There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.
Elon Musk is a remarkable individual.
Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them.
Biotech 1.0 is slow, like a lab science, and Version 2.0 is more like computational sciences.
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.
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 love photography. I love rockets.
By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets.
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.
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.
Flourishing is everyone's birthright. I'm trying to break this hold that being smiley and cheery has on what people think the good life is.
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.
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.
The short version is I'm just a total Apple fanboy. I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
Corporate houses and big companies can be meaningful distribution channels for start-ups.
We're impressed by people who don't know what can't be done.
Venture capital is a dynamic and people-driven business.
We only invest in businesses that reduce labor.
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.
I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
