Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Jurvetson - Page 2

By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets.

One very interesting framework for a company to succeed over time - beyond just business logic and analytics - is, do they have a reason why the best graduates in engineering programs will flock to them versus competitors?

Biotech 1.0 is slow, like a lab science, and Version 2.0 is more like computational sciences.

I do lament how many investors focus on all the short-term sugar buzz of some marginal improvement in something - nothing history books are ever going to be written about. In many cases, these are quick and easy ways to make money.

I've actually come to respect the most irritatingly challenging people I've worked with as really valuable in improving group decision-making and what to do and what to invest in.

Because of the rate of technology change, forecast horizons are shrinking.

The concept of a 'job' is pretty recent. If you go back a few hundred years, everyone was either a slave or a serf, or living off slave or serf labor to pursue science or philosophy or art.

The deep learning techniques, while relatively easy to learn, are quite foreign to traditional engineering modalities. It takes a different mindset and a relaxation of the presumption of control. The practitioners are like magi, sequestered from the rest of a typical engineering process.

We believe strongly that all meaningful change comes from entrepreneurs.

If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.

By the time people came to realize that free, Web-based email was indeed a hot idea, Hotmail was adding 1 million new subscribers a month.

Hotmail grew its base faster than any company I can think of.

Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them.

If I want to make a product that is appealing to consumers, like a piece of clothing or a video game, that's fad driven. Some companies do it, and I don't know how they do it, but it's generally a bad place to invest.

The commercial space industry is enormous and ripe for disruption.

I don't really care what the venture industry thinks.

We look for companies that are unlike anything we've ever seen before, with a bold vision to change the world and run by passionate entrepreneurs who get you jumping out of your seat.

I can't invest in areas of comfort.

Hotmail went from zero to 12 million users with zero marketing steps. Not a penny was spent on sales and marketing, which was astounding. It showed us the power of the network effect.

Firms that claim domain focus are late movers.

No politician has a 50-year horizon.

I've always been a fan of space exploration, and I filled our entire office with space artifacts.

Without disruptions, startups can't survive.

You've got to close deals quickly, or else you'll miss out.

Steve Jobs was my hero.

SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

The economies of the future are information.

Every new industry has exuberance in advance of reality. The techies get carried away. There is a period of despair. Then the pendulum swings the other way, and people see the long term potential. It's like when the Internet bubble crashed.

Eventually, all cars are going to be autonomous.

It is quite moving to hold a piece of Mars in your hands and to reflect on its incredible interplanetary journey, and the science that gives confidence as to the origin of this unusual rock.

In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.

I love what I do. I love to learn.

Before SpaceX, no space company was worth a second meeting.

There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.

IT is permeating more industries. Moore's Law knocks down simulation capabilities. We don't need wind tunnels anymore, for example. You can run experiments more quickly.

If you ask any VC what it takes to be successful, you'll get a description that sounds a lot like himself. There's a preference for self-similar individuals.

I love photography. I love rockets.

One tech-related concern with religion is that it appears to be a positive feedback loop to the accelerating rich-poor gap, as the disenfranchised opt out of modernity.

Lots of deals happen in situations that aren't 'pure work.'

I started programming Apples in seventh grade.

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.

When burned on a CD, the human genome is smaller than Microsoft Office.

It is this breathtaking image [of] success that motivates us and motivates kids to follow and understand rocket science: to understand the importance of physics and math and, in many ways, to have that awe at exploration of the frontiers of the unknown.

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. 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.

Go to the moon, that's my dream.