How the Renaissance Sparked an Entrepreneurial Explosion with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg

**Jeannette zu Fürstenberg** (0:00)
And what happened is that they actually, at the time, lowered the barrier to guilt. So all of a sudden, people that were active in one field were able to apply their knowledge and their whole background into other fields. And that's how you kind of got to the Leonardo da Vinci moments of that period. So I think that was one socioeconomic kind of driver for what happened in the Renaissance.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:27)
I'm Joe Lonsdale, welcome to the American Optimist. I'm really excited to have my good friend, who we can call you Dr. Jeannette Fürstenberg, you're also Princess Jeannette Fürstenberg. Jeannette, welcome, thanks for joining us today.

**Jeannette zu Fürstenberg** (0:36)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:38)
Jeannette, let's tell people a little bit about you. You have a Ph.D. in philosophy and entrepreneurship from the Free University of Berlin.
You've had extremely successful first venture capital funds, you're a venture capitalist. Talk a little bit about your Ph.D. I'm fascinated. You studied how entrepreneurship and art impacted each other throughout the ages. What eras did you focus on for that?

**Jeannette zu Fürstenberg** (0:57)
Yeah, no, it's actually a fascinating topic. So I had the lack of having a grandfather that was really one of the most inspiring people I've come across because he's actually, he was an artist before becoming an entrepreneur.
And then he basically took a lot of that creative destruction mindset and applied it to entrepreneurship. And he had no idea of engineering, he had no idea of physics. And he built a business that was really deeply rooted in the process industry. So very, very kind of deep techie and it like, you know, required from the outside and it required very different skill sets to what he actually brought to the table.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:26)
But he started as an artist.

**Jeannette zu Fürstenberg** (1:27)
He started as an artist and then he was, he took that company over from his uncle who died in the war. And his grandmother was like, hey, can you take care of it for a couple of months until we find a replacement?
And it was like a ten company, you know, ten people company at the time. And then he basically took it over and then actually built that into a global business.
And but he always retained that exposure and that interest in art. He like, you know, he always collected art. He would always host artists at our place. And I kind of grew up in this mindset and this like kind of...

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:55)
You saw art and entrepreneurship as being really related.

**Jeannette zu Fürstenberg** (1:57)
No, not initially. I think that kind of revelation came later. But I saw him kind of very much intertwining art literature. He was a very passionate reader. He was a very passionate reciter of poems. He was someone that would always be extremely curious in very, very many different domains.
And that curiosity has kind of led him to pull in, you know, people that would sit around our dinner table that really had seemingly nothing to do with one another, but really were kind of been creating very interesting discussions that were just kind of sparking new ideas. And that is kind of a great analogy to the way he ran his business. So he would always kind of, as one example, if he was confronted with an issue or with a problem, which was in his specific case, a level and flow meter process, it's called the Coriolis effect, which basically measures the flow that flows through a U-shaped tube.
And that flow is basically being measured or at the time was measured by kind of measuring the vibration and lots of different variables from a sensor perspective.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:56)
Why did this matter, the flow through a U-shaped cube?

**Jeannette zu Fürstenberg** (2:58)
And the problem he was facing, that his engineers were facing, is that the flow would actually create, the kind of substances would create residents and they weren't really scalable to large diameter. So if you think about the oil and gas industry, which kind of evolved in the time when I was a child, they were like, listen, we have to make it like a straight tube. It doesn't work to have a U-shaped form.
And that straight tube was something that all engineers told him was impossible. It's like, you know, we cannot build a straight tube. You know, it has to be the U-shaped form. That's the only way the process works.
So he said, listen, take a look at this violin string and the way it's swinging and let's try to replicate that effect. So he basically always applied concepts that weren't really innate to the industry. And basically through that, disrupted and hacked a lot of new sort of innovations into the business. And that is just something that always fascinated me. And then when I went and studied initially philosophy and business, I thought this has really very little to do with what I've learned with my grandfather. You know, you learn about accounting and you learn about all these different marketing strategies, et cetera, et cetera. It all sounds great and great and well, but it has nothing to do with this kind of spirited kind of really creative, destructive force that I was observing.