some. But until it does, you're going to be very timid in your investing. So most investors I see just let all the biggest home runs pass them by. Almost every term sheet I've written to a company that's turned out to be a spectacular home run, I had no competition at the time of the series. No kidding. Like nobody else would invest in the company. What would the”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, tons. Yeah. All over the place. And to be fair, I'll try to drop in and mention when I made those same mistakes, so by no means I'm trying to judge. But two that jump to mind. One is way too many seem to be loss avoidance or fearful. And I'll elaborate that in a moment. But the other one that jumps to mind equally is they think they've hit upon the only formula for success. Yeah, that is, and many different levels at which that's worrisome. So, the first one, this notion of being fear driven, I have come across.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. In the middle of Silicon Valley, that's true. Yeah. And then that was the only school I applied to, by the way. If you think about it, do you want to go to business school? I did not apply to any other school because there was no other school that would have met that goal. And also, I learned a lot in the network back to the network. Almost every investment I made, I think it was almost for the first year or two out of business goal. And that was a lot because it was the middle of the dot-com boom for me, had some business goal connection. It was either literally the entrepreneurs were from business school or it was sent to me by a professor from that business school. Or for the first year, that's how I jumpstarted everything I did.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that really all played out. So it gave me, so did it do what I expected? In a way, it did. I didn't know venture capital existed. When I grew up in Texas, I'd heard the term. I never met a venture capitalist. Never knew anything about him, wouldn't know how to reach one. No idea, right? I grew up. There wasn't the internet. So I literally would not know how to reach one. They're not on the phone book. There's no way to find them. They really aren't putting up billboards or advertising in any way. The entire transition to venture occurred because of people I met.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT