History has proven time and again that downturns are the best time to invest in new start-ups. You get good deals and find a better environment for start-ups to grow. – Steve Jurvetson
If there isn’t a business logic to get to marketability, the chance of an idea’s importance in the world is very low. – Steve Jurvetson
When the venture capital industry invests, it’s usually because they sense there is money in them hills. And often it takes a high-profile winner to wake everyone up in the category. SpaceX is that company. – Steve Jurvetson
As a geek, I take umbrage at the notion that chips are not sexy. But yes, robots, drones, satellites and self-driving cars are the kinds of things that excite me. – Steve Jurvetson
The future will be less predictable, forecast rises will shrink, company lifetimes will shrink, new entrants will proliferate and it’s going to just get more unpredictable. – Steve Jurvetson
Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth. – Steve Jurvetson
When you lower the cost of access to space, a boom of innovation follows, just as low-cost fiber optics paved the way for the Internet and the cloud services that followed. – Steve Jurvetson
I’d stay away from investments in a variety of sectors that are capital intensive. Anyone who says we need $100 million before we know if what we’re doing makes sense and the customers want it – that’s not going to work. – Steve Jurvetson
While, in general, life satisfaction goes up with wealth, beyond the safety net more and more wealth brings very radically diminishing returns on life satisfaction. – Steve Jurvetson
SpaceX is very unusual. I don’t know of any other startup where the founder put in $100 million of his own money before looking for any outside capital. They have wildly exceeded any reasonable expectations. – Steve Jurvetson
If you thought financial crises came and went, just count on them – another economic collapse, it’s almost going to be like not news any more. But for startups this is great, because it’s a perpetual driver of disruption. – Steve Jurvetson
Flourishing is everyone’s birthright. I’m trying to break this hold that being smiley and cheery has on what people think the good life is. – Steve Jurvetson
I believe that technology has the potential to change the fate of nations, industries and companies, as well as the context of our lives. I want to help build the companies that take the risks needed to make those kinds of real changes in the world. – Steve Jurvetson
Building and launching rockets has been a lifelong hobby that my son and I share. We regularly travel to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to launch rockets. – Steve Jurvetson
The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science. – Steve Jurvetson
In manufacturing, too much work is beyond repetitive – it is inhumane. The people doing this work aren’t doing it because they want to – they are doing it because they have families to feed and clothe. – Steve Jurvetson
IT is now reaching out to fuels and chemicals, energy and clean tech, rockets, all kinds of bizarre industries that formerly didn’t face much competition. – Steve Jurvetson
Beyond self-driving cars, I think all airplanes should go pilotless. Get the pilots out of there. Even better, have no cockpit at all, and turn it into a nice lounge with a bar. Why give people the illusion of control with a steering wheel? – Steve Jurvetson
When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy. – Steve Jurvetson
My interest in space started early, but for many years, I could not find any space-related investments that really penciled-out for venture. That changed in 2009 when Elon Musk came to us with a big vision to explore Mars while producing rockets at a fraction of a price and making space accessible. – Steve Jurvetson
There aren’t many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It’s pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley. – Steve Jurvetson
The short version is I’m just a total Apple fanboy. I started programming Apples in seventh grade. – Steve Jurvetson
Development of space will improve life on Earth. Access to space is important for agriculture, humanitarian efforts, communications, and navigation. – Steve Jurvetson
