By developing deep learning solutions that are faster, easier, and less expensive to use, Nervana is democratizing deep learning and fueling advances in medical diagnostics, image and speech recognition, genomics, agriculture, finance, and eventually across all industries.
— Steve Jurvetson
There are many good ideas out there that never get an audience.
Steve Jobs now rests with the sublime satisfaction of symbolic immortality.
Truly original thinkers tend not to be entrepreneurs who've spent 10 years at Cisco and can be trusted to know what they're doing. They tend to be 26 years old and highflying. They often have a very childlike mind, with some naivete.
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
There is nothing like visiting a facility to get a sense of how companies work.
When I was 11, I went to space camp at the Space Center in Texas, near where I grew up. There, I met video-game-industry pioneer Richard Garriott, better known to gamers everywhere as 'Ultima' creator Lord British.
I don't want to be a driving machine on my daily commute; I want to be driven by a machine.
If you think 20 years out and ask what's the most important company on the planet, it is not any company you could write down today. The most important company 20 years from now has not even been founded yet and doesn't have a name.
If there isn't a business logic to get to marketability, the chance of an idea's importance in the world is very low.
SpaceX is very unusual. I don't know of any other startup where the founder put in $100 million of his own money before looking for any outside capital. They have wildly exceeded any reasonable expectations.
Development of space will improve life on Earth. Access to space is important for agriculture, humanitarian efforts, communications, and navigation.
In manufacturing, too much work is beyond repetitive - it is inhumane. The people doing this work aren't doing it because they want to - they are doing it because they have families to feed and clothe.
There aren't many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It's pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley.
The future will be less predictable, forecast rises will shrink, company lifetimes will shrink, new entrants will proliferate and it's going to just get more unpredictable.
History has proven time and again that downturns are the best time to invest in new start-ups. You get good deals and find a better environment for start-ups to grow.
When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.
The bad news is that most traditional VCs have a youth bias that they will state very overtly. You always wonder if that's a self-fulfilling prophecy or if it's something about the nature of those businesses.
Elon Musk is a remarkable individual.
We only invest in businesses that reduce labor.
Generally speaking, if you control matter more precisely, you can get more efficiency out of any process.
I would say that nanotech's worth paying attention to no matter what your background because if you look far enough into the future, it'll impact just about any industry you can think of.
Personally, I do not look at IPOs for an exit.
We definitely stand behind Theranos in the sense of, we are an investor, and we want them to succeed.
Since the Moon has no atmosphere, it presents a unique orbital opportunity - we could fly incredibly close to the surface while staying in lunar orbit.
The closer you are to technology, the more you trust it.
As a geek, I take umbrage at the notion that chips are not sexy. But yes, robots, drones, satellites and self-driving cars are the kinds of things that excite me.
Building and launching rockets has been a lifelong hobby that my son and I share. We regularly travel to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to launch rockets.
My interest in space started early, but for many years, I could not find any space-related investments that really penciled-out for venture. That changed in 2009 when Elon Musk came to us with a big vision to explore Mars while producing rockets at a fraction of a price and making space accessible.
I believe that technology has the potential to change the fate of nations, industries and companies, as well as the context of our lives. I want to help build the companies that take the risks needed to make those kinds of real changes in the world.
IT is now reaching out to fuels and chemicals, energy and clean tech, rockets, all kinds of bizarre industries that formerly didn't face much competition.
Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth.
I'd stay away from investments in a variety of sectors that are capital intensive. Anyone who says we need $100 million before we know if what we're doing makes sense and the customers want it - that's not going to work.
While, in general, life satisfaction goes up with wealth, beyond the safety net more and more wealth brings very radically diminishing returns on life satisfaction.
Charging a fee for an online service is a good way to lose 90 percent of your customers.
Back when I was a student, I had Steve Jobs over to my house for a fireside chat with the GSB High Tech Club.
We're impressed by people who don't know what can't be done.
Technology business increasingly becomes difficult to predict because technology itself is accelerating in change, and human nature and markets are more stagnant and static. But the dynamic engine of technological innovation continues unabated.
Corporate houses and big companies can be meaningful distribution channels for start-ups.
You have to build businesses for longer term.
Machine learning allows us to build software solutions that exceed human understanding and shows us how AI can innervate every industry.
In general, when it comes to AI, many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution.
Beyond self-driving cars, I think all airplanes should go pilotless. Get the pilots out of there. Even better, have no cockpit at all, and turn it into a nice lounge with a bar. Why give people the illusion of control with a steering wheel?
When the venture capital industry invests, it's usually because they sense there is money in them hills. And often it takes a high-profile winner to wake everyone up in the category. SpaceX is that company.
When you lower the cost of access to space, a boom of innovation follows, just as low-cost fiber optics paved the way for the Internet and the cloud services that followed.
The short version is I'm just a total Apple fanboy. I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science.
If you thought financial crises came and went, just count on them - another economic collapse, it's almost going to be like not news any more. But for startups this is great, because it's a perpetual driver of disruption.
Go to the moon - that's my dream.
Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.
