00:21:33 · Brian Singerman
[00:21:33] S0: Venture capital to me is put the most money in the best companies possible at the best price possible. Nowhere in that is like portfolio management and reserve calculations and ownership percentages and all that nonsense. It's like, just, Nope, it's pretty easy. Put the most money into the best companies possible at the best price possible. Sometimes the best price possible is more than what you want to pay. You know what? If it's a great company at the end of the day that you see is going be one of the greatest companies of all time, that's okay. So, it's the best price possible. That's venture capital right there. All the other stuff is just nonsense. The other thing is that we realized that we just knew from early on. First of all, it matched our style, having no fear on these things, but also just like, know, a venture fund like three Xs over the course of ten to twelve years, I don't even think that that beats the S and P. I'm pretty sure it loses to a Vanguard no load index fund. No, seriously. So just like, you've got all these people talking about like, woo hoo, our fund three Xed over these twelve years. Just like so it means your investors essentially lost money because they could have easily scaled money into an S and P no load index fund. We knew that. Beating the market is hard. Let's just be clear. Beating the market is extremely hard. You have to have some real advantage in order to do it. Venture capital, legal inside information. You're not playing the same level playing field as everybody else. It's not like the public markets where I want. No, that's why I don't invest in public market companies. I want no inside information about anything public. I want no liabilities on anything, but private companies do, you know, absolutely. And so, if you've got that kind of access and you can truly see something as a great company, the way to beat the market is to put a ton of money into that company. Like put every penny that you can. Like that's the way to beat the market in venture capital. Everything else just ties it or loses to it.
00:23:28 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Singerman
[00:23:28] S1: And you spread that across funds. Don't even think about like, Oh, we did in this fund, we're maxed out, we'll do it. [00:23:34] S0: Well, mean, you know, there were some advantages. Now, didn't have that advantage early on. Let's just be clear, SpaceX didn't work, Founders Fund would not exist. We bet our careers essentially on SpaceX. And I love that, which goes into why I'm doing what I'm doing now, is exclusively that. But I love elite athletes betting their career on something. Truly elite talented people betting their career on something, that's what I love. I think we were just really, really good at that. At Founders Fund, we weren't trying to do portfolio management, we were trying to put the most money in to the best companies possible. [00:24:14] S1: I think it was really funny when I talked to you on the phone the other week, I think this was maybe the day the SpaceX S1 came out, you're like, Yeah, whatever, I'm not going to read that. Why am I going to read that? [00:24:25] S0: I wouldn't really understand what I was reading. There's probably a lot of financial stuff in there, and to me, it's just like, Oh, Rocket's cool. Elon, greatest founder in history. Great. It's a different calculation for me than pouring over a prospectus. There are other people who are great at that. Some of my partners at Founders Fund are great at that. Napoleon is probably one of the best in the world at being able to really do that and understand the company. Great. There's his edge. It's not my edge. I don't put skill points into it.
00:24:25 · Brian Singerman, Molly O'Shea
[00:24:25] S0: I wouldn't really understand what I was reading. There's probably a lot of financial stuff in there, and to me, it's just like, Oh, Rocket's cool. Elon, greatest founder in history. Great. It's a different calculation for me than pouring over a prospectus. There are other people who are great at that. Some of my partners at Founders Fund are great at that. Napoleon is probably one of the best in the world at being able to really do that and understand the company. Great. There's his edge. It's not my edge. I don't put skill points into it. [00:24:51] S1: And then when you invested into SpaceX, this is 2007, 2008? [00:24:55] S0: 2008. [00:24:55] S1: 2008, they had three failed rocket launches. How did you gain that conviction? You met Elon, what was he like?
00:24:55 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Singerman
[00:24:55] S1: 2008, they had three failed rocket launches. How did you gain that conviction? You met Elon, what was he like? [00:25:04] S0: I didn't really know Elon back then. Remember, I had just started at Founders Fund. Did get to sit through one meeting with him. I've since met him several times, but back then, I was a new junior person starting at Founders Fund. But I did get to talk with the group about it and back then it was just the most amazing thing. It still is, right? There's still no other rocket companies that get up with that kind of I don't know when it's going be air, but a Blue Origin thing just did not work. It's still pretty amazing. And one of my greatest startup camaraderie moments in history in my career was being able to go to the Hawthorne office when we did get the first successful Falcon to actually complete a launch. It was like the most amazing camaraderie experience of my life, even more than the startups that I was at or Google or whatever. And yeah, it's just like one of those things. It's like an end of one historic thing to be part of. [00:26:03] S1: What do you think the key traits are that he has, that he implements within his teams? Obviously vertical integration.
00:26:03 · Molly O'Shea, Brian Singerman
[00:26:03] S1: What do you think the key traits are that he has, that he implements within his teams? Obviously vertical integration. [00:26:09] S0: There's no other person like Elon because he's the only person that truly could be the CEO and CTO of a company like SpaceX. Nobody else exists like that. It's like, Levchin kind of, right? In some ways, because he's that he could be a CTO and he is a great CEO, right? But it's very, very uncommon to be the best from a novel business, understanding the execution side, as well as the technical side. There's never been anybody like that in the history of business. [00:26:44] S1: Are you surprised at all by how much progress he's making now with all of the new launches? Not just rocket launches, but TeraFab? [00:26:54] S0: Oh, nothing surprises me. [00:26:55] S1: Nothing surprises you? [00:26:56] S0: No? No. I mean, it's got the best team in the world. These things snowball, and so when you're committed, and plus when you're somebody like that who's truly mission driven and truly driven to achieve all these things from a, even just from a, Oh, I want to make more money. I'm the richest person in the world. From an actual what the company is doing perspective, yeah, you tend to hire really, really, really good people. Yeah, no, not surprised at all with what that company is doing now. [00:27:30] S1: We just did a walkthrough tour of Impulse. [00:27:33] S0: Oh yeah.
00:27:33 · Brian Singerman, Molly O'Shea
[00:27:33] S0: Oh yeah. [00:27:34] S1: And I did a sit down with Eric Roma as well, but we did a walking tour through their first facility with Tom Not their El Segundo one, but we did a walking tour of that facility. Towards the end, we got into some SpaceX questions. I was like, Starlink is the topic du jour right now because they're hitting inflection point scale. And so I asked him, I was like, did you know when you started rolling out Starlink that it was going be this big? He said, absolutely. Let's get as many as we can out All [00:28:07] S0: of us knew. A lot of us have been talking about, oh, Starlink is the truth. You need the launch business in order to do this and that, but we all knew that Starlink was the business for a long time. [00:28:19] S1: Market wise though, why? Because you thought old telecoms and all these [00:28:24] S0: others It's would just an end of one company. I'm bullish on launch going forward, but the applications of launch are where everything is at, right? And like telecom and global telecom, I mean, it's pretty huge. [00:28:42] S1: So, talked a bit about Teal, we talked about Elon. Of your portfolio that you were involved in early investments was, and I will repeat this, but I'm sure you'll correct me, it was SpaceX, Palantir, [00:28:58] S0: Airbnb Well, I didn't need Space X or whatever. [00:29:00] S1: Maybe you [00:29:01] S0: were a part of it? [00:29:01] S1: Was part of the team. Many people can say that they were