In this special episode of money in the moonshot, we are excited to speak with venture capitalists Steve Jurvetson. Steve is a VC investor who focuses on mission driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology. An early investor in SpaceX, Tesla Planet Labs, Memphis Meats and Hotmail, he currently sits on the board of both SpaceX and Tesla. Prior to co founding his current venture capital firm Future Ventures, Steve was a research and development engineer at Hewlett Packard. He also worked in Product Marketing at Apple and management consulting with Bain and company. In 2016 President Barack Obama appointed Steve as a presidential ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.
In this special episode of money in the moonshot, we are excited to speak with venture capitalists Steve Jurvetson. Steve is a VC investor who focuses on mission driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology. An early investor in SpaceX, Tesla Planet Labs, Memphis Meats and Hotmail, he currently sits on the board of both SpaceX and Tesla. Prior to co founding his current venture capital firm Future Ventures, Steve was a research and development engineer at Hewlett Packard. He also worked in Product Marketing at Apple and management consulting with Bain and company. In 2016 President Barack Obama appointed Steve as a presidential ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.
Chris Wright
In today's special episode of money in the moonshot, we are excited to speak with venture capitalists Steve jurvetson. Steve is an early VC investor who focuses on mission driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology, an early VC investor in SpaceX, Tesla Planet Labs Memphis meats and Hotmail. He currently sits on the board of both SpaceX and Tesla. Prior to co founding his current venture capital firm future ventures. Steve was a research and development engineer at Hewlett Packard. He also worked in Product Marketing at Apple and management consulting with Bain and company in 2016. President Barack Obama appointed Steve as a presidential ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship.
Chris Wright
Steve, thanks for taking the time today to speak with us. I want to start with the big question in light of the famous cliche, but the best way to start to make a small fortune in space is to start out with a big one. So what is the investment case for space? So perhaps to you, I should ask the investment case in the way that Ilan musk seizes?
Steve Jurvetson
Right? Well, okay, let's be different questions. So let me first start with my own perspective. And then I could try to give you the elans perspective, as best I understand it. So the space industry has largely been one of private investment today, right. So most of the exciting companies you can think of are not publicly traded companies, which is an interesting starting point, digging deeper into that, where's that funding largely come from? It has shifted dramatically over the last 10 years. So just 10 years ago, it would have been Bezos himself, Elan musk himself, who put up hundreds of millions of dollars to fund their own enterprises in the case of basis. It's entirely him funding is on the rise in the case of Ilan was just the first hundred million, the riskiest hundred million. And this is real money, but it is like it's not in substantial sum to invest in a project that perhaps no one else would have invested in at the time. Now how far that's changed till today, right? If we jump to the other end of the spectrum, there is no end. It seems a venture capital firms, not just individual investments, but firms tripping over themselves to invest in a category over 300 of them 350 of them frankly. And here's the most amazing statistic that I recently came across, in in 2018. So last year, there were 114 venture firms who made their very first space investment, so they had not yet done anything in this category. It's it's sort of a hockey stick of recent interest. More to the point I remember another interesting milestone in funding for space in 2015. Now, two companies, I was on the board of SpaceX, and Planet Labs, a satellite company in a rocket launch company had raised $1.1 billion between them, that alone in venture investment space exceeded all prior years, combined times two, which is like talking about a hockey stick, right. And then today in the last three years more recently 70% of all venture investment in the space sector occurred in the last three years. So you have this just massive influx. Now, we can get into this if you want. I think there's some really peculiar things going on as to where it's going, how concentrated isn't just a couple of ideas. But the big picture, I think, is moved from illegitimacy of the category in institutional masterminds, meaning it's only available to, frankly, angels, I'll be super angels, you know, billionaires who can invest in this. And you might include Paul Allen and Richard Branson in that family of billionaires, that were the early pioneers. Then some venture firms such as our own that were the earliest investors, you know, before it was popular, and when there was no one else doing it. There were probably only three or four venture firms investing in this area back in 2008 2009 timeframe 10 years ago, and now it's you know, everyone in their pet is just Which has been hilarious, frankly.
Chris Wright
So I suppose there are two different things to look at here, I can fully see the economic rationale and the investment rationale of something like payload delivery nanosatellites something you can analyse and quantify, you can see the supply and demand the economics of the whole thing. But a company like SpaceX, which has as its stated ambition, not only to bring down the cost of launch, but to go to Mars and populate the place. I mean, that's a difficult investment to analyse. There's no spreadsheet, but that's going to fit into
Steve Jurvetson
Surely it's a great question. Yeah. If you're a Queen Isabella, you know, like that whole Columbus America thing, what was that worth You like it? And does she actually have a contract that I mean, she did have actually somewhat of a venture capitalist like contract terms of a carried interest that percent of gain but my guess is she left a little on the table in America. Now, that being said, when we first invested in SpaceX, we did not attribute any value to the Mars programme. It doesn't mean it wasn't important doesn't mean isn't a reason we invested. But we couldn't do the exercise you just mentioned to say let's pencil out economic case. I think we would not have invested if that was the only economic case. In fact, I can say that with certainty that we can probably most of SpaceX investors would not have said, Okay, we're going to invest back then hunker down for 20 years and then we'll have a business case that is bad for a number of reasons. Not only is a bad as an investment on time by money, but it also means you're building a company in a particularly unhealthy way. You want to iterate with customers, you want to learn from the market, you want to build products and services that are useful all along the way, instead of betting everything on this big hail Mallory, you know, 10 years out or a decade or two out. And so the investment thesis for us in SpaceX has been and continues to be that there's a really interesting business opportunity here. And now in low Earth orbit, soon the moon eventually Mars. And that market initially was rockets, launching satellite payloads for all kinds of customers, both commercial and military. And then secondarily, this new opportunity, which is broadband satellite data, basically connecting the next 4 billion people online via a terminal that's on the ground that connects directly to a satellite and unlike satellite iPhones the past does so with higher bandwidth and lower latency, frankly, than even traditional fibre. In some cases. That's the kind of mind bender. It's completely different architecture than anyone has ever had before. There's a new capability. It requires a whole lot of satellites and a whole lot of launches. That wouldn't have been conceivable, you know, just 10 years ago, but SpaceX Looking ahead, like, we're driving the cost of launch down like 100 X, what might we start to do that no one was thought to do before that business opportunity alone is one of the major reasons we were excited future ventures to invest in SpaceX, even recently, not just 10 years ago. Absolutely. But you say you didn't ascribe value to Mars, but you also didn't describe loss or penalty to it. Some traditional investment banker types might say, wait a minute, what is this maarsbergen again? And how much are we going to spend going to Mars And oh, by the way, Elon has publicly tweeted that there will be no IPO until their regularly scheduled flights to Mars. So that alone might cause one to pause. And in fact, I relish that anecdote because the whole point is That tweet was the at the investment bankers office back. And it did a moderately good job of that, right? They say look, stop banging on my door every month to get to know you a meeting like every banker wants to do, like we just want to get to know you. So when they actually go public, you know, they'll think of, you know, think of us total waste of time right now. And certainly it will last five years total waste of time, because the company had no need for financial aid, or assistance or guidance or pointers from bankers, right. They've been able to raise as much money as they want at all phases. So there's been no need to start chumming the waters and building relationships with bankers. Plus the ones got plenty banking relationships, why would you need to do that for SpaceX? Specifically, so by tweeting that he sort of pushed him off, but it does beg the question and stepping back from SpaceX more broadly in private equity markets in general, is it attractive to stay private a lot longer than people had ever contemplated before. Google is an early company in this regard, and went public lot later than a lot of people thought they should. But frankly, they probably should have waited even longer. Same for Facebook, it wouldn't have been a lot easier not to be in the public eye. And in the case of Google, you know how
The lucrative pneus of their business model, keep it out of them, you know, not everyone needs to know how much money they're making for them to succeed. And similarly, there's all kinds of hassles who in the public company, as we all know, so, a different question is that's an open experiment, which is, hmm, can you gain liquidity for shareholders, your employees, your investors, while staying private. And so far, that's been okay. For SpaceX, they've been able to continually offering to shareholders for their employees and investors who want liquidity and new investors keep coming in. So it's almost like a private market for the shares. So we'll say that it seems to be working just fine for now.
Chris Wright
And that's one thing I wanted to ask you about as well to actually so one is the time horizon, one is required to have when investing in space, and how that varies to the rest of the private equity model. And then the second point is the question of an exit how and when it might ever arise. So if we take the first of those, what would you say?
Steve Jurvetson
Living admitted by us here at future ventures and throughout my entire 25 year career as a venture capitalist, I've invested In moonshot ideas, things that are, unlike anything else, things that if they succeed will change the world, but are highly risky and take a long time. And so in this firm, for example, we have a 15 year horizon not even attempt. So most venture firms have a 10 year fund life, it sounds long, but we found that it's not long enough that we need at least 15. We think for almost all the investments we've made that have been interesting, year nine year 10, or like some of the peak years, heading to future growth. So I do think you need to have a long term perspective. Luckily, I do see a growing number of investors who are taking a longer term perspective, in contrast to an even larger number of vessels, were taking a very short term perspective. So to be clear, there's a bifurcation in the investment world where there are those who are thriving on enterprise software and the internet and fast term cycles and almost like fast fashion, you could argue in the sector it exists and people to do it have different skills than I have, and they managed to make money doing it quite well. the.com boom for me in the 90s, stuff like that, but lately, I'm much more interested in substantial value or longer periods of time. wants your question, it takes longer. I think rightly so. And the opportunity should be, you know, many billions, if not hundreds of billions of market size and market potential to justify the time you're taking in the risk business. Right? So it's not this is risk capital, majority things we invest in fail. And we keep reminding ourselves that right, most every cool thing I see is going to fail. And if you give a time, there's almost like a, there's some data by the way, that there's a halflife to companies public and private of about 10 years that half of all companies, you know, are going to disappear in 10 years. It's just kind of amazing to think of that for all the big public companies and just in that keeps compounding every 10 years, another half a mile away. And when our businesses even more risky than that,
Chris Wright
and then in terms of the exits, if it's going to be a long time before any of these placements list if they ever do at all.
Steve Jurvetson
Well, I think they will, I think they will eventually sorry, jumping in and things like to diversify a bit Planet Labs, you know, satellite imaging company, doing quite well growing like crazy. Companies like that probably will go public within the next two or three years roughly. There's kind of a bell curve of that. estimate could be sooner or it could be later, but not 2030 years. Same could happen at SpaceX, they could choose to go public anytime they want. Let's just say, if you're a CEO of a public company and a private company at the same time, you probably enjoy one of them more than the other.
Chris Wright
I think he's made that very clear hasn't the famous email that he sent around after Tesla was listed? And when people at SpaceX, were asking, when are we going to list and he spells out in great detail all the reasons not to do it. So he's he right? I personally think so.
Steve Jurvetson
Yeah. And I'm on the board about this. So yeah, I mean, it's going public, I think serves a couple of major functions. One is a financing event and liquidity. So it's financial terms, and the second can be a marketing event. So back in, let's say, the 90s, eBay z IPO was a huge boon for eBay's business when the customers the mom and pops that are using eBay were like, wow, this is a potential company. I actually see audited financials publicly. I will trust my small business to run on eBay. You might imagine the same goes on for Alibaba and what how do you learn Fast word of the present day, I'm not sure Alibaba is doing just fine as a private company to write to they have to be public to gain credibility, the way you might have felt in the 90s or the 80s. So I think that one's fading as a reason to go public. And then it goes back to the first Do you need money? Do you need to do secondaries? Do you need to keep going to capital markets such that you want to lower those transaction costs and just be in the public eye? Maybe right? It makes it easier to structure bond offerings, what have you, if money is coming plenty easily, and you have all the marketing you need, if not more, and marketing unity. You might stay private.
Chris Wright
And definitely how significant Is it the Virgin Galactic is listed? It will be it through a slightly circuitous backdoor approach.
Steve Jurvetson
My personal view, is it no and to be fair, I it's not like they were pitching us for that investment. So this is, you know, consider this not the view of an insider, but one of an observer and as an investor in the sector is that to me felt like the that first category, meaning it's an investor, they need the money. They This is all public information. What I'm about to say is they were on the cusp of closing a large funding round with the Kingdom of Saudi, and to Richard Branson's credit when the Khashoggi affair started to break before there was all the evidence, it was like in the early days, the evidence was dribbling out, if you might remember when it was like it seemed like something really untoward happened, but it hadn't proven yet. And we didn't have the audio files yet. He was like, No way, we're not going to do business with this group. And I mean, kudos to him six vice principals, by the way, he was depending on that money, they needed the money. And so they spent quite a bit of time quite a bit of Richard Branson's personal capital to just keep the company afloat to find a big bolus of money because they needed a big, big slug of equity. So that revert that's back or that reverse merger into a public show provided hundreds of millions of dollars. And then if I recall to the company, that's why they did it. They they had to get it from somewhere. And there may not have been many other options, right? Because if you in my personal view, if you've gone to the Saudis, you've probably tapped all other good options for funding. And you're now down to your bottom of list option and choice. I mean, like who in the West would want To go there unless you have no other choice.
Chris Wright
Hmm, it's an interesting perspective. And in terms of your own underlying investors, whether here or in previous shops, what do you tell them when they come in just just about these points of time horizon vision, an investment case, all that sort of thing?
Steve Jurvetson
Well, that's a good point. So we raised the fund earlier this year, closed it in various first inaugural fund future ventures. And in my prior firm, I was leading the same kind of investment but it was a more heterogeneous portfolio. And the investors there and certainly all investors here we told Look, it's gonna take longer. At the end of the day, this will be a diversified portfolio for you because these are probably not investments you're seeing all across the board. Right. So like the boring company digging tunnels or you know, SpaceX back in, you know, 10 years ago, was a one of a kind, right there weren't, it wasn't like you're getting exposed to this left, right and centre. So I found Actually, it was easier fundraising for this dedicated focus vehicle on moonshots, if you will, these hard tech or deep technology companies than any other fundraising done in my life, they were prior firms where I had more of a tractor with the point to around the strategy, a bigger team of people all kinds of reasons why fundraising should have been easier or coming up with.com boom when we're making money hand over fist and just like insane, you know, multi hundred percent IRR, internal compound growth rates, I'm returning capital. This was easier. Like, we were done in a matter of like a month, month and a half in our entire fundraising effort from scratch,
Chris Wright
but presumably an investor who comes to you has a certain mindset anyway, and you don't present yourself as a mainstream venture capitalist.
Steve Jurvetson
So we leave with this, in fact that our entire pitch deck to our investors that invest in the fund was like, here are the crazy things we want to invest in that are one of a kind that are unlike anything we've seen before. Yet adjacent to markets we've invested and that this will take longer, hence the 15 year timeframe. I mean, I'm pretty sure I verbally said we'll probably don't have much to show for it, you know, three, four years in because by definition, you're not liquid on anything yet and other investors may not work Going up to the sector yet, you know, it's we're investing in nuclear fusion and synthetic meats and you know and sell it or meat like off topic, today's interview. But these are not obvious ideas just like electric vehicles was not obvious when we first invest in Tesla, the vast majority people, perhaps wisely so would say every attempt to do this is failed. Every car company in America has failed since Henry Ford. Why would this now work? And what's different? Right? These are very good questions. Is it a fool's errand is certain to fail like all prior? So if you go off historical statistics, you'd say there's just too much risk in some of this. But actually, we find quite the opposite.
Chris Wright
And I suppose below, investors clearly want to return is there also a sense for them of backing something that matters or will matter?
Steve Jurvetson
It's a good question. I can't say for sure. I would hope they do. Not in that they would give us slack if we fail to make a return. But ultimately, I know that I get up out of bed each morning super excited about what I'm doing not because the gross IRR number was up by X percent right? The finish reward is a Bible for me at least as a byproduct of making a difference in the world of helping entrepreneurs change the world and improving the vector progress for humanity. I mean, that's big stuff, right? The SpaceX succeeds. And we're a multiplanetary species that might go down like one of humanity's greatest hits, if we can make synthetic meat and get us off, like slaughtering animals for meat production, that might say the earth in terms of climate change, and other land use and freshwater use issues. And I could go on and on each of these companies, if they succeed, history books could be written about them that's fulfilling, that, I guess, motivates not only my continued investment, interest and engagement, it motivates Of course, the employees of these companies, their customers or partners, it makes life a little easier for everyone down the chain. And then so similarly, I would hold my LPs have that same pride, frankly, in what SpaceX has done pride in what Tesla's done such but yeah, ultimately, they're only investments that we make the money, but they feel good about it because they're making a positive difference right.
Chris Wright
Now, you spoke about this hockey stick trajectory in terms of venture capital that is going into this space healthy in terms of availability of capital. But sometimes an influx can hint at trouble ahead. But it's not always going to the wisest places. So do you have any concerns about what you're seeing right now? Oh,
Steve Jurvetson
yeah. Let's face it specifically. Yeah. So, oh my god. Let's just say it is nearly impossible to contemplate the number of groups that are making their very first space investment to say this is done with savvy insight and wisdom. I'll point to one the most dramatic example of this. There are now over 130 companies trying to do the exact same thing which is a rocket to launch small satellites into orbit. So going at the part of the market that SpaceX abandoned when SpaceX had a falcon one they were doing that smallsat launching, they scuttled that programme to focus on the Falcon nine Falcon Heavy in that starship. And so that was a perceived hole in the market when you couple Okay, no one's doing a small set dedicated launch vehicle with The market forecasts are the number of satellites launched is going to explode it's going to it is in the process of growing dramatically. Therefore, that's a great opportunity problem is the vast majority of the small satellites launched during the huge constellations. So obviously, all the SpaceX satellites are launching on a SpaceX rocket. And that's the most cost effective way by far to get a satellite in orbit, especially in the launch a bunch of them. So if you take out the big constellations like SpaceX, everyone that actually is launching things of scale, they're going to do it many at a time, and they're not going to need so the actual market size is much smaller than anyone thought. But even if it were big, there's no way 131 I don't understand how someone invest in the 20th, the 50th, the 92nd, the 100 and third, like what are they thinking like? Do they actually believe all predecessors will fail or they think this is a market is going to support 100 different competitors, it makes no sense and then just take take as a given. There was no differentiation. It's not like oh, they're all different sub sectors, you know, like this one will serve that market. They're all taught the exact same thing. They all had the exact same business plan. There. In many cases using the exact same technology, substrate, what are they using for turbo pump? How are they using 3d printing for their engines, they all know these are new ideas. But like after I've seen 10 of them and like, they're all the same. So in the long run, I think there'll be one, maybe two serving the West one maybe to serve in China, and they aren't going to be great businesses. So that is going to be a wasteland that's going to be very painful stepping back. This is not unfamiliar in the venture industry. So at the peak of the.com, boom, on all the x bankers and x consultants were flocking in as entrepreneurs and getting funding from ex bankers and consultants who are now common investors. Of course, it was an excess. Fast forward to today, you kind of wish you invested in all of them, you know, because you had a little piece of Amazon a little piece of Google, and eventually Facebook had you either pulled back to say, Oh my God, this sector is horrible. You might have missed Facebook, like we did at my prior firm. We just missed social media. I did let me just speak my partner's wanted to do Facebook. I I missed it. I didn't think there was still a whole nother wave of new innovative ideas to be had in the internet. So I missed that by focusing on But there is this lemming like flock behaviour. Once you have this, you know, a visible success like Netscape was in early days the internet or SpaceX and Planet Labs are today in space where, wow, everyone thinks there's golden hills and they come rushing in and they overfunded, the simplest things to understand.
Chris Wright
So we've had an evolution in the availability of capital already, if we look forward and consider perhaps three buckets, so states NASA funding through tax dollars, public markets through listed companies and private equity, venture capital, how would you imagine that develops in the years ahead?
Steve Jurvetson
Today, it's primarily private equity, and venture capital and such, and government. So if you tallied up all of the government spending, if you want to lump together both science missions and NASA related stuff, as well as government, military, that's probably at least up to the present day. Slightly more than half of all the dollars coming in. And the other bucket would be commercial costs. emerged in venture capital. And the reason I say today is an important caveat is that could dramatically change over the next five years with broadband data because that think something might add up to hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, dwarfing everything else it made. When Google first did some analysis on this area, they were thinking about doing their own for a while before they decided to instead invest in SpaceX. They did deep deep market analysis and believed that broadband data from satellites was a bigger business opportunity than everything else. Google is doing that alone. Yeah, just like bigger than Google itself. It you could think of it as subsuming the telecoms market, the data comm market, and initially, in all the areas that aren't well served today, but in the long run, they kind of do a good job of serving everywhere, as you launch more and more of them.
Chris Wright
So I must ask, what is this SpaceX board meeting like?
Steve Jurvetson
Fascinating, I've never missed one. Some parts of it are like, like any other board meeting, but every time we go there, one or two things blow us away the vector of technology change And improvement is just, it's just so exciting. I'm an engineer by heart. So seeing some of the things they're doing this is breathtaking, right? The idea that we'd have the ability to launch a rocket, let's say from New York, land in Beijing and have it cost less than a commercial flight economy costs, right? Well, you get to see the world from that perspective and get there then 30 minutes like that's kind of mind bending that blows away supersonic flight and hypersonic flight. This is one of the tributaries coming off of the Mars programme. That's the same rocket architecture they want to take to Mars. So as one example, the other is one fellow board member called financial porn. Now, as I say that in a tongue in cheek way to just say, wow, this is a really good business. It's not just science technology, you know, rah, rah, you know, like government handouts or something, in fact, anything but it's actually a great business. And so stepping back what I let me move, put some flesh on that because this is an investment thesis we have here future ventures across a variety of industries is that I've seen it in automotive. I've seen it in aerospace. I'm seeing it the beginnings of it in agriculture and construction. What are these have in common, huge industries, enormous industries, in some cases, multiple trillions of dollars that really haven't changed the way business is done in the product configuration is the same as has been for at least 50 years. And against agriculture more like 100 years, like a radical restructuring of how we make meat a radical restructuring of you can see it playing out, has amazing effects. The incumbents are incapable of pivoting. It's be as if, imagine a software company announced, oh, we're going to be moved like like, like like Salesforce did. We're going to be moving CRM into the cloud back in the day. You know, Oracle doesn't say, Oh, yeah, right. We forgot to do that. We give up right now. Of course, there's a we do that too. We do the cloud better. You know, whether they do or don't they immediately develop product and do it better. The reaction of the aerospace industry to SpaceX is initial Falcon nine was to, quote give up in my own words. What I mean by that is the Chinese minister said we can't compete on price. Even with Western technology. These prices must be incorrect. Europe and US near Milan. providers are like we have nothing in our r&d pipeline that can compete. The only way we compete is if the government gives us billions of dollars beyond the RN six beyond anything that was on the roadmap currently for US companies. So it but for government handouts, we would have to shut down our rocket programmes, and some of them are being shut down literally in the United States. If you translate all that it says, left to their own devices, the competitive response to the mantra is to go out of business. Like that's in to announce it until like stated upfront, like it is mind boggling to me. And I might say the automotive sector is perhaps the same but doesn't know it yet. In that it's almost like having a sixth sense. You can see dead people they don't know they're dead yet. They are somewhere in between, let's say Oracle, which would never say I don't have a product for this, but of course I have a product for everything. And the other in the spectrum be honesty and then the middle is the automotive industry, which is like Well, yeah, no, we're, we're on it run. We're gonna we're gonna compete really well. We'll see. Maybe they won't, but it would be a novel experience for a incumbent to radically restructure. Its Is that almost never happens?
Chris Wright
Yes. But when you back a disrupter, you have to get on board with their view of risk. I was listening to the podcast you did with Tim Ferriss, very interesting. And there was a point when he talked about or you talked about Elon Musk as having a different way of evaluating risk than most of us do. And I'm just thinking through the history of Tesla and SpaceX, you've had to back it through very difficult times, especially 2008. Whenever investors didn't see things the same way you did. So how do you have to tailor your view of risk to the way that the people you are backing See it?
Steve Jurvetson
The thing that jumps to mind is I think I intuitively or naturally, I'm about on the same page. And that is potentially a luxury that grew into in my career that I may not have had in the 90s. In the 90s. I started mostly internet investing with the occasional moonshot. But I'm not sure if I would have had the self confidence and trust in my partners and conviction. To make those kinds of investments early on, in fact, when I first proposed SpaceX investment, I got a pretty harsh condemnation. I remember the email sent to my entire partnership that said, we should not let our investment passions cloud our investment judgement, and I can quote it verbatim, because it's done, especially since cc to all and at first. My first reaction was, Well, I'm not letting my passions by my judgement, actually, here's why it's a good investment. Yeah. But today, I consider sick I think we should let her investment or personal passions cloud or investment judgement. That's the whole point, especially if you think you have deep domain knowledge in an area and passion for transformation of an industry like if it's a business and technology passion that is relevant, right to invest in, you know, art colonies or wine or whatever. Yeah, maybe that's a little off. You know, a personal passion is not an investment thesis, but here it seemed pretty tightly aligned. As you can see a rock was full of space artefacts. This is like an area of deep domain, expertise and interest to me. So now would say yet That's when you should be focusing. Your question about risk, though. I think as we asked earlier, it takes longer the feedback cycles along. So for anyone entering the venture industry as a new entrant, that's not necessarily a good place to start, right? Your ability to build a track record to raise your next fund to do what you do professionally, you know, on an ongoing basis is actually you might say, Gosh, I maybe should be a little more thoughtful and fearful and pullback. And that's what I unfortunately see the vast majority investors doing and that leaves this domain, relatively under invested. So doing the bold moonshots at the edge of sanity is relatively underserved the amount of capital and the opportunity set, very different. So coming back to when you said like, investment history in space, so in 2009, no one was investing a handful of firms at most, now hundreds of firms, right, so we are no longer here actively investing much in space companies, for example, in new ones, because we have to see something that's unlike anything we've seen before and we might remain open minded. We Dude, we talked to firms, but I give it more likely than not that we won't invest in a space company this upcoming year. But we would do something that's really bizarrely different. I shouldn't say that. So definitively, I just currently can't say that there's a handful of ideas that I know we're probably gonna invest in better space related. It's like, I'd have to be enlightened by an entrepreneur that opens my eyes to something I just hadn't covered. I never thought of before.
Chris Wright
If I have time for one final question. So we're surrounded by the most remarkable trove of Apollo memorabilia. What does Apollo mean to you?
Steve Jurvetson
So Paul, was this incredible accomplishment of humanity, right? It was an unusual time in the 60s where you had the backdrop of a military industrial complex and competition and the geopolitical aspects, but under the covers, you had this incredible engineering effort, a moonshot that we use the term moonshot. I have several times in today's discussion, proverbially back then that was real. It was really a moonshot. The risks that were taken Rama, the, the solutions that came out were so incredibly inspiration. That's why these are physical artefacts are so interesting to me is they solve problems with remarkably small amount of compute. But ultimately, the end of the day, the reason the US be Russia was compute related, we consume 60% of all global semiconductor output in the Apollo programme. It was meagre, but it was allowed us to do things like rendezvous and all kinds of complex manoeuvres in space. That would have been harder if it was purely mechanical and analogue. And it was the precursor of what was an enormous computing industry to come. It also motivated a bunch of people for generations to enter math and science and engineering, in fact, even look at PhDs in science and engineering spiking after Sputnik, and then kind of dribbling away during the shuttle era when you know, sort of this sense of purpose and mission and why are we going to space What's it for faded? I believe it's spiking again, with SpaceX. There's an enormous swelling of interest people that realise it's quite Want to be an engineer that rocket science is tangible, that things blow up on the pad and failure to launch is visceral. Most of the engineers by the way hired by these groups are in software. It's not just aeronautics and astronautics and what have you. It's a pretty broad set of capabilities. That is, I think, making people excited to be alive, excited to be in this time of human history. Be like, you know, would you been super excited and retrospective, if you could choose any decade the mid 70s. But right now, this is pretty exciting decade coming up. And companies like SpaceX are showing us how exciting can be permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars mean? Like, this is the stuff that makes your heart skip a beat. It's, I think, part of the human tendency to want to explore the frontiers of the unknown that make us uniquely human.
Chris Wright
Fantastic, Steve jurvetson. Thank you so much. Thank you. In our next episode, we will have the complete interview with President and CEO of the Coalition for deep space exploration Dr. Mary Lynn did ma did mark as a 25 year veteran of the space industry. Earlier in her career, she managed flight Operations for Boeing on the International Space Station programme. Later, she acted as a special advisor to the NASA astronauts office before her appointment as Boeing chief scientist for commercial utilisation of the ISS. This has been the Euromoney audio production created by Chris Wright and Chris hunt.
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