Words matter. These are the best Steve Jurvetson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them.
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.
SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.
Generally speaking, if you control matter more precisely, you can get more efficiency out of any process.
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.
When the venture capital industry invests, it’s usually because they sense there is money in them hills. And often it takes a high-profile winner to wake everyone up in the category. SpaceX is that company.
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?
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.
When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.
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.
There aren’t many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It’s pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley.
Truly original thinkers tend not to be entrepreneurs who’ve spent 10 years at Cisco and can be trusted to know what they’re doing. They tend to be 26 years old and highflying. They often have a very childlike mind, with some naivete.
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.
The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science.
I can’t invest in areas of comfort.
If there isn’t a business logic to get to marketability, the chance of an idea’s importance in the world is very low.
The closer you are to technology, the more you trust it.
The commercial space industry is enormous and ripe for disruption.
Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth.
There are many good ideas out there that never get an audience.
History has proven time and again that downturns are the best time to invest in new start-ups. You get good deals and find a better environment for start-ups to grow.
The short version is I’m just a total Apple fanboy. I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
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.
I taught myself HTML.
The economies of the future are information.
We believe strongly that all meaningful change comes from entrepreneurs.
Before SpaceX, no space company was worth a second meeting.
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.
Hotmail grew its base faster than any company I can think of.
Flourishing is everyone’s birthright. I’m trying to break this hold that being smiley and cheery has on what people think the good life is.
The concept of a ‘job’ is pretty recent. If you go back a few hundred years, everyone was either a slave or a serf, or living off slave or serf labor to pursue science or philosophy or art.
Because of the rate of technology change, forecast horizons are shrinking.
I don’t want to be a driving machine on my daily commute; I want to be driven by a machine.
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.
You have to build businesses for longer term.
Charging a fee for an online service is a good way to lose 90 percent of your customers.
Steve Jobs was my hero.
I don’t really care what the venture industry thinks.
Venture capital is a dynamic and people-driven business.
In general, when it comes to AI, many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution.
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.
Being slick is not the right answer.
I love photography. I love rockets.
In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.
A big part of green tech will be organisms that eat waste.
I love what I do. I love to learn.
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.
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.
While, in general, life satisfaction goes up with wealth, beyond the safety net more and more wealth brings very radically diminishing returns on life satisfaction.
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?
The bad news is that most traditional VCs have a youth bias that they will state very overtly. You always wonder if that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or if it’s something about the nature of those businesses.
We only invest in businesses that reduce labor.
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.
Firms that claim domain focus are late movers.
I started programming Apples in seventh grade.
Go to the moon – that’s my dream.
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.
Development of space will improve life on Earth. Access to space is important for agriculture, humanitarian efforts, communications, and navigation.
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.
