Welcome to Market Overtime. I'm Nicole Petallides. Today we're joined by legendary venture capitalist Tim Draper, founder of Draper Associates and an early investor in companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Skype, Hotmail, Coinbase, and BYU. We'll discuss where he sees the next major opportunities in technology from AI infrastructure and automation to Bitcoin, decentralized finance, SpaceX, and also the future of startup investing. Tim, it's great to have you with us. Thank you for being with us today.
Fun to be here, Nicole. This is great. I'm looking forward to it. You go ahead and fire and we'll have some fun today.
Well, I have a big lineup planning to fire. I have plenty of firepower here. But first, I have to say I get to meet the Drapers. Here it is. I mean, I think that's so much fun. Everybody wants to meet the Drapers, but it's me. I got the opportunity and so happy to speak with you. I mean, the show's been so incredibly successful. I believe you are taping your 10th or 11th season. Why do you love it? You've been all over the world. Just tell us a little bit about the show and some of the great, you know, when you look at people who are entrepreneurial and you say this person deserves the money and what goes with that?
Well, when I started the show, it was I would drag in any entrepreneur I could and try to get them to be on the show with me and the only person who would watch it was my mother. And then as time went on we instituted crowdfunding so that the viewer could invest in the companies and then it started to get very popular and then we started to go international and we did all these kind of amazing things and now it reaches 300 million people and about 10 to 20 million watch each show. So, it's gotten to be a really big deal. And what's happened is it not only helps us see a lot of interesting entrepreneurs because I'm a venture capitalist. I like the idea that these things I do bring me deal flow. But it also allows the people who get on the show to supercharge their business and that's just really fun for startups. So, we've had a lot of fun with the show. This most recent season is all US. And that's really the first time we've really gone to the US. We tended to do it to attract entrepreneurs from other parts of the world. And one of the US stops was Hawaii. And part of what we do is we do a little cultural thing. So the cultural thing was walking up this waterfall or walking up two-way waterfall. And I got to the waterfall and I thought, 'God, I'm at a waterfall. I should just get down into the bottom of the waterfall.' So I walked up, jumped in, and I looked down and there were a bunch of entrepreneurs way down at the bottom. And I said, 'Hey, anybody want to pitch me?' and they all like one guy just sprints straight up the waterfall and jumps in with me and starts pitching me in the waterfall. But we've had so much fun and we have guest judges there that are so great. We have these guest judges like and we adopt them as Drapers. So we now have Joe Montana Draper, you know, four-time Super Bowl champion. We have Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Draper, the biggest guru in India. We've had Rosie Rios Draper. She's been on the show four times. She's former treasurer of the US. She signed all your dollar bills.
Just quickly, the entrepreneurs of today, how do you compare them to yesteryear? I mean, are they more ambitious, less ambitious? Getting capital is extremely difficult at this time. It's hard to raise. And are you finding them to be more cautious or different than years past?
Well, the entrepreneurs we look for are the entrepreneurs that have very big ambitions where they're transforming an industry. They're doing something really extraordinary because we seed seed entrepreneurs. We put the first money in. So like first money in Tesla, first money in SpaceX, but we were also first money in a whole bunch of companies that did not work. And the reasoning there is that we take these extraordinary risks on entrepreneurs who are trying something really big. And you know, everything now it's everything from reversing aging to colonizing the moon to making Bitcoin pervasive to all these amazing things these people are doing and they're things that I call them heroes because they take long shots at extraordinary outcomes. And those outcomes can be so big that they're bigger even than the entrepreneur imagines they become because it's a big world. And so the entrepreneurs today, they are more savvy. They have seen more. There's a system now in place around the world for an entrepreneur to get funding. And that is relatively new. And then the entrepreneurs over the last year or two are seeing that they can start a company with AI without hiring a whole bunch of people. And so they can start companies with very little money.
Tim, let me ask you this because Tim, I have a lot of questions for you. So, let's try and fire through a lot of ideas here. I'll start with this. You look back at some of the early investments, we mentioned companies that you had, Tesla investments, Tesla, Skype, Hotmail, Coinbase, SpaceX, which you know, we look at the IPO news of 2026, SpaceX is there. Do you feel was there one year or two that you missed?
Which ones quickly? Yeah.
Oh. Well, Netflix, he came to me and I said, 'Wait, why are you sending DVDs through the US mail? We're going to be streaming in 18 months.' And he said, 'The world's not ready for that yet.' And I didn't understand what he meant, but what he meant was he's going to get all the customers and then he's going to stream to them. And I was just an idiot. And then I made another mistake not investing in LinkedIn, not realizing how incredibly extraordinary that LinkedIn network would become. And then I can blame myself for a bunch of them and I can also blame partners for some of them. But you know I sat with Sergey and Larry on an airplane and I came to my partners and I said hey you know these guys at Google is pretty cool and my partner said Draper you've gotten us into six search engines you know why do we need another one?
Yeah right. Well, yeah, exactly. When we think about Google and so our you know our business I get it.
That was a good one. Okay. And I got outbid for Facebook. We have had a lot of you know people say well you know you've had this success. How about your failures? My failures were all failures to act.
Look I mean there's no failure isn't there to a certain extent. I mean and I'm not even being sort of glass half full here. When you've had so many opportunities and you've had so many wins, do you really view any of them as failures? I mean, you're talking about Sergey Brin and Larry and Reed Hastings and, you know, you mentioned Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, you're meeting with top people around the world and now at this point, isn't there more opportunity? Is it this AI cycle that you're seeing? You know, where are the opportunities now? Where are the opportunities right now? Where do you evaluate a big idea today? And also is it the founder, the technology, what big ideas are today?
Yeah, when I was getting started in the venture business, you know, my dad was a venture capitalist and so were all of his friends or a lot of his friends and that made up the entire venture industry. There like six people and I went around and some of them said it's all about the people, my dad included. Some said it's all about the market and some said it was all about the technology. So Don Valentine talked about the market and Tom Perkins talked about the technology and I realized that they're all right and so we need to really evaluate all of those things and more and actually we're even using AI now to help us evaluate companies. So the world is changing in a super fast way. Our AI can evaluate their voice and see what their personality is through their voice. The AI can evaluate their facial expressions and determine their emotions and whether they're lying. And a lot of it is just right now we're just using AI to verify our own feelings on companies. And we're also using it for sourcing and we're using it for post-investment help and pre-pitch help. We're using it in amazing different ways. It's really changing the whole nature of the venture capital business and we're really...
