Tim Draper: I Was SpaceX’s First Investor – Inside the Massive IPO ｜ Bonnie Blockchain

Wow, that is fantastic. That is extraordinary. Way to go, Elon. We backed him.

How would I describe SpaceX? I think SpaceX is the company that is going to take us to Mars and all of the things that come along with it. When Kennedy said, 'We're going to the moon.'

We were first other than Elon. Elon put the first 30 million of his own money in. My partner Steve spent most of his nights and weekends launching rockets. He was just so obsessed. And I said, 'Look, you're so obsessed with rockets. Find us the best rocket company.' And he came back about 3 weeks later. He said, 'The best rocket company is Elons. He needed it.' And the first couple of rockets after the investment blew up on the launch pad and we thought, 'Oh boy, that money went away pretty fast.'

Terrific. Well, it's been fun to be on your show and happy to do it again.

Terrific. Well, I do like people and that helps because I do get a lot of interest. Much of it is because I'm a venture capitalist and well known and I do early stage investing and a lot of people have interesting ideas they want to run across me or real business plans where they want to make those things happen. So I appreciate them. They come from all over. I see my eyebrows once again out of control.

So I find it good to go out and see people because I learn a lot from a lot of different people. And I learn about what the future might hold. Mostly because people like to come to me and talk about the future and what it's going to look like. And that was a great event, that Mar-a-Lago event on Bitcoin. I thought it was a great event. Very well put together and really some extraordinary people. I met Mike Tyson.

Who's a great philosopher.

Yeah, I really enjoyed a lot of the speeches. I enjoyed the interactions I had. And it's such a beautiful location.

There was a lot of security going in. Yeah.

Yes.

He was protecting himself from me.

Yeah, we were first.

Oh, you were first? We were first. Other than Elon. Elon put the first 30 million of his own money in.

Well, it's really credit to Steve Jervson, my partner at the time. Steve spent most of his nights and weekends launching rockets. He was just so obsessed. And I said, 'Look, you're so obsessed with rockets. Find us the best rocket company.' And he came back about three weeks later, maybe a couple months later, and he said, 'The best rocket company is Elons.' And I said, 'Isn't he supposed to be running Tesla?' Because we had a big investment in Tesla. And he said, 'Yeah, but I think we should hear him out.' So when we talked to Elon, we got this amazing feeling from him that his mission in life was really to make us multiplanetary and there was so much passion tied to getting us to Mars or whatever else he wanted to do that I realized that that was what he was really put on the earth for and Tesla was sort of a means to an end. And well, he also wanted to save our planet here, but he also wanted us to get off this planet potentially. And yeah, so we backed him and that was an amazing decision. I'm thrilled we did and we put a lot of money into it too because hey, he needed it. And the first couple of rockets after the investment blew up on the launch pad and we thought, 'Oh boy, that money went away pretty fast.' But then one of the Falcon Ones lifted off and worked and suddenly there were plenty of contracts and he was off to the races. So way to go, Elon. And he has that great way of saying, 'Hey, we're going to Mars.' And when you get a big mission like that, you attract the best entrepreneurs in the world. You attract the best engineers and scientists and everybody wants to come join you because they want to go to Mars or they want to think about that problem. That's a much better problem than another SaaS product or whatever. So Elon really attracted some of the best talent and that talent has come up with some amazing things. Starlink. We have fiber to the home here and my Starlink works better than my fiber to the home. Wow, what an amazing company. And on your way to Mars, you're going to find so many other things. I don't know if space is the final frontier, but it's the frontier of the now.

Well, I don't know if they're ready to go to Mars, but I certainly have plans myself to eventually go to the moon. I think they have great imaginations. I think a lot of people are a little scared. They live in a scared world. They don't want to see change because they've got a system working. They have a job and they get food and shelter and clothing and occasionally they get to go out to the movies or whatever. They kind of like this. So if somebody comes and shakes them up and says, 'Hey, we're going to Mars,' it's one of two reactions. One is, 'I don't want to go to Mars. I don't want anybody to go to Mars. I don't think anyone should.' That's one. And the other one is, 'Wow, that is fantastic. That is extraordinary. I can't wait to see what happens here.' And people who buy shares of public stocks are going to look and say, 'I want a piece of that. I want a piece of that future, whatever that is.'

How would I describe SpaceX? I think SpaceX is the company that is going to take us to Mars and all of the things that come along with it. It's a little like when Kennedy said, 'We're going to the moon.' But I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his reach around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard. And all sorts of new technologies came from that. The transistor came from that. Some amazing things came from people solving a big problem like that. So you create a goal like, 'Hey, we've got to all be able to live on Mars.' How are we going to do that? Then you start thinking about how do you do it. You terraform it before you get there? How can you get there faster than six months? So people start thinking in really extraordinary ways. So I actually think SpaceX is the company that's going to take us to Mars, but along the way it's going to have things like Starlink and I guess also Twitter is now a part of it and X and X.AI. Actually, I use all the AI products and X.AI is the one I go to for the truth.

Because the rest of them are a little coddling. Not all of them, but some feel like they're written by lawyers or people who are very politically correct. Some of them just want to make me feel better. Sometimes I just want the facts and that's where I go to x.ai.

I encourage them to fight. I encourage them to do things and try things and explore and fail and fail again until they succeed. I encourage them to promote freedom and trust around the world. I encourage them to do things where they're willing to take a chance on something that might not work. That is a much better way to live in my mind. And it also moves humanity forward a lot faster. Then if you take away people's freedoms, you overregulate and overtax. If you tell everybody what to do, if you're the leaders of a group and you're telling everybody what to do, then they live in fear and they are afraid to take chances. They're afraid to speak out and they're afraid to think big. They're afraid to think imaginatively. I felt that during the whole COVID fiasco where people were telling me what I was supposed to think and that woke thing where you're not allowed to say things. Part of the beauty of America and Silicon Valley is that people have freedom of speech and they can say whatever they want. By saying whatever you want, you can make mistakes and get admonished for them. That give and take makes you better and stronger and a more sensitive person. Remarkably, it has the opposite effect. Freedom of speech makes you more sensitive because you're able to try so many more things. It also makes you much more imaginative and that imagination is really what drives humanity forward. That's where we take these amazing anthropological leaps. And they're happening faster and faster. So, it was a long way from when we had the industrial revolution to where we had the automobile. And there was a long way from the automobile to the computer, but it was a pretty short way from the computer to software and a really short way from software to the internet and a really, really short way from the internet to Bitcoin and from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence and from artificial intelligence to whatever we do next will also be a short time horizon. That means that each of these anthropological leaps forward is happening faster and faster and that is very exciting. If you look back 150 years, there's no indoor plumbing. There's no electricity. There are no cars, no computers, no DoorDash, no AI, no Bitcoin. People were still trading gold or maybe the promise of gold. They were a long way from here. And if you go forward 150 years, it's going to be amazing. You think, 'Oh, it'd be nice to be able to go back into those wonderful times.' No way you'd want to go back 150 years, but going forward 150 years, that will be amazing. Think of all the amazing things that people will come up with. We have the imaginations of 8 billion people and all of their kids and grandkids who are going to come up with amazing new things. So going to Mars will be like a blink. The innovations that happen between now and 150 years from now are going to be amazing. In fact, even 15 years from now, we're seeing people reversing aging. We're seeing people with flying cars. All these things are starting to happen. I think this is going to be a really exciting 15 years and then it will keep accelerating beyond that. The only resistance points to that are insecure governments who create stupid rules for people. They don't realize that if you make a rule for 300 million people, you're forcing 300 million people to do that. That is huge resistance. That's friction to our economy. That's friction to our progress. So it's no surprise that the freer the country, the more progress they make. Socialist countries always go flatline. Their economies go flatline because they have weak leaders and they tell everybody what to do and then everybody just does that. That's flatline, no innovation. Whereas the free countries and the capitalist countries grow at extraordinary rates. The less regulation and less government friction mean the country can grow that much faster.

Well, I fund entrepreneurs. If there were no freedom, there would be no entrepreneurs. They would be restricted. They would not be creative. They would not think outside of what we're all doing. They would not try new things because in a socialist, restrictive environment, they are punished for thinking of anything outside of what everybody thinks is normal. That's why freedom matters.

It's usually pretty easy for me by now. We have AI that does it too. We have Sear and it can detect lies.

We use those tools really to help improve those tools. The tools aren't as good as people yet. We're just hoping they get as good. We use AI in about 15 different ways to improve our venture business. Some of the ways we're using it is just to train it so it gets better. And some of it really does help our business a lot. We also use AI so you can submit your business plan or your deck to Draper.VC, our site, and we give you feedback and then you can call my digital twin and talk to that. That AI gives you feedback on your business. People have spent two and a half hours with it and keep calling back. It's really interesting.

Yeah. Draper University is what we call a people accelerator. It takes in somewhat ordinary people with great passion and turns them into entrepreneurs in kind of an odd way. We have survival training and we have a three-day hackathon and we do business modeling and at the end we do a demo day with a bunch of venture capitalists. We throw a lot at the entrepreneur and we challenge them somewhat intellectually but mostly emotionally and physically. And spiritually we enlighten them. We put a lot of things into that program and it ends up creating a lot of great entrepreneurs. It's been a huge success. I think 7,000 people have gone through hero training. About 24,000 have gone through Draper University in one form or another, but 7,000 have had hero training. They've started about 3,500 companies and about five are already unicorns. We're only 15 years old and five have become unicorns. Then about 25 are worth more than $100 million. The people who go have come from 104 different countries. So we are very international.

I would have loved it. It's only five weeks. It's not like wasting four years of your life.

Yeah, I don't think it was a waste when I went, but I think a lot of the university system needs major overhaul and it would be a waste academically. I think you get a lot more out of AI than you would out of a university today. Socially, you'd be good. It would be very good to go to a university.

It was Taiwan. Oh, Snake Alley.

Well, first, dad is awesome. He's 98. He's the nicest guy in the world. He's forgetting a lot of things, but his processor works like a charm. And if I have a really complex problem, I'll bring it to him and he'll give me a creative solution I had never thought of. I love my family. My family is fantastic. I didn't really push for any of them to become venture capitalists, but I think they saw me having fun. They see it as a really fun and interesting and exciting career. You need to pay attention to your family. You need to make sure that everybody's doing well and moving in the right direction, or help them with their direction, whatever that may end up being. Family should be fun. They should be entertaining for everybody so that people want to be attached to them.

And I bought more at $180 actually.

Well, I actually think that technology usually sees the light of day and better technology improves people's lives. In the case of a new currency, every time there was a new currency, it became a major wealth driver for humanity. When we went from shells to gold, from gold to the promise of gold, from the promise of gold to the promise of a government, when credit was created, all these things lifted the world economy in a big way. One of the things I noticed was that in the US, people weren't really paying much attention to Bitcoin, but in places like Africa and Southeast Asia, they were paying a lot of attention. In places where there was very little confidence in a currency, they were paying a lot of attention. Now we all know that Bitcoin is better, faster, cheaper than the dollar. It is more frictionless, more transparent, keeps perfect records. It is open, global, and not tied to some governmental force. Ultimately it is better, cheaper, faster. It is a better technology. So ultimately it will see the light and that's what I had in mind while making those purchases. I saw that not only was it better, faster, cheaper, but it was also allowing people who were unbanked to be a part of the world economy. That also increases the growth of global wealth. There were so many reasons. So Bitcoin really is on its way. It's kind of accepted pretty much everywhere. Retailers haven't quite gotten there yet, but they will. When they realize they can make more money if they just accept Bitcoin.

Good. Keep that feeling. It's always early. There's always more. There are other mountains to climb. Just keep trying, pushing, excelling, asking.

You're on your own journey. I think you're going to enjoy it. If you really work hard, when you're my age you'll look back and say, 'Wow, that was something.' If this is your mission, you should just enjoy your mission and work as hard as you can. Try to always be a little uncomfortable. Do stuff that makes you uncomfortable. If you keep doing that and always do the hardest thing first, you're going to feel much better. You'll feel great when you're my age.

I hope you know what I'm referring to. That's the way every Hotmail message was supposed to have that P.S. I love you on it.