Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them.
— Steve Jurvetson
The deep learning techniques, while relatively easy to learn, are quite foreign to traditional engineering modalities. It takes a different mindset and a relaxation of the presumption of control. The practitioners are like magi, sequestered from the rest of a typical engineering process.
If I want to make a product that is appealing to consumers, like a piece of clothing or a video game, that's fad driven. Some companies do it, and I don't know how they do it, but it's generally a bad place to invest.
In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.
Every new industry has exuberance in advance of reality. The techies get carried away. There is a period of despair. Then the pendulum swings the other way, and people see the long term potential. It's like when the Internet bubble crashed.
I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
I taught myself HTML.
No politician has a 50-year horizon.
Eventually, all cars are going to be autonomous.
It is quite moving to hold a piece of Mars in your hands and to reflect on its incredible interplanetary journey, and the science that gives confidence as to the origin of this unusual rock.
I've always been a fan of space exploration, and I filled our entire office with space artifacts.
Before SpaceX, no space company was worth a second meeting.
IT is permeating more industries. Moore's Law knocks down simulation capabilities. We don't need wind tunnels anymore, for example. You can run experiments more quickly.
Firms that claim domain focus are late movers.
You've got to close deals quickly, or else you'll miss out.
Without disruptions, startups can't survive.
If you ask any VC what it takes to be successful, you'll get a description that sounds a lot like himself. There's a preference for self-similar individuals.
By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets.
The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.
I don't really care what the venture industry thinks.
One tech-related concern with religion is that it appears to be a positive feedback loop to the accelerating rich-poor gap, as the disenfranchised opt out of modernity.
A big part of green tech will be organisms that eat waste.
Steve Jobs was my hero.
I do lament how many investors focus on all the short-term sugar buzz of some marginal improvement in something - nothing history books are ever going to be written about. In many cases, these are quick and easy ways to make money.
The concept of a 'job' is pretty recent. If you go back a few hundred years, everyone was either a slave or a serf, or living off slave or serf labor to pursue science or philosophy or art.
I've actually come to respect the most irritatingly challenging people I've worked with as really valuable in improving group decision-making and what to do and what to invest in.
We look for companies that are unlike anything we've ever seen before, with a bold vision to change the world and run by passionate entrepreneurs who get you jumping out of your seat.
One very interesting framework for a company to succeed over time - beyond just business logic and analytics - is, do they have a reason why the best graduates in engineering programs will flock to them versus competitors?
Elon Musk wins you over with his elegant mastery of engineering, be it for the rocket or the car. But what blew my socks off was when our conversation veered way off topic. We started musing about whether it was possible we all lived in the matrix, and Musk still had deep knowledge.
Because of the rate of technology change, forecast horizons are shrinking.
Lots of deals happen in situations that aren't 'pure work.'
Biotech 1.0 is slow, like a lab science, and Version 2.0 is more like computational sciences.
The commercial space industry is enormous and ripe for disruption.
There was a time and a place when a pure content start-up had a chance, and that time has passed.
I love photography. I love rockets.
Venture capital is a dynamic and people-driven business.
The economies of the future are information.
There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.
SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.
Hotmail went from zero to 12 million users with zero marketing steps. Not a penny was spent on sales and marketing, which was astounding. It showed us the power of the network effect.
I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.
Elon Musk is an incredible leader and entrepreneur. I have known him since 1995 when he first came to Silicon Valley.
I love what I do. I love to learn.
Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.
Hotmail grew its base faster than any company I can think of.
Being slick is not the right answer.
I can't invest in areas of comfort.
By the time people came to realize that free, Web-based email was indeed a hot idea, Hotmail was adding 1 million new subscribers a month.
We believe strongly that all meaningful change comes from entrepreneurs.
If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.
