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i think tesla and spacex will fit into that uh moniker
it was incredibly cheeky at the time to embed a commercial message involuntarily to everything sent by your customers so you signed up for hotmail it feels like a normal email account but now every message you sent has this get your free email at hotmail.com
the idea that the message itself was the vector of uh of spread of marketing in a sense no like a virus which came from the signature when you sent a hot mail it said sent by hotmail or powered by hotmail
the thing that it really epitomized was first you know rapid internet growth for us second this thing we basically coined the term viral marketing because of hotmail
the one people have heard of boom like yeah that was the first one that got visibility bought by microsoft bingo for about 400 million dollars
i just want to give credit to him because it was incredibly cheeky at the time to embed a commercial message involuntarily to everything sent by your customers so you signed up for hotmail it feels like a normal email account but now every message you sent has this get your free email at hotmail.com
more recently they're custom chips called asics that are specialized for ai that are vastly outperforming those nvidia chips
intel is no longer the harbinger of progress there is no intel product for the last 13 years that matters in terms of the frontier of computational capture
tesla and spacex are fundamentally software companies that is the basis of their competition
the automotive industry or the aerospace industry that go decades without a new entrant decades without any change that anyone can point to that's meaningful or disruptive and then the teslas and spacex lead the change
i think tesla and spacex will fit into that uh moniker
when they succeed like tesla or spacex you can see how they've reinvented entire industries
spacex companies like that are very visible ... it's maybe an iconic example of something that very few of us probably thought was a venture investable category
if we dematerialize the phone then the software and services layers in the cloud and we can do updates more quickly and wouldn't that be a great way to leverage into all kinds of other business models that give us sustainability when the hardware itself SS commodity
corporate investors swooping in for series a quadrupling our offer ah you know that must be crazy it couldn't actually be worth that much um and so then as they started have some success you have some regrets but not a lot then when they sell to eBay you're like wow that was a big win that we missed
what really bugged me recently is I hadn't really factored in how many alumni of PayPal have started incredible companies that we may have very well had the inside track on the way the quote PayPal Mafia L just on and on right yeah and some more monsters coming I mean multi-billion dollar companies they're like paler and stuff that are still private all PayPal people
what have you missed pay PayPal those was the most painful to me and I only realized that recently so it wasn't painful at the time meaning uh well here's what happened so we presented the first actually I presented the first term sheet uh to uh confinity Luke NK and Peter teal and I think they thought it was low and they got an offer four times higher from noia and this is when the whole business idea was we're going to beam currency infrared ports
we made an offer to PayPal but got out bid
they bought a quantum computer I'm that's another crazy when I'm involved with the quantum computer company and Google bought one to do machine learning um and they think it's a path to AI which is their goal long term
almost everything Google's doing in advanced projects and research relate to how can you apply machine learning in an industry that hasn't really been revolutionized much yet and because that's what they do well
Google 10x moonshots just unbelievable ambition with Google X what do you think of just Google's Newfound ambition and scale under Larry Page it's awesome
Google Facebook where we were the under bidder to excel so if you read Kirk Patrick's books it's like we keep going up and up I mean there's nothing worse than dropping out of an auction cuz the price got just a little too high at 100 million
we all kind of like GPS systems right we like the Google Maps that we all have right in Google Earth pretty cool
then when they sell to eBay you're like wow that was a big win that we missed
we thought corporate investors swooping in for series a quadrupling our offer ah you know that must be crazy it couldn't actually be worth that much
there's no concept of Skype on on desktops initially mobile phones are where the future is
the Skype stuff's gone because I don't want to hold Microsoft I mean where's that going
I'm holding on to all the Tesla so I haven't donated any Tesla
we had invested in the R Brothers which are elon's cousins and I had known Elon since January 1996 actually when he pitched zip 2 to us ... so our first engagement with musk and Co and family was in was in Tesla and then um June 2006 was when we first invested in Tesla
the largest investor openly hostile to the concept of Elon being CEO just like right doesn't want him won't talk to the company if he's CEO and thinks the strategy is broken that's tough the fund literally mhm of the top VCS in the company thinks Elon Musk is the wrong guy for the job
negative gross margin car so selling more wouldn't help
the company was out of money couldn't make payroll was burning you know over 3 million a month of cash which is a dangerous place to be
in the case of Tesla they had a near-death experience in December 2008
the Roadster proves that the general idea Works that an electric car can actually be a high performance vehicle people would want even if in the rooster's case it's low volume and limited in certain ways it neveress proved it could be high performance than that customers wanted that gave the company credibility
start with commercial off the self components whenever possible put them together into a system in a new way that hasn't been done before
Tesla clearly had a pragmatic path to get there it wasn't like a small idea it was a big idea but they had steps to get there through the Roadster to the model S eventually to a gen 3 vehicle as they call it
I don't want to hold Microsoft I mean where's that going
he founded spaceex with that goal in mind and everything that he's doing along the way is is a really brilliant way to have commercial hop skips and jumps to that bold goal
they've figured out a way to put a lot of margin into these Rockets yeah and the sheer scale of it um when you're competing with companies that are happily charging 100 million to a billion dollar like the shuttle on average per launch
they're perhaps one of the most financially interesting companies under the covers that we've ever seen
they have over $4 billion a backlog they've been profitable 6 years in a row
a similar strategy at SpaceX by the way if you want to talk about that later which is start with commercial off the shelf components whenever possible put them together into a system in a new way that hasn't been done before so in this case the Roadster uh SpaceX the Falcon 1 that proves that the general idea works