Steve Jurvetson

So after, you know, the eight hundredth one to eight hundred, the first one don't really leave an impression anymore.

So very early on, you know, I had a meeting with Steve Jurvetson, who has now since become a good friend of mine.

I was nervous as hell because I had heard so many like amazing things about this guy, super smart.

He's just gonna take me apart.

And Sona, a startup working to improve GPS with a new purpose-built commercial satellite navigation network, has raised $250 million.

The Series D funding round was led by longtime SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson and valued the company at $2.5 billion.

Sona CEO co-founder Brian joins you next after Talking Tech, Ed.

All right, Isabel with the news.

Silicon Valley's mantra for decades has been smaller, cheaper, faster, better.

I asked venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson to translate that into numbers.

Um, we often see a technology shift when the new approach is ten times better.

It can be ten times more performant or ten times cheaper, sometimes both.

Welcome, friend, to episode 200 of the Business for Good podcast.

You may recall that for our 100th episode all the way back in 2022 that we had on legendary venture capitalist and billionaire Steve Jurvetson, which to this day remains one of our most popular episodes.

On this episode, though, we'll be talking about the ethics of being a billionaire and much more with legendary thinker Peter Singer, often described as the world's most influential living philosopher.

He was also on Time Magazine's Most Influential People list back in 2009, and just a year ago was also on Time's list of most influential people in the world of philanthropy.

I wish I did.

Okay.

You know, for our 100th episode of this podcast, we had on this billionaire, Steve Jurvetson, which to this day is among our most popular episodes of all time.

You are the esteemed guest on our 200th episode, and you've recently made headlines for disagreeing with the common refrain we hear from some on the left these days that there's no such thing as an ethical billionaire.

Silicon Valley's mantra for decades has been smaller, cheaper, faster, better.

I asked venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson to translate that into numbers.

We often see a technological shift when the new approach is 10 times better.

It can be 10 times more performant or 10 times cheaper, sometimes both.

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.

Welcome, friend, to episode 199 of the Business for Good podcast.

Now, if you've been listening to this show for a long time, you may recall that we had a very special guest for episode 100, the legendary venture capitalist and billionaire Steve Jurvetson.

It remains to this day one of our most popular episodes.

Well, we've got another special guest for episode 200.

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.