Draper Fisher Jurvetson

And they had raised around $400 million in capital from major venture capitalists and investors.

She started raising money for Theranos from prominent investors like Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend, and the founder of prominent VC firm Draper Fisher, Jervis

Stent.

She wound up raising even more than $700 million.

So the, the high level observation would be that when I started in this business of investing startups 20 years ago, it was all in a few industries, of software, semiconductors, and biotech.

And we didn't do biotech at DFJ, so it was software, semiconductors, and variants, computing, photonics.

It all felt the same.

And today, it's like a whole variety of industries that are truly being transformed because of deep learning, machine learning techniques.

Tom, raise your hand.

We are the faculty hosts for this quarter's, uh, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture Series, and I have a few announcements and things to tell you.

As you can see, we've got a really full room, and for those who are still coming in, there's an overflow room upstairs.

Uh, it's one ninety-one.

Okay, great.

Okay, great.

So, um, I would like to welcome you to the first lecture of the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture Series, brought to you every week by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and by BASIS, the Business Association of Stanford Engineering and Entrepreneurial Students.

It is brought to us online by SCPD, and it is generously underwritten by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

[clapping]

Fabiano, on behalf of SDVP, Basis, uh, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and all of us here in the Stanford community, we'd like to thank you for coming out and sharing your story.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you very much.

There was a venture fund that returned $0.

It was like a $200 million venture fund at Draper Fisher Jurvetson that, like, around that time they actually managed to return $0 of it.

Zero.

That's statistically impossible.

He was a huge, huge part of kicking that off.

So with Google directly and with one other venture firm that was called E Planetary Ventures, it was an offspring of Tim Draper's DFJ, which was this little firm.

And I only bring that up because the J in DFJ is Steve Jurvetson.

who is another one of Elon Musk's extremely good friends and was one of the reasons why he's a Tesla board member and SpaceX board member.

And he's one of the only reasons why those companies survived because he actually ended up giving them a bailout when the great financial crisis hit in 08.

I think they did NVIDIA also.

And then my dad, he took Venture Capital Global with DFJ, where its peak set up 27 different venture funds across the universe.

And then my whole family is venture capitalists.

I feel what I've been able to add to it is really a I try to back founders who are doing something that is otherworldly or what we call making sci-fi a reality.

And so that has kind of been really fundamental to like who I am and like who Mercury Fund is.

But the other piece though is I've been a VC for now over two decades and started in the venture career by partnering up with Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson at Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Tim and Steve and John Fisher had a partnership model called the DFJ Network Model where they went globally looking for individuals that they thought like them.

but were one to be part of like this global syndicate because they knew from the dawn of the Internet and cloud computing and open source that tech would be much, much broad.

He was a huge, huge part of kicking that off.

So with Google directly and with one other venture firm that was called E Planetary Ventures, it was an offspring of Tim Draper's DFJ, which was this little firm.

And I only bring that up because the J in DFJ is Steve Jurvetson.

who is another one of Elon Musk's extremely good friends and was one of the reasons why he's a Tesla board member and SpaceX board member.

And he's one of the only reasons why those companies survived because he actually ended up giving them a bailout when the great financial crisis hit in 08.