You have to build businesses for longer term.
Go to the moon - that's my dream.
Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If there isn't a business logic to get to marketability, the chance of an idea's importance in the world is very low.
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?
The closer you are to technology, the more you trust it.
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.
In general, when it comes to AI, many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution.
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.
Personally, I do not look at IPOs for an exit.
There is nothing like visiting a facility to get a sense of how companies work.
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.
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.
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.
