SpaceX IPO: Inside the Firm That Owns 1%

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
137 Ventures, 137 Ventures, Justin Fishner-Wolfson, co-founder and managing partner, 137 Ventures.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:06)
137 Ventures, you have 15 billion AUM. You invested into SpaceX, Palantir, Uber, Andral, Gusto, Cognition, Ramp, and Hadrian. Those are some of the bigger positions. Tell me about the story of SpaceX.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (0:18)
Back at Founders Fund, we did the deal in 2008 At that point, Elon had mostly funded it himself. We were really the first outside institutional capital. We probably made two dozen investments in the company since we started the firm. It's been a great run. Companies from a life cycle perspective are starting to go public again. SpaceX is the big one to start this, whether it's Open AI and Anthropic or both. S1 is confidential, so it's going to be a pretty interesting few quarters in the public markets.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:51)
Justin Fishner-Wolfson, also known as JFW.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (0:56)
Apparently.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:57)
Apparently, everybody I've been talking to is just keeping your name short.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (1:02)
I mean, most people don't use my full name when they call me.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:05)
Well, welcome to Sourcery.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:07)
I'm so excited to have you on today.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (1:09)
Thank you for having me.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:10)
You just got fresh off of a New York Times interview.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (1:12)
Yeah.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:13)
So you're all warmed up, right?

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (1:15)
Sure, let's see how it goes.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:16)
Okay. So I recently interviewed the team at Impulse Space.
We had Tom Mueller on and we also had Eric Romo, the first employee and the 13th employee. The one thing that Eric Romo said was, if you don't know 137 Ventures, you will know it very soon.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (1:35)
Well, he's a good hype man, I guess.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:37)
So 137 Ventures, you have 15 billion AUM.
You've invested into some very large names. You have over 60 portfolio companies. And I'm going to name some of the big names.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (1:51)
Okay.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:52)
So you invested into SpaceX, Palantir, Uber, Andral, Gusto, Cognition, Ramp and Hadrian. Those are some of the bigger positions. The one I want to talk about first before we get into everything, and obviously your differentiation going in on the secondary angle is SpaceX.

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (2:09)
Sure.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:09)
Okay. So tell me about the story of SpaceX. You got in it quite early. You were first exposed to it at Founders Fund. So what was the story there?

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (2:17)
Well, back at Founders Fund, we did the deal in 2008
That was sort of the beginning because at that point, Elon had mostly funded it himself, and we were really the first outside institutional capital. And so obviously got to know the company back then, was very excited when we started 137 Ventures, we continued to invest really many times over the last 16 years. So I don't actually know what the total count is, we've probably made two dozen investments in the company since we started the firm, so it's been a great run.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:50)
And why did you go after the secondary angle? How did you have conviction in that early on?

**Justin Fishner-Wolfson** (2:56)
I think the insight that we had, if you kind of roll back the clock to like 2011, that was right before Facebook had gone public. And our belief was companies were gonna stay private long, or Facebook stayed private for a relatively long time. But the major reason why Facebook ended up going public was this 500-shareholder-account rule that basically required companies, once they hit a certain shareholder count, to publicly report. So it was sort of all the negatives of being a public company with none of the positives. And ultimately, that's why Facebook went public. They changed the rules with the Jobs Act. And so that pressure to become a public company sort of went away. And I think our view was very simply that companies were gonna end up staying private longer. And what that meant was there'd be a lot more opportunities to invest in those businesses.
And especially if they were great companies, then that was just a lot more time they could compound. Going back to the SpaceX point, SpaceX always sort of allowed liquidity for their employees and they were running tenders once a year, probably back then.
And then that kind of sped up to twice a year. And so these were always company organized programs. It wasn't like you're trying to find some random person who happens to be affiliated with the companies. You're just dealing with the founders and executives of these businesses who are trying to facilitate liquidity for people to buy their first house or pay off their student loans or whatever it happens to be.