Steve Jurvetson
The closer you are to technology, the more you trust it.Collection: Trust
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.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Medical
There was a time and a place when a pure content start-up had a chance, and that time has passed.Collection: Chance
The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.Collection: Beauty
I've always been a fan of space exploration, and I filled our entire office with space artifacts.Collection: Space
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.
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.
The commercial space industry is enormous and ripe for disruption.
Without disruptions, startups can't survive.
We believe strongly that all meaningful change comes from entrepreneurs.
Biotech 1.0 is slow, like a lab science, and Version 2.0 is more like computational sciences.
You've got to close deals quickly, or else you'll miss out.
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.
Lots of deals happen in situations that aren't 'pure work.'
Firms that claim domain focus are late movers.
I can't invest in areas of comfort.
Because of the rate of technology change, forecast horizons are shrinking.
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.
Before SpaceX, no space company was worth a second meeting.
Hotmail grew its base faster than any company I can think of.
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 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.
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.
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 love what I do. I love to learn.
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.
Eventually, all cars are going to be autonomous.
No politician has a 50-year horizon.
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.
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.
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.
Steve Jobs was my hero.
I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.
A big part of green tech will be organisms that eat waste.
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.
There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.
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.
In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.
The economies of the future are information.
I don't really care what the venture industry thinks.
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.
Venture capital is a dynamic and people-driven business.
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.
I love photography. I love rockets.
By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets.
Being slick is not the right answer.
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.
Machine learning allows us to build software solutions that exceed human understanding and shows us how AI can innervate every industry.