Tim Draper On 'Free Your Voice' Podcast With Dustin Plantholt

Well, thanks for having me on your show. Is it a show?

Yeah, we call it our Desla. It was a gift from Elon Musk. I said to Elon, 'You know, I've got this new space we're calling Hero City. We're putting this thing together. A whole bunch of entrepreneurs are going to come through and build their businesses there. It'll be a flow of conferences and activities. We want the front desk to be a Tesla.' He calls me and says, 'Well, we've got one hanging around here,' and he just gave me a Tesla. But we had an artist carve it out. It's a working Tesla. We had an artist carve the whole thing out and turn it into a reception desk. The reception desk chairs are Tesla seats. So yeah, very cool.

That was the beginning of a lot. We've done a lot of interesting things with Hero City and Draper University. It's right across the street, all part of the campus. We have a Proto hologram where I spent eight hours being interviewed, so you can ask the Proto hologram anything you want and I'll respond. It's full size, seven feet tall. This isn't the future, this is right now. We have an AI Tim sitting there in Draper University. And then we have this Hero theme. It started with putting Superman and Batman as a huge mural on the wall of Hero City. My son turns to me and says, 'Dad, I'm going to start Draper University of Heroes.' I called it Draper University of Heroes, and he said, 'I'm going to start Draper University of Villains.' I said, 'Villains? Why villains?' He said, 'Because the villains in the comic books do all the cool stuff.' And I realized, yeah. It's like Green Goblin does vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, the Lizard is a genetically engineered scientist, the exoskeleton on Doctor Octopus, Poison Ivy is all about bio, and Mysterio is like a VR expert. It got me thinking we should do that. So we have a heroes' wall on one side and a villains' wall on the other side.

Here's what happens: people come to conclusions, huge groups of people come to conclusions about how the world works. That is the base from which all societies operate. They say, 'These are the rules, this is what happens, this is how it works.' And businesses generally tweak that a little at a time. They'll say, 'Okay, now we've got iPhones. How do you manage having iPhones in the world? And now we've got Bitcoin. How do you manage having Bitcoin in the world?' But entrepreneurs are always pushing that edge. They say, 'Okay, this is the way the world works today, but I have a vision for how it could work better 10 years from now.' Usually, when they're just getting started, people think they're crazy. Then as they keep going, people start adopting this new product or service. They get to a point where they go, 'Okay, this is everywhere now.' And that's when society says, 'Wait a second, we liked it the old way.' Then there's this battle. You've seen that battle many times. You're seeing it between the banks and Bitcoin, you saw it between the old-line car companies and Tesla. Every time I have a huge success where I've seeded some company that 15 years later becomes a household name, I've found there was huge resistance from the status quo. Skype got resistance from the long-distance carriers. Hotmail got resistance from the post office. Baidu got all sorts of government resistance because the government was trying to control what was said in China. Each time we've had one of these big successes, when they get really big they get huge resistance. Theranos — the whole healthcare insurance government conglomerate didn't like the idea of lowering the cost of healthcare.

Candidly, I think I've just got a mission, and that mission has been to spread entrepreneurship and venture capital wherever it goes. I'm always supportive of the entrepreneur, somebody who's trying to improve, in her case change healthcare as we know it. Any chance I get, I want to speak out and encourage those entrepreneurs because it takes courage to be an entrepreneur. It takes a lot of energy, and you have to believe that the world you're creating is going to be better than the one we're in today. If you believe that, you'll do everything you can to make it better. I guess what I'm doing is supporting all those entrepreneurs in their beliefs because I think that makes the world better. They take the world as it is and they change it, and it's not easy to change because you're up against all that inertia, all that resistance from society, the government, the competition, all the peripheral industries that are somehow related. I get it: if somebody has created a career and they're doing fine, they don't want somebody coming out of left field changing the model. But change is happening so fast now that businesses that don't think in terms of being adaptive won't make it very far.

I'll tell you: these dictators Putin and Xi, and the little guy in North Korea, and Castro, they are weak men. They have a real weakness. They're charismatic, but they're weak. And a weak man tries to tell everybody what to do and tries to control everybody. Putin, President Xi, they are weak men and they have ruined the lives of billions of people. The way they've done that is to clamp the government down on top of them. What that really does is say, 'We are not going to progress. We are going to be status quo, and we're just going to control everybody and tell everybody what to do.' The strong people, the great leaders, are the ones who trust people and set them free to do great things. They build a platform of trust and freedom so that entrepreneurs and business people and anyone trying to make the world a better place can open up their minds. What happens when you have a bad leader is that everybody watches each other and no one can step out of line. If you're an entrepreneur, you are very depressed, you are stuck in line. You know there's a better future, you know you can do something about it, and you know your government is getting in the way. If you're in a country that is free and open, where they're experimenting and trying new things — that's Uruguay, that's El Salvador, it's Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and hopefully Singapore stays that way. They allow people to experiment, to try new things, to innovate. That's built into their thinking. They realize that a light touch, a government that just creates a platform to help businesses and people live their lives — those are going to be the governments that thrive in the future. I'm pushing very hard for Nikki Haley because I think she believes in freedom and realizes that all that freedom for business will grow the economy much faster, create more jobs, and create a strong country that nobody wants to attack.

There's a word for it in German — there isn't one in English — 'Schadenfreude' says that if I take down somebody, it makes me feel better. I think it goes back to caveman days. In a little community, people would kill the beast and bring it back to the village, and the villagers would celebrate. Then the beast would get smaller as they ate it. Eventually they had to figure out who to cleave from the pack. There was this psychology of cleaving somebody from the pack that made you feel better by saying somebody else was doing something wrong. It's easy to take a shot at somebody everyone knows and has seen. So they go after Elon Musk, they go after Bill Gates, they go after Zuckerberg, they go after Bezos. What they're really looking for is something to make themselves feel better. It's a weak part of our society. We need to realize that the economy is a win-win game, not a zero-sum game. We aren't cutting the beast up and dividing it. People have to get over that because the economy keeps growing. In my grandfather's days, they believed the food supply was growing linearly and the population exponentially, and we couldn't feed everyone. But what they missed was that entrepreneurs and businesses would come up with great solutions. When people talk about the problems of today, like global warming, I don't think it will be a politician saying 'Don't use plastic straws' that saves the planet. It will be an entrepreneur who says, 'Hey, I've got a cool idea — we can block the sun for three minutes every day at the hottest place on Earth and lower the temperature,' or 'Hey, we can create energy that doesn't generate CO2.' There will be many solutions, and some will cool the Earth, and then we'll have to figure out how to heat it back up again. Entrepreneurs figured out how to create more food with less land, how to travel, how to have all the intelligence of the world in AI. That's magical. We're going to be able to launch humans into exponential growth. There will be an extraordinary anthropological leap forward. Bitcoin gave us an anthropological leap forward because now everyone in the world can understand a source of value that no one country can destroy the way they did in Argentina and Nigeria. AI is creating another anthropological leap forward. Maybe the next one will be putting AI into robotics. We all carry around a phone now; I have a feeling we'll have a drone following us everywhere. We'll say, 'I forgot my wallet at the restaurant, will you go get it?' and the drone will pick it up and bring it to you. There will be really amazing things in the future.

Here's the way I look at it: go back 50 years, none of us would want to live there. Go back a hundred years, there's no indoor plumbing, no electricity. We have made huge human progress, and it's just getting better. The phone — I can push two buttons and get myself home from the office even if I had a flat tire, and I can bring dinner home with me by pushing two buttons. That was not possible 10 years ago. In people's wildest sci-fi moments, that wasn't possible 50 years ago. Humans are way better off than they were back then. I know there's a part of the population that just wants to leave it the way it is, but there are those of us who love these major breakthroughs because we know ultimately our lives are going to be much better. The media — I love free speech, I love the media, it's fantastic. But there's a part that doesn't work: they sell fear. Fear is what people watch and buy into. If you sell fear, that's what you show. They used to say 'If it bleeds, it leads.' But it's more than that. They present the worst thing in the world, and then you find out the trend is actually good. They'll say there were all these murders across the country, but if you look at the data, we're having fewer murders than we did 10, 20, 30 years ago. There's a fight-or-flight thing, an endorphin rush when you get scared and then realize you're okay. The media plays on that endorphin rush. Also, they all tell the same story. I thought with the internet, everybody would tell a different story. I was so wrong. I thought the internet would break up the monopoly of ABC, NBC, CBS, and we'd see all these different news shows with different news and optimistic scenarios. But somehow you get one centralized story, and that's all anybody wants to talk about. The presidential election is a big deal, but your local elections are probably equally important. You probably haven't paid attention to them because nobody cares about local news, even though it affects you directly. I think it's just easier to have something in common, a common base to talk to each other. But I thought the internet would allow anyone to create a news station, yet all those stations now spout whatever the networks tell them. The writers for the New York Times have one point of view, but they get all these people parroting what they said. That's something an entrepreneur could work on. Some people have figured out how to break the fear cycle — Hallmark figured it out, and that business has gone through the roof with happy content. Some small streamers and young people are listening to podcasts a lot more, and I think that's positive because podcasts are like listening to a person talk, not somebody with an axe to grind.

I remember how hard it was to get started, and how brands really mattered. If you worked for IBM, everything was fine. If you were working for yourself, it was tough. People thought, 'Why would I listen to somebody who's not attached to some big icon?' I remember how hard that was. When I was getting started with Draper Associates as an SBIC, it was tough to get credibility. I remember thinking that as an entrepreneur you really only need one person to believe in you, other than you and your mother. That may have stuck with me. I've always liked the underdog. There was another thing: I remember playing touch football when I was about 10 years old. This guy gathered up all the best athletes and put them on a team, then turned to me and said, 'Okay, Draper, you pick whoever else is left and see how you can go against us.' I took a rag-tag group, put them together, and thought about how to do this. They were faster, better. We came up with some plays no one had ever seen, and we beat them. I thought, 'The big institutions are not always right.' Another time I got arrested for something I hadn't done when I was about 12. I thought, 'Even the government doesn't always know what's right.' He eventually let me off when he realized I was just wearing the same kind of jacket as someone who had broken some lockers. I thought, 'Even the government doesn't always know what's right.' So I had to start thinking for myself. I think that was important for my career.

Great, thanks for having me. That was really fun.