In Search Of Excellence - Tim Draper: Think Big and Drive Progress | E05

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

What does it take to become one of the most iconic and successful venture capitalists of all time?  How does a commitment to freedom and trust empower us to think big and drive progress? Meet Tim Draper.  An early investor in Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, Space X, Twitter, Robinhood, Coinbase, and other industry-disrupting companies, Tim began his venture capital journey at age 27 and never looked back. In this episode, Tim breaks down for listeners why thinking for yourself will be the most valuable skill in the 21st century, how cryptocurrency could forever change the economy as we know it, what selling condoms can teach us about running a business, and much more. Topic Include:The impending automation revolution, and how to prepare for it.  What selling apples as a kid taught Draper about politics. The importance of heroes and superhero figures.  The unique curriculum of Draper University.  Cryptocurrencies and the future of bitcoin.  The art of cold calling, and the ability to close.  Working with Elon Musk.  The value of mentorship, and other topics. Tim Draper is a true visionary.  A third-generation venture capitalist, Tim is one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time.  In 1999, Tim created the first Silicon Valley venture capital firm to raise a global venture capital fund.  He was an early investor in bitcoin and has been among its greatest proponents since 2010.  He is the author of How To Be The Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs.  Tim is also the founder of Draper University whose mission is to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit of students from around the world and prepare them for success in the real world. Resources Mentioned:How To Be The Startup Hero, by Tim DraperDraper UniversitySponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If you work as hard as you possibly can and you do the best you possibly can, all sorts of opportunities start popping up for you. My sister says, make your own luck. And that really just means you work, you work, you work, you work. 15 years later that you're this huge success, you're an overnight success. But it was like you laid one brick at a time and you finally got there. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about

planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is the amazing Tim Draper. Tim is a visionary and one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time. There are too many to name, but some of the companies he's funded include Hotmail, Skype, Twitter, Robinhood, Tesla, SpaceX, and Coinbase. In 1999, Tim created the first Silicon Valley venture capital firm to raise a global venture

capital fund, and he was also the first venture capitalist from Silicon Valley to invest in a Chinese company. That company was Baidu, which currently has a market value of $75 billion. He was an early investor in Bitcoin and has been among its biggest proponents since 2010. He is the star of the TV show Meet the Drapers, which allows people to invest from their living rooms. Tim is the author of the TV show Meet the Drapers, which allows people to invest from their living rooms. Tim is the author of the book, How to Be the Startup Hero, a guide and textbook for entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. He is the founder of Draper University, whose mission it is to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit of students from around the world and prepare them for success in the real world.

Tim, welcome to In Search of Excellence. Oh, thanks so much for having me, Randall. This is just great. And what a great introduction. I thought about it, thinking about In Search of Excellence, and I was just thinking, my route toward if I ever get to excellence has been very circuitous. There have been ups and downs and difficult times and wonderful times. And it is definitely one of those things where you get there, if you get there, it is a very unusual route. But keeping your head down and building your business one brick at a time is usually a good long-term strategy. We're going to go through all of that, but I want to start with our family

because from the moment we're born, our family helped shape our personality and our values and the preparation for our future. You grew up in the wealthy suburb of Atherton and you had two extremely successful and accomplished parents. Your mom had a master's degree in early child education. She worked for the Peace Corps. She was on many nonprofit boards, including the Kennedy Center. Your dad went to Yale. He served in the Korean War. He got his MBA at Harvard. He worked as a steel salesman for a few years. And then he became a very successful venture capitalist.

You're basically the son of Silicon Valley royalty. Your grandfather was also a venture capitalist, which makes you the third generation to be a venture capitalist. The story about how your parents met, super cool. They met on a ship to Europe when your mom was engaged to somebody else. And three days later on the ship, your dad jumps in there and he asked her to marry him instead of the other guy. And they went on to be married for 65 years. So tell us, what were they like as parents and how do they help shape your future? Oh, they were the best parents. My dad has this ongoing, undying optimism and it permeates everything that he does.

And it spread to me and my sisters. It had a very positive effect. We always had a can-do attitude. And we said yes a lot more than we said no. And we really had very full lives. My mom was a wonderful mother. And you said, we weren't really that wealthy growing up. In fact, we were kind of poor for part of it, because he ran for Congress and lost. And we were in some hot water there. But I always felt like everything was there for me and

everything was good. My mom, every time we'd go to a new place, she'd say, go explore. I don't know whether she was just trying to get rid of me or what, but it was the best thing that anybody could have ever said. Go explore. I explored all sorts of different places, whether I was in the city or out in the country or in a forest or in the desert, I explored. And I think that really helped me help kind of pull my life into a direction where I could try things. I could go out and make

mistakes. I could go see something, take it on as a challenge, go after it, and keep after it until I succeeded. My dad did have that, which was he had a determination to get wherever he was intending to go in a very systematic way. He'd have one goal at a time, and he'd just go after it until he got there or failed. And then he'd move on to the next goal. And that has been a great role model for me. And yeah, I'm a third generation venture capitalist. My grandfather was the first Silicon Valley venture capitalist ever.

And now my children, three of my four children are venture capitalists. So we got it in the blood. You have that extra venture capitalist chromosome in your DNA that most people don't have. And the business has evolved. So it's so different from when my grandfather got into it and my father and then how I got into it. And now with my kids, they're going into a whole new world of venture capital. Did your parents encourage you to be the best in whatever you did? Did they lead by

example? Did they actually use the word, Tim, I want you to be the best at whatever you do? No. Although they might as well have. They expected me to be the best that I could be in whatever I was going after. And they encouraged me to follow whatever it was I was interested in. And I think they were probably pretty concerned about me in seventh and eighth grade because I was basically running wild in the streets, but I was really good in math. They decided that it was worth it for me to go look at going to prep school. I went to Andover and that was a really critical time for me. It was a great time to get away from your parents. I was 14 years old, maybe a little early for a lot of people, but not for me. And it gave me this independence. And I was able to start prioritizing

things myself rather than having my parents tell me what to prioritize. And most people get that when they go off to college or they leave the house, leave the home. But I got it very early. And I think that was a great edge that I had on a lot of people because I was able to filter through what I felt was not important to me and focus on those things that really mattered to me. So you love math, but what were you like as a kid? Were you one of those popular kids? Were you a natural born leader? And what'd you do for fun? You know, I was a natural born leader until people started drinking and taking drugs because I didn't.

I had a bet with my dad not to drink or smoke or take drugs until I was 21. And I didn't want to break that. But all my friends were starting to get into alcohol and drugs. And my leadership dwindled, my following dwindled. And so that ended up working long, short term, it was very painful, long term to my advantage, because now, as an investor, I can think for myself, I can try things when the world thinks something's coming to an end and I don't. I'm willing to step against the tide. When I see an entrepreneur and he or she has

something extraordinary in her or him, that is a very exciting thing for me. And I think I see that in myself for having had to struggle through something. And I think it formed me a lot. And I understood peer pressure because there was a lot of peer pressure that I had to resist. And I understood it in a great way so I could use it when I needed it and defend against it when I was being pressured. I think thinking for yourself is a powerful thing. And particularly today, when people are just following the snooze, I call it the scary news, the snooze. If they follow the snooze, they all act the same. It's like, oh, okay, now we have to wear a mask. Now we've got to walk in the goose step. Now we've got to, you know, whatever they tell them to do, we got to do. I think it's good to

think for yourself and say, well, what are the numbers? How important is this virus? How big a deal is this virus? And how do I operate given those circumstances? I know everybody goes through some of that, but a lot of people just go along because they're told to. I do not do that. Thinking for yourself turns out to be one of the most powerful things. I think in the next decade, it's going to be the most important thing for anybody who wants to make a great living because artificial intelligence is going to take the mundane job away. So you're going to have to come up with a job that is creative and open and with multiple branches where you don't know which way to go.

And you've got to be able to decide for yourself which way to go. You've got to be able to decide for yourself which way to go. I do think that people need to break from the snooze. They've got to start thinking for themselves because their jobs, if they're mundane in any way, are going to be replaced by computers and robots. Then they are going to have opportunities to do jobs that are much more interesting, more creative. It'll be like these jobs that take these abstraction leaps, and they're going to be so much better for it, and their lives are going to be better and more open. So I think we got good things happening and good things coming, particularly for people who are willing to think for themselves.

When you were eight years old, your first job was picking apples in the backyard. You had a couple of trees and you'd pick the apples. You'd sell them for five cents each at the end of the driveway. And at the end of the summer, you had sold 160 apples and made a massive amount of money, $8. And one of your buddies helped you. When his mom found out that you had helped him, that he had helped you, she forced you to share a dollar with each of your buddies who helped sell the apples. What did you learn from the apple picking experience and sharing the profits?

I think you got the story just right. She came and I did this for days and days and days. I picked the apples. I sold them. It piled up. I kept the money all there for all this time. And then one day, a bunch of people were there. They were just hanging around watching me sell apples. And I think there were five other people. And this mother came up to me and said, oh, great. You're selling apples. How much have you made? I went, $8. That was $8 over about four weeks or six weeks or something.

She picked up the $8 and she said, good. Then she handed $1 to each of the other four guys or five guys. Then she took the other two and walked off. And I thought, that's socialism. I didn't know it was socialism, but I knew I didn't like it because I put in all the effort and then they just spread it evenly and then took the money. And then she took $2 for herself. And I thought, whoa, this is wrong. And that really did have some effect on what I believed. My political philosophy is freedom, capitalism, free markets, open systems, and not a lot of government control.

Well, of course, the difference is you either have freedom or you have government control. And she was my government control. Anyway, I knew I didn't want to be a socialist from that moment forward. Let's talk about the value of education, which is one of the building blocks of our success and our search for excellence. As you mentioned, you went to Andover. You were a good student, 13% acceptance rate. And then you went to Stanford, which has a 4.3% acceptance rate. That's incredibly impressive and very, very hard to do. It's not possible for most of us to do that. We're going to talk about Draper University in a few minutes and a specific focus. But before we do, what's your view on the importance of education and where it ranks

in terms of the factor for our future success? As part of that, for us to reach our potential, do we even need an education at all? Yes, I think education is perhaps the most important thing we do. I think people have to learn how to learn. They have to learn what has gone on in the past so that they can create the future. They have to understand what the world is like. They have to dig deep into the human spirit and understand how humans think and operate. So many things.

And I think they need to really study a lot of math, a lot of engineering, a lot of science, a lot of art, because that is where our progress is going to come from. I looked back at my education. I had an amazing education. I went to Harvard Business School after Stanford Engineering. I came out realizing when I went off to start a business, I realized they had taught me nothing about starting a business, even Harvard Business School. They taught me more how to rise up through the ranks. I had to wing it. Then I started to think, well, what else is wrong with education? I think it's this. The A means you didn't make any mistakes.

But if you think through history, most of the really great innovations came from mistakes. Penicillin was moldy, feeding moldy bread to people in the hospital. Electricity was going, if you believe it, he went out and he was flying a kite to see the kite would be hit by the electricity. The telephone, that was a lot of mistakes. They tried and tried and tried and finally got there. The Velcro was somebody who studied a burr under a microscope. It was people doing things. America was discovered by somebody who was just testing to see if the world was round and he was looking for the West Indies. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, you know, chocolate and peanut butter got smashed together.

It's a lot of these mistakes are important. And I noticed that when I did something really extraordinary in school, that sometimes it turned into an A and sometimes it was an F. And I thought, you know, there's something wrong with this because I think that F was really a valuable, I did something really cool, but it was just something the teacher had never seen before. And so that's why I started Draper University. I saw after the financial crisis, the world was coming apart, the financial world was coming apart. And I thought, well, the world now the heroes of the world are going to rise. Well, the only one I really saw was Satoshi Nakamoto. And he went on a pseudonym. He wasn't even willing to stand up and say, look what I did.

And so that was the beginning of me thinking, boy, the world needs more heroes in our education system might be failing us because they're telling us to be on assembly line, do the same thing as everybody else does, memorize this, memorize that, and just do it by rote. But what we really want is, I mean, now we have machines that can do that for us. We really want people who are creative and open and have tried things with their life. So I think that that's where I think the world needs to go. And it's going to be very difficult for the existing educational institutions to make that shift. I understand why they are the way they are. It's because they were building factories. You set up the system to

build a factory, so you move people in and out the way you'd move a factory worker and you move the machines in and out. But now we need to get people to sort of a higher consciousness level. And I think we'll get there, but it's going to take some challenges. And we think Draper University is sort of step one toward that. So you said we need education as a building block for our success, but what about all the people who drop out of college who are successful? I mean, Peter Thiel, he encourages people to drop out of college. What about people who don't graduate from high school? There's a lot of people in the history of the world who've been massively successful who didn't finish high school. So what's the balance there? You said we need it, but can you be successful without it?

Well, we need education. That doesn't mean we need the existing education we're getting now. We're getting the manufacturing education. We're getting the conveyor belt education now. And that isn't particularly good for entrepreneurs. That's why entrepreneurs, they drop out and they go say, hey, I got a better way to do this. I'm going to go do it. There's no reason for me to learn ancient Greek when this school doesn't even teach Bitcoin or coding or whatever. Draper University started teaching Bitcoin immediately, right there,

right at the beginning. It allowed three of our students to go create quantum, one of our students create Tron, and all of our students to go out and explore the crypto world. And it took five more years before Stanford or Harvard had any kind of a Bitcoin or blockchain course. So we were way ahead. Our students got a huge leap on everybody else because we weren't waiting for some committee to decide what we should be able to teach. We just said, hey, these things are important. Let's make sure our students know about it. So I think it's the quality of education. California used to be number one in education, best state in the union. And now they're number 50. Well, why? Well, part of it's because California for the last 50 years has been completely dominated by union bosses. And they're just saying, no, it's a conveyor belt. We move people in, we move people out. We move

teachers in, we move teachers out. We don't care whether the teacher's good or bad or whatever, they're all paid the same. That's their system. But I think we need better education. So you don't want students to drop out from high school. I mean, you know, a high school student who drops out is a very dangerous person. We don't want them dropping out. We want the school to adjust so that they can encourage somebody like that and mentor somebody like that, teach somebody like that, because that's who we want. I mean, that's the kind of people we want to be the big successes down the road. And I think college, same thing. The colleges, they got everybody on a conveyor belt. You know, it's interesting.

One of the statistics is that Stanford boasts that 85% of their students coming out of undergrad get a job. And at Draper University, we only take them for five weeks. And our average student creates five new jobs. So it's just another way of looking at the world. It's like you look at the world and either you just leave it the way it is and blend in and watch the snooze, or you try to improve it and change it and make better things happen. And I think that's what education needs to go to. So you created Draper University in 2012.

You invited me to speak there in 2018. And I absolutely loved it, by the way. I sent you an email thanking you, but let me thank you again here. For those who are listening and watching, you can find my Draper University videos online on YouTube. When you go to the Draper University website, a banner comes up with the title Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship Program. And it talks about heroes, which you've already mentioned here.

When you go there, you see all kinds of signs about heroes. When I spoke there, there were three large banners behind me and big bold letters that said, think big, drive progress and go full steam ahead. Can you tell us more about this? And we talked about why you created it, but talk about what you mean by heroes. And you walk into this incredible room, there's a Tesla there, there's superheroes on the wall, there's a big picture of you with an S and a cape on it. I mean, you walk into this thing and you say, holy moly, this is incredible. Just the inspiration when you walk in, the room's different. And I walked in there and I was inspired

by just being in the room and seeing all the people working and all this cool stuff around you. But let's talk about heroes. And then tell us about the room and the murals on the wall. So we called it Draper University of Heroes, but we really probably should have called it Draper University of Superheroes. Because when I think of a hero now, I kind of thought it through. I think of Henry Ford or Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Those are heroes of the past. Well, Elon's still going, but heroes of the past. I think of superheroes. I think of science fiction. I think of what's possible. And supervillains too. Supervillains are flying around on vehicles that seem to defy gravity. They're changing themselves into lizards or bats or something.

So there's something about the comic world, the science fiction world, the world of future possibilities that I want to capture. I want people to start thinking, what's the world going to look like in 15 years? What's it going to look like in 50 years? But 15 years from now, I mean, self-driving cars on the ground, personal vehicles that fly. Certainly, Bitcoin, some sort of cryptocurrency, will dominate the economy. Fiat currencies will be gone. The borders will probably be very irrelevant. What's your business going to be at that time? That's what I want people to start thinking, how powerful this new future is going to look and how do you fit into it? How do you build something that drives that future,

makes that future even better than it could be? That's the ambition of the school. Now, we've had 1,200 students there. They've come from 95 different countries. They've started about 500 companies. A couple of them have, there is one unicorn and then there are a couple that are just close. And that I feel like in 10 years, that's a pretty good accomplishment. So for those who are not in the venture capital business who are watching and listening to the podcast, a unicorn is a company with a valuation over a billion dollars. So they started with nothing. They come into Draper University. They go through the exercise and pretty incredible, Tim. Congratulations on that. Actually, one of our favorite stories is about a woman who went through and she had gone through

testing her ovary for cancer and they had to destroy her ovary to determine whether or not she had cancer. She didn't have cancer, but they destroyed her ovary. So she actually came up with a fiber line idea that goes up the fallopian tube and detects cancer in women. And then she built it, got FDA approval. None of this would have happened without her going through Draper University. But she built it, got FDA approval and sold her business for $275 million. And none of that would have happened without us doing what we do, encouraging people, driving them. I did put some money into that one, so I'm kind of happy. But there are a couple that I missed that are also of that kind of quality that have gotten to be that big. There's a yogurt company in China that I didn't back that I think is well over 100 million in revenues.

Incredible. Let's talk about the curricula there, which you design. It's definitely unorthodox. Some of the tasks you have the students do include going to San Francisco and getting a job offer on paper in 24 hours, selling something embarrassing, and going through survival training in the wilderness. So tell us about a couple of examples about selling something embarrassing. And if you want to talk about the other things I just mentioned, I'd love to hear about those too. The embarrassing things,

we always want them to have to do a face-to-face sale of something that is among the most embarrassing things that they could possibly sell. So normally it's condoms, but once it was the flex, which is a new kind of tampon, and they had to go. One was underwear, kind of funny underwear that the women had to sell men's underwear and the men had to sell women's underwear. We do it and we want it to be face-to-face because we want them to go through that embarrassment so that when they actually have to sell their product, they're going, can't be any harder than selling condoms face-to-face.

A lot of people are afraid. They go through high school and they're worried about what their friends think. They're worried about what society is going to think and all that stuff. But if they're forced to do something that embarrassing, it has an effect on them. And then the 24-hour thing is fun because they had 24 hours to go get a job offer on paper from somebody they didn't know. And it's pretty impressive. About 90% of people actually did come back with job offers.

But the two that stick out in my head are one person got a job at Twitter, which I thought was a pretty big deal. Yeah. One day. It's amazing. Yeah. And the other person got a job sweeping up a gay bar from three to seven in the morning. And it was a highfalutin one and a lowfalutin one. But the whole point was, hey, your downside is in 24 hours, you can go get a job. And so what's your upside? And the same thing with survival training, we want them to see, hey, so you might have to live in a tent, you might have to live out in the middle of nowhere, but it's not bad and you can survive

it. And I think then when people have that, they go, oh, yeah, well, I slept in a tent, so I know what it's like to have my back against the wall and I can actually survive it. And then by the end, they create a business plan. We always play with their business model a little bit. Then they pitch for two minutes to a panel of venture capitalists. At the very beginning, we do something kind of interesting too, which is, we call it a hero-a-thon. It's like a hack-a-thon. They have to come up with an idea for a problem. They have to come up with a problem, a global problem that they think is a big deal. Then they have to come up with a solution. But then they have to come up with a

product that creates the solution to that problem. Then they have to figure out how it's going to make money. So they have to create a business model. Then they have to figure out how they're going to delight their customer so that their customer becomes their sales force. So that process is a very powerful one at Draper University. And I think it's been very effective. I think we feel like it's interesting that people who start businesses, they get a little bit of a jump because they've

been trained to do whatever it takes. The ones who don't, it's interesting. Either they go back to school and they learn something that they think is practical. Usually, it's coding or going back to business school. Then their grades either go sky high or they go down because they're studying at the same time they're running their business. Or they go to a big company and they get promoted faster than anybody else. I'm convinced that in a big company, a lot of people are just watching each other, making sure nobody steps

out of line. But if somebody comes in there from Draper University, it's like bulls in China shops shaking the whole place up. And so then they might get fired, but they generally are getting promoted. I want to talk about the condoms for a minute. What exactly are they doing? They're bringing condoms someplace, and then they're walking in. What exactly are they doing? They're bringing condoms someplace and then they're walking in and are they, where are they doing this? We have Draper University logo.

I was going to ask you about that. We have logoed condoms. Each team gets a stack of them and whatever they sell for their team, that money goes into whether they can, money that pays for the food and survival training. So there is a great incentive to go ahead and do those things. Yeah. But where do they go? Are they walking up to people on the street of San Francisco? Yeah. And then on the train on the way there, we always say, you've got to get a life story of the person next to you on the train. So on the train up, they get the life story. They get to San Francisco.

They usually go to Union Square. They sell the condoms. We may have to combine those two things. Then they have to go get a job and then they come back. But they've been two trips to San Francisco historically. I think there's two things that I'm hearing when you share this with us. The first is the art of the cold calling. I think the ability to cold call as a founder, as an executive, I think that's critical to our success. And the other thing that I think of is the ability to close. Do you think cold calling is a necessary skill for those who are going to start a company?

You've got nothing. You've got a piece of paper. You've got a business plan. You think, gosh, I hope somebody likes what I'm doing. I hope I can raise money from someone. Some people don't raise money. That's the best way to start a company, not to raise money. And you own all of it yourself.

But where does cold calling come into this? And what do you tell people? People are afraid. I think when people walk in, they don't know about, you got to go sell condoms. People are thinking, I mean, in a million years, if you had told some of these people this, they would have said, I'm never going to do that. So you make people do that. But what are you going to say to all the people out there that have the fear of doing this? Because I think that's an impediment to a lot of us, a lot of people who, you know, to get motivation and to be inspired. Well, they should stop watching the snooze. That's the thing that scares everybody, the scary news. But I also think when you do it, it changes you because you're afraid to do it and then you do it and you go, oh, it wasn't so bad.

And then you also realize that a cold call or not. I think it's really important to be able to connect with people, even if it's the people you work with or your customers or whoever. It's important to be able to connect. I think you have something like that. It's something they can laugh about. It's something they can tell people, oh, my God, these guys had to, you know, got me into this. And now I'm selling condoms on the street. And it's actually it's pretty interesting because some people go and sell the condoms and then others like become street musicians or whatever mimes. And they try to get money that way. So it's it forces them into odd situations that are a little

embarrassing. And I think if you can get over your embarrassment, you can do great things. Think of Elon Musk. Elon says, we're going to Mars. Most people are going to look at him and go, that's nuts. But who joins him? The best engineers in the world, the ones who are going, that's a cool idea. Let's see what I can do with that. That's going to be fun. How are we going to feed people? How are we going to house people? How are we going to clothe people on Mars?

And so he ends up with the best engineers in the world, and all because he's not afraid to be embarrassed. And look at what he does. I mean, his tweets are hilarious. I mean, he's doing a brain computer interface. He's doing a boring company that bores holes in the earth and allows people to travel that way. The guy's willing to stick his neck out over and over and over again and take the embarrassment at the beginning because he knows down and deep in his heart that he might just be able to do it. I want to share with our listeners and our viewers. I started cold calling when I was a freshman in college. I sold t-shirts

door to door, room to room. You knock on the door, some people blow you off, terrible, get out of here. And then some people bought the shirts, but I bought them for five. I sold them for 12. The long sleeve, I bought for seven. I sold those for 20, bigger margin there. I sold them outside the big house, Michigan football stadium, 100,000 people in. And you got your box there and you're selling shirts. And I've done it.

I've had some success and I've done it in the last 10 years. We had a portfolio company based in Palo Alto. The ex-CIO of Salesforce was the chairman. We were at the big Salesforce conference. We had a little booth in the back and my job was to go and find people and bring them into the booth. You know what that's like. You're looking at badges and you're pulling people and you get blown off 99% of the time. But a couple of people went by the booth. I have a product. It's called a collar card. It's basically a credit card that has four pop-out collar stays. We sell them to hotels and dry cleaners. Our business was,

we had record sales. First quarter, Tim, $0 for the first time in the 11-year history of the company. But I went to the Clean Show two years ago, and I'm sure it's one of your favorite conferences. It's the dry cleaner show. Every drying cleaner in the country goes there. I'm walking around with my collar cards, and I'm cold calling. Am I fearful?

Yeah. Did people blow me off? Yeah. Does it bother me? You know, I'm used to it. I'm 52 years old. I was 50 when I went there, and I still have to do it

for my own success. So for those listening today, cold calling is something that I think we all need no matter how young or old or whatever you've done in your career to that point in time. Oh, no question. I think you're dead on. People have to... And cold calling, it's a personal connection. And as soon as you start thinking about it that way, it changes your whole attitude. Then you realize all I'm doing is I'm stepping up to somebody, giving them an opportunity. If they say no, no big deal. But you get a chance to meet them. My first paid job, I worked for a company called Mural Stone Construction. It was a summer job, 16 years old. I sat in an office with six people.

We had a phone book. And we went through the phone book, cold calling people. Hi, I'm Randy from Mural Stone Construction. Are you interested in some aluminum siding today? And I'd make 200 calls a day. And you have to be on for every single call. Sort of like raising money. You're meeting with 20 venture capitalists in two weeks. You have to be on for every single meeting. But you're a little fatigued if you're 200th call at the end of the day. And I remember I had one sale of, I think, $70,000. And I remember getting a check for something like $1,800. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. But it really is the greatest thing ever. It's really helped my career and some of the things I've been able to do. Let's talk about internships. And I want to talk about

their importance of building block to our success. And before we get your views on this, I want to take a minute to give a little background here on my program. I've had an internship program at my venture capital firm, Jump Investors, for the last nearly 20 years. It's a teaching internship. We have prominent and very successful speakers each week who share their stories. Our speakers are entrepreneurs and leaders in the field of finance, investment banking, money management, entertainment, the world of professional sports. Stories are so inspiring. We've done some super fun things. One year, Tony Hsieh said, come on out to Zappos. I flew all of them out there to Las Vegas and incredibly gave us a tour. You talk about an amazing learning experience from one of the leaders in terms of customer

service and how they do things. It was just life-changing for many of the leaders in terms of customer service and how they do things. It was just life-changing for many of the interns. I spend 60 to 90 minutes a day with our interns, and I teach them about basics of starting a company, each phase of building a company, financing, hiring term sheets, how you have to fire people sometimes, which is traumatic. And I keep it extremely real. I share my experiences and my mistakes with them. I really focus on the mistakes because I'm a big believer that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. And we spend time teaching the intangibles. Don't be late. Be the first one in, the last one out. Have a smile when you come to work every day. And of

course, the value of hard work. And it's become super popular and somewhat of a thing. We get 1,000 applications now every year. We interview 150 to 250. We hire lead interns, some of the best interns from the previous summer. They do all of the hiring. They greenlight every single person. I'm not involved in the process. I get the stack of resumes before they come for the summer. Our first one is coming next week. And our interns learn more in our 12-week program to prepare them how to succeed in the real world than they do during four years of college. And I stay in touch with many of them. And a very large percentage of my interns tell me that my teaching and the lessons have made a huge difference in their lives. And that's my goal. I want to make a profound difference in the lives of other people.

And I'm super proud that it has. So internships, hugely important to me. But let's talk about your internships. You interned at Hewlett Packard when you were at Stanford. I want to know what it did for you. And then I also want to know as a follow-up, how do potential interns get jobs at amazing firms like yours? You probably get a thousand applications for one or two interns for the whole summer. Yeah, we're actually thinking about expanding that because interns now are all virtual and we can handle a lot more of them if they aren't all in the office. I think I'd like to embrace that and give it a shot. Maybe I can learn from you. The internships that I had, I had an internship at Chambordier Oil down in El Tigre, Venezuela. And then most of my other summers were just working

summers. But then I also, I guess this was sort of an internship between business school years where I was the assistant to the president of Apollo Computer. And I learned a lot from that. Yeah, I think it's an important thing to do. I think it's great that you're doing it and giving young people attention so that they can kind of guide them in their lives. They get a lot out of that, and it's a great thing to do. It's fun to help the best interns this summer. We had a woman who went to the University of Chicago. She was going after a Goldman Sachs

investment banking job for next summer. As you know, that's one of the toughest summer jobs to get. She was told it was down to one or two people. David Solomon, the CEO, I know, I don't know him very well. I pinged him and she got the job. So that made me happy. I mean, I've known him since he was at Bear Stearns. And again, we're not friends, but we're friendly. And that's super fun. It's super fun to see some of the interns now be my peers. One of my former interns was the first employee at Uptake, Brad Keywell, who I'm sure you know is one of the founders of Groupon. Uptake has a multi-billion dollar valuation today. And it's super fun to teach people and to see them do very well. Yeah. Our school is, I mean, it cost me money to put it on. Turns out, it's earned itself back. A couple of guys paid in Bitcoin back when, so it's paid for four or five years. But it also does a lot for me when I'm helping these people get going with their businesses. And I wouldn't call those internships, I'd call that just like helping or mentoring maybe. But it comes back because a lot

of these people tell me about other people who are starting businesses and we should take a look at. A lot of them start their own businesses. And so I always feel like when you do something like that, there is a karmic effect. So I'm sure it comes back to you all the time too. The best thing that happens every year on the business front is when I get a note from them saying, I just got a job here. I just got a job there. The lessons I learned during your summer program made it happen. And that's one of the best feelings that I can have as a result of my mentoring. Let's talk on a related

front about role models. Your dad was one of your role models. Steve Jobs was one of your role models. How important are role models and are they an important ingredient in our search for excellence? Well, I'll answer it this way. We funded Skype. In funding Skype, it came from nowhere. Most of the team was in Estonia. Estonia had never seen anything like a unicorn. The company grew to be worth 10 or now Skype probably to Microsoft is worth $50 billion. Skype was an extraordinary experience. All of a sudden, that was a model. That was a role model for all of Estonia. And since then, there have been four, five, 10 Estonian unicorn companies because they all saw it happen. They all knew those people and they said,

hey, we can do that too. Same thing in China. I mean, we backed Baidu. It was really the first of the VAT companies that got venture funding from the US. And he, Romney, grew that business, made it a huge success. And after that, I that, China was a proliferation of new startups and a lot of activity. Yeah, role modeling is a big deal. I've made a big point to spread entrepreneurship and venture capital around the world because it does spread. Once it takes root somewhere, it really grows and becomes a big deal. You graduate, you work in an investment bank for a couple of years, Alex Brown,

one of the great tech firms. And then when you're 27, you start your own venture capital firm. You borrowed $6 million from the SBIC. You invested in 40 different companies. And then four years later, the government calls your loan. So you flew to DC to explain where all your money went, and you asked them to hang in there a bit longer, which they did. Were you absolutely terrified and thinking you're going to go down in flames at that point? And tell us what happened in 1991. Yeah. I wasn't afraid. I was more just so convinced that I was doing some really interesting stuff that I felt like I just had to go explain it to the people at the SBIC. By the way, there were only four people working there at that time, and now they're like

800, and they manage about the same amount of money. Anyway, they put me on their watch list and then they put me on their dirt list. And then the IPO market opened up, the window opened up and we got five IPOs within about a month. And parametric technology was one of them. It paid back the fund many times. I was able to pay back the loan. I was able to do it all. And I went from being on the SBIC's dirt list to being on their wall as Venture Capitalist of the Year.

That was one of the most fun transformation. But that's a lot of what work is, is you keep your head down, you do it, you do it, you do it, you do it. And then something good happens. And then you got to do it again. It's like a plateau and then a ramp and then a plateau and then a ramp. And sometimes it's like a ramp down and then you got to start that plateau again and build to a ramp.

Your life, your career, none of it will be smooth. You're going to go through a lot more jobs than the average person in your parents' generation did. You're going to have all sorts of ups and downs. I think when you have the downs, that's what makes you the most interesting. And when you have the ups, you have to make sure over, we'll have a party or come over and let's talk about what your next career is going to be or whatever. I think it's really an important thing to do when you're up to really bond with the people who have fallen down. And when you're down, it pays to help them out when you are up. There's a good karma that goes out when you're

starting things and growing things. And just in your job, just a regular job, you're going to have days where you think, oh my God, I'm getting fired. And then you're going to have days where you're going, oh my God, I'm getting promoted. And neither one might be the case. But even if both of them are, being fired is not the end of the world. I've been fired from several different positions, which is why I really needed to start something on my own. Not completely true, but kind of true. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's a rescaling of business. People have to lay you off for various reasons. And you have to kind of get yourself back

out there and start looking for a job and make something happen or join a company that's getting started. Your career life can take all kinds of twists and turns. But as Randall says, if you work as hard as you possibly can and you do the best you possibly can, all sorts of opportunities start popping up for you. My sister says, make your own luck. And that really just means, it's like your work, your work, your work, your work. 15 years later that you're this huge success, you're an overnight success.

But it was like, you laid one brick at a time there, and you finally got there. So it's going to be fun. I mean, for many of you, I know there's generally a young population. Life is fantastic. It starts when you start, when you finally leave the nest, and it just gets better and better and better and more and more fun. And it'll get even better if you work hard to get there. Let's talk about your investment strategy over the years. You've looked at, I think, over 100,000 pitches. You probably funded over 1,000 companies. What's the process here? You said you don't find it worthwhile to figure out how a company could fail before deciding to invest. Instead, you ask yourself, what if it works?

And you've also funded companies with no revenue. We'll talk about Hotmail later. Hotmail had no revenue. They had no plans for the revenue. I know. We didn't even know what we were going to do, and we were burning money like crazy. Let's talk about that one for a second. YouTube was the same way. And they sold the company for a huge amount of money. But let's talk about that one in particular.

So you funded the company. You meet Sabir Bhatia and his partner, two brilliant guys. Why are you funding a company with no business model and no plan for revenue that, as you said, is just churning cash? It was a, what if it works? Because what happened was they came to us with an entirely different idea. And then as they were walking out the door, they said, well, we do have this other idea and it's free web-based email.

And we kind of looked at each other and said, and then? And it was like, how are you going to make money? And they didn't really know, but they were very straight of it. And they just said, we don't know, but we think this is an important thing to do. And we backed them. And then they were going to buy a bunch of advertising so that people knew about web-based email. And I said, wait, wait, wait, can't you just get it out to all those people on the web?

And they said, oh, no, can't you just get it out to all those people on the web? And they said, oh, no, that would be spamming. Then I thought, well, you're giving this away for free. Can you put a little message at the bottom of a screen that says, PS, I love you, get your free email and hotmail. And they didn't like the idea at first. And we I had to fight and fight and fight. And finally, I said, okay, we'll do it, but no PS, I love you. To this day, I think we would have had a more peaceful and loving world if they'd kept it. But anyway, no PS, I love you. But it spread because it was as though your customer was selling your product for you

because it was on the bottom of everybody's email. And it spread to 11 million users in 18 months. The founder, Sivir Bhatia, was from India. He sent one email to his friend in India and there were 100,000 registered Hotmail users from India in three weeks. It was a really amazing transformation. It was a big deal. And I actually think Hotmail was possibly the most important thing I helped with because it allowed everyone in the world to communicate for free. And that was unheard of before that. It was so expensive to make a deal with somebody from another country before that, because you had to go there three times. It was 80 cents a minute for long distance calls. It was

really tough to do business overseas. And all of a sudden, it was just an email away. And that, I think, has had a big impact on the world. And then Skype did the same thing in a bigger way. You invented viral marketing. I don't think a lot of people know that. You encourage them to put this footer on the bottom of every account in an email. Did you know you were doing something huge at the time, which today people take for granted?

I mean, I don't know what the value of viral marketing is today, but it's in the trillions of dollars and you invented that. I knew it was kind of important. I didn't know it was this big a deal, but I knew it was kind of important. And the way I thought about it was like, I played chess when I was a kid and I thought, well, if I send it to you and then you send it to your friends and they send it to their friends, then it starts to grow like a virus and it grows and grows. And then it's going to go to everybody. And then necessity is the mother of invention.

I didn't want to spend $5 million advertising free web-based email. I wanted something better to do. And I remembered back at the Harvard Business School, there was a case on Tupperware where the women were not allowed to buy the product unless they were also selling the product or forced to be a distribution channel for the product. And they all loved the product. And so there were these Tupperware parties and it spread and it was the cheapest marketing ever. So I did kind of have that in the back of my mind thinking, you know, this is sort of like a Tupperware, but thinking three or four moves ahead,

realizing that it can grow to the whole world in a pretty fast way. That did get me pretty excited, although I had no idea that it was going to grow that fast and have that kind of an impact on the world. We're back for part two with my awesome guest, Tim Draper. Tim, thanks for being here again today. Let's jump right in to talk about Tesla. And to do that, I think we need to give some context to the investments in the automobile business. In the last 100 years, there have been more than 2,000 new car companies that have failed. At the time you invested in Tesla, there hadn't been a successful new car investment in the last 50 years. The last one was the DeLorean Motor Company. And I'm familiar with the story. I grew up in Detroit, and John DeLorean was a huge deal. He was the youngest division head in the history of GM,

which started in 1903. At the age of 40, he leaves GM. He raises $150 million for a prototype of this new cool car. If you've been to the Back to the Future ride at Universal, that's the car we're talking about. It took eight years for the cars to come on market. And then one year after it came to market, the company was $17 million in debt. And DeLorean, as a way to get out of debt, is caught trying to sell 100 kilos of cocaine to salvage this, his car company. And of course, he's busted on tape. You can watch the video online. I remember 15 years old watching it. But 50 years later, these two guys came along, Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning.

They have a new idea for a new car company. They're going to take on GM, Ford, Chrysler, a new kind of car. At the time, GM did $194 billion in revenue and had $3.6 billion in net income. And these guys raised $7.5 million. Six and a half came from Elon Musk, who two years later became the chairman. And that's when you made your investment in the Series C round. What were you looking at then? And why did this appeal to you? Tell us what you were thinking at the time you made the Tesla investment. Well, I met a man named Ian Wright and he had something called Wright Automotive or whatever. And he took me for a little spin in his car and he said, yeah, it's all electric and here, strap yourself in. And it was a five point strap. And I thought,

what? This is an electric car. And I thought it was just going to be like a ride in the park in a golf cart or something, and he said, no, no, and he took me on 280, and we went zero to 60 so fast. The thing was kind of put together with PVC piping and whatever, and we were on the freeway. We're moving super fast. And then he came back and we stopped right on a dime. And I thought, oh, my gosh, this is a better experience than a combustion engine. And it's lighter and it can stop really quickly and it's going to be safer. And right there, I started to go out and I checked. I went and visited all the hobby shops, anybody who was doing anything with electric cars. All of them mentioned Tesla. I said, well, we got to bring Tesla in. explained how he could get more torque and have a safer vehicle with a lithium-ion battery

by having a bunch of batteries in parallel. So if one went out, they could route around it and the car would still operate. And it turned out that was the key to success because Tesla had that and Fisker just had a big lithium-ion battery and those Fiskers were blowing up all over the place. And so we really did luck out there that we had the right technology. And then we backed it. And at one point, Martin was out of money and Elon came to us and said, look, I'm willing to put another 10 million in as long as I run it. And we went, God, we not only get 10 million in, but we get Elon running it. And so we jumped at the chance and it was a great success from there. In fact, Elon was masterful. He was able to pull

together pieces and parts that were, he bought the Numi plant for five cents on the dollar. He negotiated this amazing deal with US government, the clean tech people. He decided that he would just ask for everybody's money up front and then deliver the car much, much later. And all those things worked. He was masterful. It was probably one of the best business strategic and implementation that I've ever seen. When was the first time you met Elon Musk? Oh, I think we met him when he was doing x.com. Yeah, I think I was on a panel with him at Stanford. And he also merged with our company, the company we were trying to fund called Confinity. And they ended up with a better deal from a corporate venture capitalist. So yeah, many, many, many years ago.

You invested at a $40 million valuation. Today, the market cap's around $560 billion valuation. Yeah, but we distributed it way long before that. So if everybody had held onto their stock, yeah, that would have been a fabulous return. But we distributed way earlier than that. LPs tend to want their distribution. Let's talk about Bitcoin. You've been among the most vocal, if not the most vocal, venture capitalist proponents of Bitcoin, really from the very beginning when people thought it was sheer craziness. It was worthless.

It was a bunch of hype. You started getting involved in Bitcoin in 2011. You purchased $250,000 of Bitcoin on a cryptocurrency exchange called Mt. Gox, which by 2014 accounted for 70% of all the Bitcoin, you lost your money. And that would have scared some people off. It didn't scare you off, though. That same year, the FBI raided Silk Road, which was an online marketplace that was used for criminals, drug dealers, weapons, buying drugs online. The marshals came in, they seized 29,656 Bitcoin. They auctioned them off. I think the Bitcoins we're trading is 618 a coin. You bid higher, even though you heard people were going to bid lower. You bid $632 per Bitcoin. You win, you buy $18.7 million of Bitcoin. And sure enough, Bitcoin craters down to 240. So you lose 64% of your money.

Just like that, you lost $12 million on paper. What were you thinking at the time? Were you thinking, uh-oh, what have I done here? What's really odd was I just, after Bitcoin, after the Mt. Gox thing, I thought that was the end of Bitcoin. I thought, why would anybody use a currency where the biggest trading arm of it disappeared a bunch of money? Then I found out that it was absolutely critical for certain people around the world and how valuable it is as a vehicle for trust and freedom. And suddenly I realized this is really important. This is something that really could transform various communities and economies and governments and all sorts of things because there were a lot of great uses. There's the remittance, and then there's the paying people overseas and easy rails to send

money from one place to another. But the part that really got me was I met this great guy, Sebastian Serrano, from Argentina. And he said, yeah, my family has made a fortune three times, and each time has lost it to currency manipulation. Three times in my life and I'm only 30 years old. So every 10 years, they have some sort of currency manipulation that kills the currency. And so there's no incentive to build anything of great value in Argentina because they just take it from you by inflating around it. And so you have no way to build anything of great value, so the entrepreneurial spirit dies, and it's not a great place to start a business. Well, all of a sudden, Bitcoin gave him a vehicle

to do just that, to allow people to build things of value and hold them. They knew through the hardware and software that there would only be 21 million Bitcoin out there forever. If you build something of value, it stays. That was the thing that really got me. And when I heard that, that's why I bid above market on the US Marshall's office auction. I didn't think I was going to get all nine lots. There were nine, that 29,000 Bitcoin were in nine lots. And so I thought maybe I'd get one or two by bidding 632, but I got them all. And then there was a very nervous time where I was trying to figure out how this all worked because the first time I lost the money, this time I had bought other Bitcoin, but this time it was a lot and it was supposed to come in from the marshal's office. And I had already sent my money to them and it was coming and it was coming. It was coming. And you know how the Bitcoin blockchains a little slow or it was slow. Now, now it's faster than a Visa network when you find it with open nodes.

So the retailers can take the Bitcoin and everything. But back then, it was like 45 minutes waiting for my Bitcoin to arrive. And we were all just going, well, wait a second. What happened here? Anyway, we got the Bitcoin. It went from $6.32 down to $2.40, went actually all the way down to 180. I bought a little bit more. I bought more in an auction, but I also bought more just on the market. And I used that, I bought that and I used it. I didn't touch the Marshall's office money,

but I used that to fund companies. And here's the deal. How about this? 300 Bitcoin for 4% of your business. And these are raw startups. But at that time, that was like $60,000, $70,000. And they were going, God, I don't know if I should do this. It's kind of a crummy deal, $60,000 for 4% of my company. I don't really want to do that. Only one of those managed out their Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin went from 180 all the way up to about, oh, well, it went all the way up to 17,000. Then it dropped back down to 4,000, came back up. I it as this is, it's a mission for me. I started with the mission of spreading entrepreneurship and venture capital around the world. And that really has grown and great things have happened because of it. Now this mission is, I'm looking for trust,

freedom, and nothing is more important than trust and freedom to an economy. Bitcoin creates perfect trust and perfect freedom. You can buy and sell, move whatever your Bitcoin anywhere in the world. It's all value. Everybody knows what the value is. One Bitcoin is still worth one Bitcoin. All these other currencies are very volatile as they slowly disappear from use. But I mean, the other fiat currencies or some of the cryptocurrencies are doing very well. But the fiat currencies, you see them just slowly disappearing from use. Because why would you? If I can buy food and clothing and shelter for Bitcoin, I don't need a fiat currency. I don't need a government currency anymore. And so that's pretty exciting. Anyway, I'm very excited. And I had no idea how impactful it was going to be and how important it was going to be to all these smaller economies that anybody in Nigeria with the Naira,

anybody in Venezuela with a Bolivar, anybody in Venezuela with a peso, and anybody who feels that their government is not performing, Turkey or China or whatever, where they've kind of moved toward government control and away from freedom. You've got Bitcoin. That was a very good investment for you if you held your shares. I know you're long on Bitcoin. It's those at $18.7 million investments worth today, around $1.3 billion. That's been another good one. You've had many, many good investments, but this one must rank at the top. And I know

you're very bullish on long-term prospects as well. I've heard you say you think it's going to $250,000 per coin. And I remember being at one of your LP conferences, I think it was 2017, you had Brian Armstrong on as the keynote at lunch one day, and I think Bitcoin was around $3,000. Yeah. And it was a frenzy. It was a frenzy. And Tim, you said it's going to $20,000, and you were mimicked. No, I said it's going to $250,000.

$250,000. Okay. $20,000, $20,000, $20,000. And people made fun of you, mimicked you. Who's going to have the last laugh on that one? Yeah. Who's going to have the last laugh on that one? Yeah, who knows? I think the way I look at it, I say big industries like this, exciting new changes in the world, go through a period where they kind of go up to a little hype and then they drop back

down. And then all the engineers and entrepreneurs do all their work. And all of a sudden, it lives up not only to their expectations way back when, but to expectations way beyond their imagination. And that, I believe, happened with the Internet. It happened with search engines. It happened with e-commerce. It happens with almost all industries. And I believe it's happening with Bitcoin now. So I made the first prediction that we'd see that hype curve and it would hit 10,000. So I think

Bitcoin was at, I don't know, one, maybe 200 when I said it was going to go to 10,000. And it hit 10,000 exactly on almost to the day of when I said it would happen. And now it's come back down and now all these people are working and building it and making it so retailers can send Bitcoin and it can be traded and there's DeFi and there are all these things that are going to happen. And that's why I said, okay. And that was about, yeah, that was in 2018, early 2018. I said, by the end of 2022, we'd have $250,000 Bitcoin. It was the Bitcoin pizza. Two guys exchanged 10,000 Bitcoins for 0.0041 cents per Bitcoin, 10,000 Bitcoin for a total of 41 USD value to buy a pizza, two Papa John's pizzas sent to Florida. Robert Leonardus Hey, that's interesting. When it crosses 100,000,

that's going to be a billion dollar pizza. Well, you took the words out of my mouth. That's a $430 million two pizzas. He bought it for his four-year-old daughter. You can go online and actually see the daughter with her pizza. Hopefully, she enjoyed those two pizzas. But you look at companies today, they're saying, oh, we're accepting Bitcoin as payment. We have drug dealers using them, criminals, money launderers. But when you start talking about buying a Tesla- All those guys are getting caught because it's a perfect records on the blockchain. So the U.S. Marshal's office didn't like Bitcoin at first, but then they realized that there's the blockchain that keeps perfect. And the criminals are, I mean, they're all getting caught. So

let that be a message to you. If anybody who's a criminal, use cash. They're not watching this podcast, I don't think, but we'll put the word out. But let's talk about, okay, Tesla bought a billion five worth of Bitcoins. They said you can now buy a car with a Bitcoin. Bitcoin in the last 12 months has traded between $8,800 and $62,000 per Bitcoin. The guy or the woman who bought a $100,000 Tesla 12 months ago could really be driving a $700,000 Tesla today. And they actually have to sell the Bitcoin to pay tax. So are people really going to use Bitcoin to buy Teslas? Actually, I'm not spending mine right now. But I bought a house recently, and they were saying,

we'll take Bitcoin, we'll take Bitcoin. I was making a donation to a college and they said, no, no, we want your Bitcoin. This is happening all the time. You can buy a house, you can buy a car, you can buy whatever with Bitcoin. And now because there's OpenNode, the retailers should all want to use Bitcoin because they don't have to pay the banks the 2.5% to 4% every time somebody swipes a credit card. I mean, it could like triple their bottom line for any transaction that happens in Bitcoin. And with the number of wallets increasing as fast as it is, you're going to see that that will be a significant value to a retailer. So I think they're all going to be taking it very soon. I think that'll be a part of what pushes it over the $250,000 mark. Now, the other thing is only one in 14 Bitcoin wallets is owned by a woman, but 80% of retail spending is done by women.

And once the economics become clear, I think all the women will come in and start using Bitcoin for their purchases to save them a fortune. I think that that ends up being a big change. So, yes, no question in my mind. Switching gears and our search for excellence to be the best we can be, we all have to overcome lots of hurdles, challenges, difficulties. You're a venture capitalist. I'm a venture capitalist. Most of our deals go south.

I want to talk about some of the craziness we've seen in the world, in the venture capital world. We'll briefly mention WeWork, where they raised $20 billion, and you had some of the best venture capital firms in the world, SoftBank, Benchmark, let their CEO buy a $70 million Gulfstream jet. The company actually bought this. The startup bought this. They let him do this. And obviously, we know what happened with WeWork there. The valuation, I think, went from $40 billion to $3 billion in a matter of weeks. We'll see what the final outcome there will be. It's going public. It's back. Right. We'll see how it does.

I mean, the word is out on that one. We'll see how that does. But you had a particularly difficult investment with Theranos. You met through a family member. It was a debacle. The woman, founder Elizabeth Holmes, she recruited the best venture firms. You were an investor, Bob Kraft, Rupert Murdoch. It was a who's who. Their board was a who's who.

And ultimately, the company was a fraud. They promised with a single prick of a finger, you could test for hundreds of differences of diseases, not have to draw blood. She was at one point the wealthiest, on paper wealthiest female founder in the world. She was a rock star. What happened there? How could everybody miss that and miss all the warning signs? She is in danger and looks like she may go to prison. Yeah. I think that I don't look at it that way. When you're an entrepreneur, you are trying to do extraordinary things, something that's never been done before. And she built something of great value to allow people to just use a small pinprick rather than losing a lot of blood every time you get it tested. And she got FDA approval for the herpes test and things were going well. And I don't know what all the details were on what she said and what she did and whether those are aligned. But I do know that when you are successful, people go, okay, great. When you're super successful, you's like all the big drug companies. It's the doctors themselves.

It's the AMA. It's the insurance companies that support that whole system. She was coming up with a system that was going to be a lot cheaper and would not take as much effort. And now, of course, since then, I've seen 15 startups doing the same kind of thing and they are all capable of doing it and they're getting there. And we're going to see that technology and it is coming. But the establishment always lines up against it, tries to fight it, whether it's banks going against Bitcoin and then all of a sudden going, oh, well, okay, I guess we got to join the crowd because we fought it. Or the taxis going against Uber or whoever.

You see that. The industry goes against it. Now, in this case, the industry goes against it. Now, in this case, the industry went against it. They somehow got a writer to just write, write, write, write, write, pound, pound, pound, pound, pound. Finally, the government said, hey, there must be something here. They went and dug in and I guess they may have found something. We don't know. Innocent till proven guilty. And I think she's brilliant. And she created something of amazing value. And it was really transforming the medical industry. And when you do that, let this be a message to entrepreneurs everywhere, you do something that transforms an industry,

you're going to get blowback, and you should be prepared. Make sure that your customers are going to support you. I think that's the key. You get customers supporting you and then you don't start running into this kind of trouble. You're immensely successful. You're immensely wealthy. You're busy. You have your hands in many, many different things. Let's talk about work-life balance. I was texting with your daughter last week, Jessie. Big plug for her. She's a phenomenal venture capitalist, Halogy and Ventures.

I told her, your dad's going to be a guest on my podcast. That's awesome. Do you know what she said about you? She said, you're the best dad ever. She said you had just been down to Los Angeles to help her take care of two of her boys. She just had her third boy. I mean, that says it all. Is that your greatest accomplishment in life is being a great dad and now grandfather to your grandkids? I mean, let's face it. It has to be, right? Because you're passing whatever it is on to

the next generation. Everyone loves their kids. Everyone does the best they can for their kids. And I think it's a very important thing. My wife was great with this because whenever I'd get home, she'd take a baby and go here. And I'd go, oh, okay, what do I do here? And so I guess I got better and better with them. And then I would just throw a switch. I'd be at work and then I'd be at home. And then I'd be back at work at night. I did a lot of work at night after all the kids were in bed. I do. I love work. I love my kids. I feel the same way. I've got five kids. And like you said, I eat with my kids every night, spend time with my kids. I take them each on a one-on-one vacation. I just got back yesterday

with my twins who just finished their freshman year at college. I'm fighting with social media as they get older. And this is a time for them to hopefully put their phones down and me to put my computer down. But I live for these moments. Let's conclude the podcast. I want you to tell us, to be excellent in the best that you can be to reach your potential, what are the top five ingredients for all of us to get there? I guess I wrote it, so I always refer back to it. But Draper Credo is what I really focus on. And that's what we tell all of our students. And it starts with, I will promote freedom at all costs, do everything in my power to

drive, build, and pursue progress and change. My brand, my network, my reputation are paramount. Those are some of the things that stick with me. Then there are a few that really stick, which is I will fail and fail again until I succeed. I use the word fail instead of try and try again because I kind of want that shock value. I want that thinking that it's okay, fail, but get back up, fail again.

And then eventually you will succeed. If you don't fail, you won't succeed. It guarantees you won't succeed. If you don't try stuff, you won't succeed. And then I will keep my word. And I think you put all those things together and do the best you can. I mean, occasionally things are going to go the wrong way and you're going to have to figure it out. But and there's more to the pledge. You can read it in my book or whatever.

But those are the things that sort of stick with me. And and I think I'm always thinking freedom is just the greatest thing we've got as humans. And and trust that you put those two things together. They're so important. If you can somehow spread that around wherever you go, you're going to leave the place better than you found it. It's great advice. Tim, you've been an incredible guest. I greatly appreciate you sharing all your advice,

your wisdom, your role model to the many, including me. Thanks for having me. So many great things in your life. your role model to the many, including me. Thanks, Randy. So many great things in your life. I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing more in the future from you. Thanks again. Terrific. Well, great interview, Randy. Thank you.

Keep up the good work. You do really good research. Thank you. you