Musk's Early Investor: What the Next 3 Years Actually Look Like | Steve Jurvetson

**Marina Mogilko** (0:00)
What will the next three years look like?

**Steve Jurvetson** (0:03)
I have this gut feeling that it'll be something architecturally variant.

**Marina Mogilko** (0:07)
This is Steve Jurvetson, an early investor in SpaceX when almost nobody believed in private space. He backed Tesla before electric cars went mainstream. For over 30 years, he's been betting on the future, and history keeps proving him right. When someone comes to you with just an idea, what would be the best thing that they can do?

**Steve Jurvetson** (0:25)
Single person with an idea? I might try to find a co-founder, but I think it's rarely an individual. Jobs and Wozniak, Batman and Robin.

**Marina Mogilko** (0:33)
You're working a lot with Elon. Top three principles that everyone should learn from him.

**Steve Jurvetson** (0:37)
I do try to observe leaders in action. Even with a focused effort, it's not always obvious, but a few things. One is this insane ability to...

**Marina Mogilko** (0:47)
Thank you so much. This is going to be very exciting, Steve. I am so excited to have you on this stage. What a fun time, right? SpaceX, IPO, and you were there super early.
What did you see that most investors didn't see back then?

**Steve Jurvetson** (1:06)
The simple answer to the question is, there were almost no investors considering space. It wasn't a category on any site. Slightly varying, the question is why in the world would we invest in a sector that is just not a sector for venture? Same could be said for automotive, for Tesla, energy, with nuclear fusion. There were a handful of investments, but very few. The short version is obviously an incredible entrepreneur, someone we've worked with before. I've known him for 29 years now, and invested in all of his companies of the century and his cousins too.
All in, if you will. The uniqueness of the opportunity. What we've come to appreciate in a fuzzy way then, but now in a more crystallized manner, is the way in which a software-centric system engineering approach to a sleepy industry that hasn't had any change for decades, can actually unlock incredible value and opportunity. You can see it in aerospace, you can see it in automotive now. It was a long bet when we first invested, but now we can see in retrospect how that's going to play out in almost every industry over time, how they become information businesses.

**Marina Mogilko** (2:12)
Obviously, you're so good at predicting future. Part of this podcast, I really want to understand how you think about the future. You have this amazing graph, 130 years off compute, and it basically grows exponentially. What does it mean for all of us? What will the next three years look like because of what's happening to compute?

**Steve Jurvetson** (2:31)
Now, I'm just curious, how many people have seen this version or this abstraction more as well as originally by Ray Kurzweil in like 99 book, Ages of Spiritual Machines? Looks to me like 25 percent of the room. Okay. I always ask because I'm curious how much it has entered the zeitgeist, because I think it's the most important thing ever graphed, and I give credit to Kurzweil for even seeing this pattern, back when no one knew they were fitting to a curve. So just for those who don't know, this covers like five different technology substrates from mechanical devices to relay-based computers to discrete transistors and integrated circuits. Only in the most recent era would what Gordon Moore called Moore's Law be almost a refraction of a much longer term trend, transcending all kinds of dramas of companies that came and went. It's almost cosmological. Why has humanity's capacity to compute compounded for 130 years? For sense of scale, that's an exponential scale, logarithmic scale, so straight line is exponential. This graph shows a 10,000 billion billion X improvement in computation that a dollar can buy. This is what customers care about. No one buys transistors when they're buying ICs. They don't say, how many transistors does that one have? Why the one that has more? No, they buy compute capacity or memory, and both have been on rails. So to your question, the first and foremost thing would be to just predict that it's going to keep going for three more years. Like, why would it suddenly just stop and hit a red brick wall the way Intel has been saying it would?
And when companies say that, like Intel usually assign their losing their business to someone new like Nvidia 15 years ago. So in the next three years, I think you'll see the analog chips continue to carry the mantle of Moore's law. Some of the more esoteric and customized AI silicon that does discrete matrix multiply and add really efficiently. And this is what's going to carry the juggernaut that we all just take for granted that it keeps going. In fact, I'd say without this sort of exponential change in technology, you wouldn't have startups, you wouldn't have this disruptive innovation opportunity like we talked about in SpaceX or in a bunch of companies because if business is predictable, if there isn't disruptive technological change, the big get bigger.