Steve Jurveston: [00:00:00] There's no possible future in which we're gonna slaughter animals.

This is one of these like clear as day generalizations that I make about the future that it only has like a handful of others that I can list. Like all vehicles will be electric, all vehicles will be autonomous, and we won't slaughter animals for meat.

Paul Shapiro: Hello, friend, and welcome to the 100th Yes, the 100th episode of the Business for Good Podcast. This show began four years ago as a hobby to showcase cool people working to make the world a better place via business. And it has blossomed into a whole community of regular listeners who routinely offer feedback, both affirmation and criticism, all of which is appreciated.

A hundred episodes later. It's still a hobby, but it's a hobby with a pretty good reach and the ability to do good in the world itself. I very much value hearing from listeners [00:01:00] about how the show has impacted your life. It's especially gratifying what I hear from someone who says that they started a company after listening to the show or that they invested in a company they heard on here.

Or they joined the staff of a company they heard on the podcast, or they were just really inspired and given a sense of hope for the future from a guest who we had on. So if you wanna offer your feedback, please go ahead to Business for Good podcast.com and let us know what you think now. If you're just tuning in for the first time, as you can guess, there are 99 evergreen back episodes just awaiting your download.

But if you wanna know which ones have been the most popular, there are a few standouts that are outperformed. The others, at least if downloads are the sole metric. For example, you may want to check out our back episodes. With Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey, episodes number one and number 50, which were particularly popular, uh, the Better Meet Co-executive Vice President, DOI Kirkendall.

My colleague, who is in episode 71, was another big hit philosopher, Peter Singer, or episode 62 was another popular one. Billionaire Investor, Jim Mellon, or [00:02:00] episode 65 was also very good. And yes, the interview with my wife and author slash influencer Tony o Komoto in episode number 51. Was interestingly still to this day, one of the most downloaded episodes of all time two.

Now add to that this 100th episode, which I'm sure will be among the most popular episodes we've released to date, as well as we have got on a very special guest, if you are familiar with the Silicon Valley world or the venture capital space in general. Steve JSON is a name that needs no introduction.

For the rest of you, Steve is a legendary venture capitalist, perhaps best known for his early backing of companies like Hotmail, Skype, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and more. He sat on Tesla's board of directors for years and currently sits on SpaceX's board too. These big bets that he's taken on Ben, Risky and out there companies have led Steve to astronomical financial.

Pun intended, but also to become a very influential thought leader on space and technology issues along with others. In 2016, President Obama appointed [00:03:00] Steve as a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship. He's also been honored as one of tech's best venture investors by Forbes, and he was named as the Venture Capitalist of the Year by Deloitte.

This dude is also a pretty prolific photographer too. It turns. As I've learned, In fact, if you enter his name into Google without hitting enter, one of the dropdowns you'll get served from Google is Steve Jarson Flicker. Today Steve runs a fund called Future Ventures with his business partner Mariana Sycom and for for disclosure.

As you'll hear in this interview, Future Ventures is an investor in my own company. The Better Meet come. But as you also hear in this interview, that doesn't stop us from discussing taboo topics like Steve's personal wealth. How he spends his money and more. Other interesting topics that we explore include what led a deep tech investor like Steve to invest in an alternative meat.

How many startup pitches does Steve hear weekly? What makes a good pitch and what gets him across the finish line to actually wire investment dollars into a startups bank account? What company does Steve want you to start and pitch him on? What does he think that you should look for if you're seeking a [00:04:00] co-founder?

And for what does Steve think his future self will condemn his current self? We also talk about what would be one of the greatest discoveries ever in his view. What happened in his life when Steve stopped drinking alcohol? And for fun, what does Steve suggest you try as the funniest Google exercise in all?

It's a riveting conversation with one of the most consequential names in. Including businesses that are seeking to do good in the world. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Steve and you can listen to the 100th episode of the Business for Good Podcast.

Steve Json welcome to the Business for Good podcast. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. It is great to be with you. We are in your office here, which is, I think it must be like. Maybe the largest private space collection museum on in, in the country? No, I don't know if that's, I

Steve Jurveston: don't know, but I'm willing to bet it's the largest in a venture capital office or any financial services for OS extensively pretending [00:05:00] to be a different business.

Yes. Okay. Got it. Yes.

Paul Shapiro: So, so for those of you who are obviously listening and not looking we are we have draped above us a last, a NASA lunar orbiter solar panel from 19. That's right. So there was something that was orbiting the moon in 1966 that made it back to the us And you have the solar

Steve Jurveston: panel.

I know it didn't make it back. They sent the data back. So I have this equipment, we have the antennas on the roof, the solar panel were a spare that didn't fly. The lunar orbiter was Captain Orbiter on the moon. It had a dark lab, film lab on board. It developed analog film, then used a television camera light set up to send that data back to Earth and created these images which are hanging above our head.

Oh the first high res images of the moon.

Paul Shapiro: Amazing. Amazing. All right, so that's going pretty far back to the sixties, but let's just go back to you in college. So, People would start looking at bios from you. They're gonna see all that stuff. Oh, this dude graduated from Stanford in two and a half years.

Right? Like you were into electrical engineering and yet I presume when you were studying electrical engineering, you weren't thinking, I'm actually gonna become a venture [00:06:00] capitalist. Right? Sure. So were you thinking you were gonna be an engineer? And so why the change at some point in your life, you're like, okay.

I'm actually gonna invest in electrical engineers, but not be one of them

Steve Jurveston: myself. Yeah, it was an interesting transition. I started life in high school as a computer programmer on the Apple two. It was like a dream of mine, SD jobs, and I didn't know what I wanted to do per se, other than it was science and engineering, writ large, something like that.

And I didn't have any venture capitalist. In my upbringing, no role models, no one I knew. Had you heard of it? I'd heard of it only because my dad worked for a chip company that had seven Rosen as an investor. And I never met these people, but I heard that they were venture investors.

Paul Shapiro: Got it. Like semiconductor chips, Not potato chips.

Exactly.

Steve Jurveston: Exactly. The other kind of chips. So the transition really was a random walk. When I was an undergrad studying electrical engineering. I went all the way through a PhD, which I started, and we now call AI or neural. Left that thinking. I wanted to go back to be an engineering manager somehow.

So I was doing chip design and Hewlett Packard, but I just didn't really want to be an engineer forever. I thought [00:07:00] engineering managers have more leverage. So the one and only time my career path went according to the plan is I thought, Well, gosh, I'd like to go to business school so that I could somehow accelerate my path to injuring management, whatever that meant.

And. To get to business school. I went to bathing company management consulting firm for about three and a half years. Worked for high tech clients that did in fact get me to business school. So that part went according to plan, but it was a little lost. By this point, I wasn't sure I even wanted to come back to engineering management.

So I did product marketing at Apple and next. Going back to Steve Jobs, my desire to see him in action, but I was still lost cause we that, to my second year of business school, I did not know what I was gonna do other than go back to Bain, do more management consulting. And out of the blue, a venture capitalist p me from Greylock and said, Hey, we're interviewing someone I had worked with prior.

And that led to a whole long process of interviewing, learning about, and discovering, yes I do wanted to become a venture capitalist. And

Paul Shapiro: that's what I now do. And you became a partner there pretty quickly at Greylock. So you At d

Steve Jurveston: Yeah, At d Greylock. So, Greylock Greylock was the interview. It led to a job offer and me joining

Paul Shapiro: Draper [00:08:00] Associates with, With Tim Draper.

Exactly. Got it. And you became a partner there in very short order. Mm-hmm. . And you made a lot of big bets that people now perceive as legendary. So, you know, you're betting on Hotmail at a time when everybody else is paying for email and a company says, Hey, we wanna give away email for free. And you say, Sign me up and, you know, many other companies, right? So, I mean, if you think about the companies that I think you're most well known for, having picked it, Hotmail, Tesla, Planet Labs, SpaceX. Are there other big ones that have been like home runs for you?

Steve Jurveston: Well, there've been big, even bigger, well, not bigger, but big home runs that are less long run.

Oh, I guess Skype as well. Yeah. Yeah. Gosh there's been a bunch, there have been a bunch of IPOs probably in aggregate about a almost it. Trillion dollars of economic value growth in the companies that I've invested in or investments in. Mm-hmm. So it's been a spectacular drug, or not lately, it's been entirely focused on what we call deep tech or companies that are changing the world to the better, not the internet.

So to get rich quick

Paul Shapiro: schemes. Yeah, I, Why I talk about that transformation a little bit later. Cause that seems to be like a, a pretty. Big [00:09:00] pivot for you, like in terms of future ventures and what the goal is of, of this particular fund that we're sitting in right now. Sure. But let's just go back to those days because at a time, you know, there were, there were times when Tesla and SpaceX, like people were essentially counting them out, like they were against the ropes and you were still vetting on them.

Mm-hmm. , you've talked about how you think entrepreneurs should be more like Elon Musk. So what was it about him, like, you know, Sitting there thinking, Okay, this company is against the rips, is before NASA's, you know, giving them any great billion dollar deals or anything. And you're thinking, you know, I'm gonna pump some money into this thing.

Like what was it back then before Elon Musk was Elon Musk that you were thinking, I see some real potential in this guy.

Steve Jurveston: Right. Well, it's an interesting question because in some ways he's always been the same to me. I first met him in 96, invested in his cousins, got to know each other in that context.

First invested in Tesla in 2007. I joined the board and then SpaceX. It was a late 2008, early 2009 process of investing and. He didn't go through a profound change per se, other than I got to see him when times got tough. Right? In December, 2008, when my gosh, everything was going wrong. For all the [00:10:00] companies, you know, rockets are blowing up.

The roast was a negative gross margin. You go on and on and on and, and to, to be succinct though, he stepped in and saved the company in a way. Like I've never seen any entrepreneur go all. All of his net personal wealth, net debt to save Tesla and his spar hour. And so that was new information in a way to see that the true passion, missionary zeal of someone like that could weather such a storm.

It's what we hope we see and most of the entrepreneurs that we back, but sometimes a lot of 'em don't get tested quite like that, that that was the ultimate test. So, You know, how does that come across before? It's like when you speak with someone, you can sense, you know, beyond Elon, Elon and others that are some of our, you know, favorite entrepreneurs.

There's a deep, passionate drive for what they're doing. It's not get rich quick, right? That is ephemeral, that does not scale, that does not last through tough times. They get you jumping outta your seat with so infectious enthusiasm for what they're pitching, whatever it might be. You know, is it rockets?

[00:11:00] Is it cars, is it waste management? You know, is it a better meat product? The people that are doing it for a reason, it is unmistakable. Yeah. And you can ask simple questions like, what does the business look like in 10 years or in 50 years? And they have an immediate answer. Right, The arbitrary seeking opportunists, they laugh at the question.

They're like, Wait 50 years? Are you kidding me? , I'll be on my fifth startup by then. I'll be retired. You know, drinking martinis on a beach. There's no way that I'm gonna be working hard at this company 50 years from now. Whereas the two pioneers and missionaries, they're like, Of course I

Paul Shapiro: had been thinking about that.

So speaking of 50 years from now, then mm-hmm. , like, you know, when I listen to interviews with Elon Musk, he's, he seems extremely driven to make life multi-planetary. This is like, you know, his like load stars to make life multi-planetary. You've indicated to me though that that's not really your goal. That making life multi-planetary is not what.

You know, gets you out of bed in the morning. Sure. So what is it like, why are you so excited about SpaceX? I mean, you guys are a huge investor in, in SpaceX. You really bet big on it, right? So what is it? I mean, obviously it's more than that. You think it's [00:12:00] a good investment, you presume? We think it's good for the world in some way too.

Steve Jurveston: Yeah. So it's interesting. The question's savvy in that it reflects that you, you've read some of my other interviews or listened to them. So let me be clear. There's some companies where the big dream, the star on the horizon is one, Like we wanna do everything we can to help achieve, like Tesla's mission, for example, to make you know, get us up oil and gas forever.

In the case of basic, it's not that we don't like the idea of becoming a healthy planetary. That's super important, sort of, but it's not the investment. The way I'd qualify that is if that's all they ever did, I'm not sure we'd invest from a business point of view from a personal philanthropy point of view, is it good for the world?

Yeah. I still think it's good for the world, but it's, that's a tough business proposition. The thing that hooked us on SpaceX and continues to hook us is that it's an enormous near term opportunity to help life on earth and do scale business here. So they already. Far and away the largest launch provider, you know, getting stuff into orbi, lowering the cost matter like 10 a hundred x from where it used to be, which enables Planet Labs and other companies to do all these amazing things in space like image, the entire planet, every day count every tree on earth, every day, et cetera.

So on earth imaging, that's [00:13:00] one big advance that Space X enables. The other, of course, is startling, which they're directly doing, which is connecting the next two or 3 billion people online who aren't connected to the internet today in any meaningful way, in any continuous. And allowing them to couple, to online education, to couple to, you know, being entrepreneurs and, you know, in a sense democratizing access to the largest precursor for being part of the global economy.

Right? It's hard to imagine what life's like if you don't have an internet connection in the modern world, right? So, huge benefit, right? It's a life. So in a simple way there's money in them hills, you know, there's benefit for humanity here on earth and it's all happening right now versus, It's off world.

It's in the future and it's got risk, Right.

Paul Shapiro: In terms of timing. Got it. Yeah. Interesting. Do you think that there is some, Well, lemme put it to you this way actually, If life does, if human life mm-hmm. becomes multi-planetary, And we were to find some conscious life somewhere else out there. Mm-hmm. . And so cpa, [00:14:00] one of these planets with big water.

Well you said conscious life in our solar system. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Would it change how you feel about whether we go there or not? Oh gosh, yes. And because you would be more interested or more concerned? Oh, more interested.

Steve Jurveston: So And we can get to What about conscious life Outside solar system I think is much more likely.

So I think it's vanishingly, unlikely. Vanish small. Likely we'll find

Paul Shapiro: in our solar system massive liquidations in our solar

Steve Jurveston: system. I is, but that's something smart. And you said conscious, I mean like

Paul Shapiro: nervous system micro. Well, every fish has what you just described, right? Like every, every fish has it's consciousness.

I

Steve Jurveston: would be so incredibly amazed and, and I wouldn't even know where to start, Ron. Like we should be sending all kinds of research missions there, Uhhuh.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. So yeah, I'm using consciousness just to mean that they're aware. Not that they might be advanced or civilized, but even, even if it's fish,

Steve Jurveston: right?

Right. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but even fish would be amazing. Cause if there's fish, there's an ecosystem and there's other stuff. Yeah. I'm like, wow, would this be. One of the greatest discoveries, you know, maybe top two or [00:15:00] three ever made.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. I mean, and then we'd have to find out like, do we share an ancestor?

Like were they both seated by a comet or, or is there a different genesis together? Do they have

Steve Jurveston: DNA in rna? Do they show the precursors? I mean, you'll learn a lot. You get the fish from, you know, the frozen ocean or under the frozen part, you know, in the liquid ocean. How they adopted the temperature. What does this tell us about their likely ubiquitous aspect of life throughout the universe?

Paul Shapiro: Right. So, so NASA has this office of Planetary Protection designed to basically prevent us from, you know, essentially wiping out another, you know, Star Trek thing. Yeah, . Yeah. Yeah. It's like a, it's like a prime directive. That's right. Like you don't want to, I. And have like some Holocaust that goes on because we arrived there.

Right. So what do you think is the appropriate protection? Like you're expressing great enthusiasm for, you know, checking out the fish of Europa, let's say. Mm-hmm. . But what protection should we be taking to ensure that, you know, we don't cause some massive extinction event? Cause a lot of them on, on earth let's, you know, how do we not do 'em in your robot?

Steve Jurveston: I think the, the obvious first and emphatic needs to be robotic on, like, of course. Okay. [00:16:00] And now that's not a perfect solution. Right. Let's be really clear. Nothing that's non robotics should be sent to these wolves, and that's important. It's like, I think Moon and Mars are interesting human destinations.

I don't think the moons of Saturn or Jupiter are interesting human destinations ever. Right. And certainly not if we discover anything. Didn't you see a Ropo

Paul Shapiro: report? No. You never watched that out. It's cold out there.

Steve Jurveston: It gets really, The distance from Mars to Jupiter is dramatic. If you actually look at it spaced out, it's like, wow, that's a big jump.

Yeah, that a big leap. And it's just a big gas ball. Yeah. So, but to. There are sanitation procedures and things where we might gain some confidence that what we're sending is not microbially, you know, infected with tar degrades, or you name it, you know, it's not perfect, but we can do our best. I think what we'll learn is worth the risk.

Of possible contamination and oh, by the way, that, that contamination could possibly live in that environment, might maybe and that it would interfere and kill everyone thing there. That's, these are some

Paul Shapiro: pretty big leaps, right? Yeah. You know, when you think about like European colonists who came here and their microbes wiped out many of the people who were living here, but they didn't, their microbes didn't [00:17:00] wipe out the trees.

Right? Like, and so Exactly. And, and then if there is life on another planet, they're even further removed from us than the trees are. You know, so, you know, there is a, there is some question the other, then the question would be how do we treat the individuals? Like is it, you know, do we start killing them to study them and, and so on.

That would be another interesting ethical question, but some catch and release fishing,

Steve Jurveston: catch and .

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of interesting studies of wildlife now where we're basically studying feces as opposed to capturing the actual animal, which like helps us to understand various things.

But I have a feeling that most of the time that we've not shown as a species a desire. You know, take into consideration the interest of other species. Probably would also not take individual, the individual animals who might be living there. But let's bring it back to, because a lot of people are listening here, they are interested in your career as a venture capitalist, not your speculations on what life might be like on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

And so I wanna just ask folks what I know many people are wondering, like people are thinking, you know, if I was pitching to Steve, like what does he want to hear? Like, first of all, like how many pitches are you hearing? How many of them cross the finish [00:18:00] line and what is it that gets you to cross the finish line with them?

Yeah, it's by cross the finish line. I mean, you wire them money. Ah, okay.

Steve Jurveston: So there's a pretty wide front at the front end, which is random inbound and email Between my partner Maria and I, there's, you know, I'm on a guess scores per day. We've got

Paul Shapiro: proposals. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, every, every day scores per day.

Yeah,

Steve Jurveston: yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, 24 and 36 a day would probably be my ballpark. Let's say 20. Let's just be, let's go into that range so that we can make the math easier later. So, you know, you're, you're looking at 500 actually you're looking like over 7,000 a year and cuz they don't rest on the weekends

And then at the end of the end of the year, we might invest in 10. So there, there gives you the sense of the. In the peak of the.com boom, it was even bigger on the front end or more per day when any arbitraries seeking opportunities could rock,

Paul Shapiro: rock flush. So you're not even making one deal a

Steve Jurveston: month?

Mm, no. No. Slightly. Listen that it's about 10 year.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Okay. And so what is it like, So that's an extremely rarefied [00:19:00] number, you know, 10 out of 7,000 . What is it, What do those 10 have in common that led you to. I want to own part of this company. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Jurveston: So part of an answer I can give you would be helpful to your listeners that is things that are generalizable, things that they could make use of.

Maybe I'll start there. Okay. But the most important answer is the part. They won't help 'em at all, but, but it answers the question truthfully from inside. So the parts that help are, you know, and this may be not this similar from other venture firms. You know, passion entrepreneurs that are looking to change the world for the better.

That's last point, actually start to lose some of these seasons. Like, I don't care, I just wanna make money. Right. Whereas like we would not invest in gambling, we would not invest in Jewel, we not invest in things in pre-owned human frailties or you know, including social media. Like we just wouldn't invest in any of that stuff.

And making it the world better. We also had hold a high bar for that. So we don't invest in enterprise software of any kind cuz like really it's not that important. And a threshold question we might. Can we imagine 50 years from now, history books being written about this company, whatever it's, and even the major enterprise software companies pick the biggest, most successful ones [00:20:00] of the era.

Yeah. Would anyone really care about Oracle or Salesforce? Any of the ones that are the most important companies in enterprise software? So high bar. So back to, okay, people, big idea, change the world for the better. That exploits something, take advantage of something that's new. So in other words, if this business idea, whatever it is, could have been done 10 years ago, we almost certainly won't talk to them.

More investor pursue it because they could have been done 10 years ago. Why hasn't it been right? We don't believe. A ripe idea sits on the shelf for 10 years and then, you know, someone finally picks the book off the shelf and executes might happen, but we, not in our business, not in the high tech that usually needs explaining something around Moore's law or what's going on in AI or, or mobility or the internet back in the day.

You know, there's something that's the sea change foot that is enabling a new Eric company. Okay, So that all sounds. And we can double click on some of these, like what are the attributes of the founder that make them great? You know, is it having enough intelligence to be adaptive and nimble? Having enough self confidence to be humble?

There are some enigmatic points there, but let me get to that thing I alluded to, which is, what's this crazy thing we're doing that, that no one can make [00:21:00] sense of? And that is we, at least the future ventures, also filtered for, is this proposal or idea or business something that's unlike anything we've seen before, yet adjacent to things we've seen.

Now, the reason I say that's not so helpful is if you're not in our firm, how the hell do you know what we've seen? Right? You have to do a lot of research on us to deduce, well, they've probably seen this and they've probably seen that, but have they seen this? Right? Because that's, it's inward looking, but it is absolutely the driver and has been for like 20 years now of how I invest.

And my partner Morgan, is the same, which, which is, if they're five or 10 companies doing something similar, chances are low that we know how to pick the winner. We're not operating managers. We don't go in there and say, We've done all our work. We've met with all five competitors. We've spent six months in due diligence.

You're the winner. We. Haven't honed that skill set and we wouldn't know what they for. Sometimes we get lucky, we invest in a company that actually has four or five competitors. We just didn't know that. And then sometimes they end up winning and sometimes they don't. But we have other filters then for how we would do, who's gonna win and who's not.

[00:22:00] But my point is this, it's much easier and I think a source of continual. Learning on our part and continual success in our investment to not invest where the herd is going, Not invest in obvious sectors, but to try to continually expand this frontier of technology to new frontiers of the unknown new areas.

And Frank, when we get to meet and meet alternatives, you know, that has been one of these examples of my long investment history. Of prior things getting me to have a prepared mind to finally invest in things that I would never imagine in the nineties that I'd ever be looking at. Anything food related, like just mind boggling to me.

Yeah. Today and I know that five years from now we'll be invest in things I couldn't name today without a doubt. Or even next

Paul Shapiro: year, frankly. So let's talk about that then, because you are, you know, very passionate on a number of issues, but on climate and on the environment. Mm-hmm. Something that I know that you are very concerned about, you were sharing on social media recently.

The Bostons own groups new reports suggesting that alternative meets have a much bigger bang for the buck of the investor if they're interested in, in climate. Climate impact. Yeah. In climate impact. Thank you. How much of your portfolio [00:23:00] today is something that's going to have beneficial impact on climate?

Mm-hmm. . And is it gonna be more in the future? And then we can talk about meat too, but presuming that you know, you are in a accord with the view that this is really among the most pressing things that humanity faces. How much of it, how much of your investment dollars are going toward that? Yep.

Versus other things that might be deep tech that are cool and that have some benefit. Like, let's say bringing email to everybody, like starlink, We don't do that. . Yeah. Well, no, no. Starlink, I mean, bring internet to people. Oh yeah, yeah. Right. But, you know, that's not a climate benefit. It's, it's a good benefit.

Mm-hmm. , it makes the world better, but it's not gonna, you know, avert climate change. So what portion of what you're doing is climate oriented and what do you think it will be in the future? Right.

Steve Jurveston: So there's. Here's a, an interesting broad SWAT cut, which is almost all of it is indirectly with the grand exception of life sciences, which is about 45 to 50% of what we do.

So that's already half the fun and all, And I'll mention you why It's the, the human health related one, mental health related companies [00:24:00] you know, reproductive longevity related companies, et cetera. They're important, but it's not directly on a climate thesis. Mm-hmm. . And that that right is about 45% of what.

There's one other exception which you alluded to, you know, SpaceX and one might argue boring companies similarly that are not obviously directly connected with climate, even if they bring efficiencies to these systems and enable others. Mm-hmm. , well, actually boring in fact, you know, reducing sold vending traffic and being an EV only solution.

You might argue as an indirect, you know, climate angle, but it wasn't the investment. Let's put

Paul Shapiro: it that way. It's EV only cuz you couldn't have emissions

Steve Jurveston: on you don't want, Yeah. Yeah. The whole dream here, the smaller tunnels is do it EV only, and you don't have to worry about all the air handling equipment.

You don't use giant tunnels and the cost of the tunnel goes dramatically down scales with the area of the border face. And so what would the size of your tunnel, you have this polynominal improvement and cost. SpaceX similarly enables Planet Labs. Planet Labs is an environmental company, primarily, first and foremost as a pvc.

That is their mission. But it's indirect. Okay? So it wasn't, to be honest, we did not write the check to Boring or SpaceX saying, Ching, here's another climate company, [00:25:00] right? It's a post-rationalization. Now, that being said, almost all the other ones. In the sense that either they're directly working on it, like Commonwealth Fusion, creating base band, you know, energy with no carbon production or any of the meat related companies as we'll get to, I'm sure later in this podcast where like climate is squarely one of the checkbox items of why we get excited.

Yeah. And why we think there's gonna be. A ever growing excitement in the category. Cause that's the inevitable future. It's sort of like being on the right side of history, but then across almost all the others, Here's the simple question you might ask if you're building something, an object in the world, cuz again, we don't do enterprise software, we to consumer internet.

So like we're investing in things. A lot of times it's either sustainable or it's not. Hmm. And it's kind of like an obvious point. If you're thinking long term, you don't wanna invest this and this's not sustainable, it's. It sometimes makes people chuckle. It's has a bunch of non-sustainable investment propositions, like who wants to do that?

Right? Yeah. That's just something big companies do to defend why they're doing terrible things

Paul Shapiro: to the world. Yeah, I guess it's like, you know, if somebody is expecting [00:26:00] to be out of it within five years or seven years, it may be unsustainable over 30, but it's not an investment problem for them. Like somebody investing in oil today

Steve Jurveston: run like, I just can't, and I don't fathom folks who want to enable it.

They're like you. Hit your ride to. Yeah. I

Paul Shapiro: have no respect for that . Okay. So let's talk about what you do have respect to or, and what you do want to hit your ride to. Sure. So you have become known in recent years for being a food tech guy, which I, as you said, would've been, you know, an athema to you 20 years ago, let's say, but, Well, no, un

Steve Jurveston: unfathomable.

Yeah. Yeah. Not that I would be opposed if he's like, What, how that happened? Not

Paul Shapiro: opposed. Yeah. Just, it would've been very hard for you to, to comprehend how. But you know, you were a big believer in Memphis meat, which is now upside foods. You're invested in better miko, and I believe you have some other food tech investments too, right?

Mm-hmm. like new culture, right? Which is doing precision fermentation to make milk proteins. That's right. And so, Now you're in this new world, right? Mm-hmm. . And so one has been a learning curve for you. And then two should we expect to see more? [00:27:00] Like, are you looking for more opportunities? Absolutely.

Tech. And is it, you know upside, new culture better? Miko. These are all companies that are trying to reduce our reliance on animals in the food system, . So is, is that the focus here or are you looking at other food technologies that may be unrelated to displacement of. Like, what is it that Steve Json and Future Ventures are looking for in this, in the food tech space now?

Yeah, no, that's a great

Steve Jurveston: question. And so for context about 10 years ago we started a quest. I posted it online in the blogs saying, Gosh, is there. Is there anyone who's figured out a scale way to solve a manufacturing problem? Is, if I were to reduce it to, in a nutshell there were some early, even 10 years ago, precursor companies we met with who were claiming they could 3D print, you know, meet the way you cd, print, you know, replacement organs and human surgery.

Didn't think that would scale provided reasons. Still believe that 3D printing's not the answer. At least if there's a one D nozzle, you know, rostering back and forth, it's just like there's no way you can make metric tons of stuff that way, efficient. But we didn't have the answer. We didn't know what it was.

We just knew we wanted a solution. That's what eventually led us to lead the, myself, specifically to lead the [00:28:00] Series A of Memphis meets at the time. Brought in Bill Gates and Richard Branson, a bunch of other co investors. Great company that was, and it is still an early pioneer in seller agriculture, as we now call it.

We used to call it clean meat. We used to call it a number of different things and, and the marketing. Changing, but the simple idea is growing the actual male cells or avian cells in a reactor instead of growing a whole animal. And the motivation there, you mentioned in the premise of your question, wasn't, I have to say animal welfare is important to me, that it wasn't the single driving factor, the single driving factor that Trump that was, there's no possible future in which we're gonna slaughter animals.

This is one of these like clear as day generalizations that I make about the future that it only has like a handful of others that I can list. Like all vehicles will be electric, all vehicles will be autonomous, and we won't slaughter animals for meat. That, and I will bet any amount of money to any listener on this, that that isn't, that will be the case 50 years from now that no one disagrees with that.

So I can't predict the wind transition by the way occurred, but I'm willing to take big bets [00:29:00] on when it will be that no one disagrees that the future is a certain way, right? Mm-hmm. and I, I made these bets in electric vehicles before the penetration was even like 0.1%. And now of course it's obvious to all, all vehicles, electric, at least all cars.

And I would argue it's all vehicles, but I digress. So after investing in, in what's now called upside we were. Scratching our heads, well, what hasn't been solved, that we assume they're gonna be successful. And they're a leader in what now has a number of fast followers globally, you know, doing similar things, but they're, you know, still, I believe by some metrics, We'll, we'll soon see in the next month or two when the fda, it's

Paul Shapiro: always a, it's always a month or two away.

Whenever I effects,

Steve Jurveston: well, let's just say hopefully they'll receive a certain yeah, approval that puts them in a certain poll position in the.

Paul Shapiro: I, I, right. I, I pray from from your lips to the heavens that it's true. I would be thrilled

Steve Jurveston: for that. Exactly. Okay, well, let's put that a second. Cause I'm probably not supposed to talk about that.

The, the but what's unsolved, right? There are companies going after, I say, remember my premise? We invest in things that are unlike anything we've seen before. So we're not gonna go off and invest in three or four [00:30:00] other Memphis meets like companies, right? Well, let's do fish, let's do chicken, let's do whatever they weren't doing at the time that are really, if you think about it, step and repeats of the same idea, just different species.

We wouldn't do that. Cause that's all like, it's all the same right by our filter. So the big uns saw pub, in our opinion was, well, one was milk and cheese, and so that was one branch. The other was, Well wait a second. There's still a large part of the market that is not well served today because of price.

And so we asked in an open sort of brainstorming exercise, what is the ultimate end game? What is gonna be the cheapest? Source of meat, like product and protein in the future that is unde debatable, but is like this inevitable. And so we look, we looked at insects, we looked at a whole bunch of stuff.

Plants, plant, ADEs, you algae, bunch of stuff. Nothing. Beat my sal. Go. Right, right. I know I'm preaching to the choir. Here's a full disclosure, right? That's both of us on this page. Agree. But when you go from zero to high risk in under 20 hours, That's hard to be. No plant goes that fast. No animal goes that fast.

And so it sort of, the light bulb went off. It's [00:31:00] like, wow, this is the ultimate endgame. This will be how we make, And especially by the way, if it's healthy and it tastes like meat and all the other things, cheap feeds, stocks, cheap post-processing, all this or all checked off lots, that's, that's different of satellite agriculture.

It was new and I'm like anything we see before, So that's why you mess in that. No, to your question. Tell you, we looked at feed stocks like back when you know, fetal bovine serum was like, and FPS was a big precursor and, you know various elements of the supply chain and feed stocks. Well, maybe there's a play there, right?

Cause we assume it's gonna take over the whole world. It was like, how does it restructure everything? A play in vertical urban farming? Maybe you can. The, the locus of production into parking lots, you're no longer gonna need an urban environment. Cause then all cars are autonomous. You don't need so many parking lots.

Maybe we convert those into food manufacturing facilities for, you know, or meet alternatives of the future in other indoor farming, other indoor farming initiatives. But nothing quite penciled out like we. Be enamored with these thoughts, but either market size, market timing, some other factors. So I can't tell you [00:32:00] what the next one would be, but we're open minded.

We're like welcoming all comers and would expect to invest more in this. Cause you got like a trillion dollar site through economy and it's to completely change out in 50 years. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Right. And has to, But by the way, just, you know, like one of the factors that played. Was China can't do to Africa.

What the US did to Brazil and the Amazon like that is gonna be a travesty for biodiversity, right? And they're already buying a huge SWA of land in Africa to grow the cattle in pork

Paul Shapiro: that they want

Steve Jurveston: for their domestic market. The US did that to Brazil. Primary source of deforestation ever since 1980, literally 99% of all divorce station in the Amazon is thanks to American Green Beef.

For the fast food chains. Like it's disgusting, right? And yet of course other parts of the world are gonna follow or lead. If there

Paul Shapiro: isn't a better alternative that would be obviously a really horrible outcome. I want to just ask you one thing about something that you said during this, that you said that animal welfare is important to you but it's not your primary motivation.

And, you know, of course deforestation has a very [00:33:00] negative impact on animal welfare. Mm-hmm. cause it destroys wildlife habitat. But how do you feel about animals? Like, to my knowledge, you don't have pets? I used to. You used to? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Jurveston: Like, so babies and pets have traded off .

Paul Shapiro: Okay. Sometimes the babies want pets.

Yeah. But I've had pets

Steve Jurveston: I think, my entire life that I haven't had. In other words, and they'll come, I know they'll come back as soon as the babies are old enough to take care of the pets.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. So you have said in other venues, for example, that you think that let's say 50 or so years from now, that people will look back on how we treated animals for food in the same with the same type of Republicans that people look back on, on, on slavery.

That's right. And so I, I want to ask you then, you know, how. Does that affect your choices today, either in your personal life or in your investing? You know, when you think about Cuz mm-hmm. , I mean, it's very, it's a, it's pretty harsh condemnation, right? To compare something to slavery, which is, you know, widely viewed as an abomination and so thankfully but how does that affect you?

Like, do you think about that? Like, do you think, hey, like we're gonna be condemned by our descendants? Like, what, what is your actual

Steve Jurveston: view on this? Yeah, no, it's fascinating. So to amplify your. There aren't any [00:34:00] other examples I can think of in myself or in people I know where I feel with incredible clarity that my future self will condemn my present self as morally culpable as being, you know, unthinkably wrong on something.

Right? You usually don't maintain that cognitive dissonance in any way. That makes sense. And, and I can see the path of how I'm gonna get from here to there, like why my future self look back and say that. Yet. I find it hard to change hard, but not impossible to change my current behavior. And it drives a lot of my investment decisions.

So what, what do I mean by this? In this analogy to slavery. So if it's not obvious, the slavery analogy was the, you know, the nuance behind it is. , but there were a lot of Americans that had slaves or condoned

Paul Shapiro: it or didn't

Steve Jurveston: condemn it. They didn't rise up in the streets the way we might today. Right. When it was hard

Paul Shapiro: to do so.

And if they didn't, they wanted to. Yeah. Like they wanted to be in that class, you know? Oh, yeah. Yeah, Exactly. Exactly.

Steve Jurveston: Like, like they, they wouldn't go visit the slave ships as they disc discouraged. The stench of humanity that went through the squa. I mean, just in horrible conditions of, you know, coming across from Africa, you can't [00:35:00] even stand up in the boats and, you know, people would just like look the other.

In the same way that we wouldn't want to go to a slaughter house, even if we could as a mediator today, Right? I know that mediators would not go in there and just, let's spend a couple hours watching how that sausage got made or that chicken got gutted, or you name it, right? It's just like they won't, And then there was laws that prevent you from doing this and taking photos and stuff.

It's crazy, Right? But transition to Curtis labor, attrition. It cleared in way oil, as you know. And you mentioned that your book. . Once you have an economic alternative and you're allowed to change your practices, the psychology follows. It's, it's sort of not practice what you preach, but preach what you practice.

That once you change your behavior, you can change your thinking. And I think that's the weird psychology of meat assumption. Sadly, and you can correct me if this data is incorrect, but last time I looked. The, despite years, decades of evangelism, the percentage of vegetarians in America has not dramatically changed.

Right, Right. Yeah. And there's been a lot of effort. There's been people like getting more and more vocal and they have social media and they have all kinds of new techniques to try to get the word out and [00:36:00] layers this stubborn majority. That doesn't change, but I think they will change when they have economic.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, it's even, it's even more sobering than that. It's not only that you don't have any real tangible increase in vegetarianism, but the vast majority of people who do become vegetarians stop. And even worse, per capita meat consumption continues to rise. So it would be one thing if you didn't net new vegetarians, so people were eating half the meat that they used to, but in fact, people were eating more meat per person than ever before.

That's right. In all human history, like despite huge amounts of effort going into trying to top the benefits of meat reduction, Meat demand, including in the United States, not just in China and Brazil, but in the US and in western Europe, most of Western Europe. It's still continuing to go up. It's really sad.

And so it brings to mind a line that the author and a friend of mine, AJ Jacobs said, I don't know if he invented this line, but he's told it to me so I'll count him. As the inventor said, It's easier to act your new way after your way into a new way of thinking, then to think your way into a new way.

Oh, I. That's beautiful. You know, you see basically, you know, [00:37:00] once you are the type of person who is enjoying these meat alternatives, now you're also the type of person who maybe starts to feel a little uneasy about what's happening in that slaughterhouse or inside the factory farm. Exactly. So on. So I, I hope it's 50 years.

It's hard to see, but I, I, I think it'll happen

Steve Jurveston: sooner. I think it is an inevitability looking after 50 years, but I think the transition will be catalyzed. Groups that are offering the alternatives. Yeah. And we saw a hint of that with the plant based alternatives. They don't scale that well. They're not as cost effective.

People care about price. And so kind of like Tesla by analogy, you want to come in with a better product, better in every way. And then, oh, by the way, you save the world, get us off gas. That's great. I feel better about my choices. But lo and behold, you weren't, People aren't doing

Paul Shapiro: that prior, right? Yeah.

Most people aren't buying a Tesla to save the world. They're buying as a cool car. That is awesome. That does all these cool things. Kinda reminds me a little bit of like quill pens, you know, so like we're using for millennia quill pens. You know, people shifted away from them, not because they cared that they were live plucked from geese, which is a very torturous thing to do, but you know, with a metal fountain pen, when that was invented in the 19th century, now all of a sudden you can [00:38:00] wipe uninterrupted.

You don't have to dip the quill in the ink. Well, you stop your thought, right? You don't have to sharpen the quill. Like all these things that raid metal fountain pens just dramatically better than quills. Sure and caused a huge shift over from this animal exploitative way of writing to a new way of writing where you get the same experience you're writing, but it's just way better.

Steve Jurveston: It's way better. I like that something's call this overcoming the activation energy of sustainability that we can imagine a global, either minimum in terms of consumption of resources or maximum in terms of utility. That's on the other side of some hump. That hump could be r and d dollars. That hump could be showing people the light, but it happens throughout the economy.

Yeah. And it's a powerful thing. You can see an automotive that should give you faith that this is gonna happen in good production. Yeah. And, and the other thing is you could just, like, you can't use more land for meat production. Right. It is like's, like it's impossible. Yeah. The pants b that this will follow.

Paul Shapiro: Right. Yeah. We're not gonna be farming the moon, we're not gonna be farming Mars. We have one seus body to farm. Sure. So speaking of, of getting over the. Well, I just want to mention, you know, you, you mentioned that these companies you invested in, it's like a trillion [00:39:00] dollars of this value creation and so on, but you've also told me that you've never sold a share in one of these companies.

That's right. That you have invested in and that when there have been cash acquisitions, like with Skype, who you've made actual cash, but you don't intend to use these shares ever. I mean, maybe, maybe you're gonna do something with 'em after your death. That's good. I don't know. Like you're sitting on a vast amount of value in terms of these shares.

Why?

Steve Jurveston: So I intend to donate almost all of them to cherry. So there's a fixed dollar amount that I have. Pledge to my kids when they're old, so they won't ruin their life, you know, like, you know, just they can buy a house and get the education they want. If I were to die

Paul Shapiro: prematurely, What, what's old 30, 35?

Like what is their Yeah, well, like, I

Steve Jurveston: think there's like a, a tiny chunk that comes maybe in their twenties so they can buy a home and then like, and by the way, I should check the inflation adjustment. I'm sure they can still buy a home . So, you know, like, Cause last I looked, I think my, my thinking was back

Paul Shapiro: when I first bought home, they might have to move in Linda A.

Little bit, but Okay. Yeah. They might have to move

Steve Jurveston: down, down down to a [00:40:00] smaller home than they're used to, But, But, but the point is it's a small fixed amount, not a variable amount. Mm-hmm. . So it doesn't matter if my personal wealth was up 10 x or drops 90% as it's once done they got this little bit of fixed dollar amount.

Everything else is pledge charity in my living trust slash will. And to be fair, I have donated shares along the way that Jerry's unintended to still. But I like to tell entrepreneurs I'm gonna be holding on longer than you are. And like, only in a few cases do I believe them when they say, No, no, , I'm gonna be holding you the ultimate hurdle or whatever.

The crypto call.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Hold on for

Steve Jurveston: dear life. Yeah, exactly. So some of that stands for, I thought it was just the misspelling of hold. No, no, no, no.

Paul Shapiro: Pod is a type of crypto investor. It's hold on

Steve Jurveston: for D Oh, I knew, I knew what it was associated with. I just didn't know it was an acronym. Okay. So Anyhow, so it's wonderful in variety ways.

First off, it's sort of like long term alignment with an entrepreneur. It's not like, Oh, hey, here's a rich quick opportunity. I'm looking at hopefully the same side of the table and the same perspectives as someone who is a missionary, who is trying to change the world for the better, not punch out the first opportunity.

[00:41:00] Second is I filter on the front end for companies that I think will have impact over that timeframe. So we don't invest in gaming. We don't invest in things like consumer hardware, by the way, which never lasts 20 years, like try to find, except for Apple. Anytime in the last 40 years has there ever been a consumer hardware company that's joining every value for more than 20 years.

You can't find them. They didn't exist. And even though there's thousands of venture capitals investing in the sector, they have to time and exits per m and a. Mm-hmm. like we sold the company, you know, like Nest, your job cam or you name it, flip it, the video goes forever. It's astounding actually to see what may actually be tens of thousands of companies, none of which is created long term value.

So we don't do any of those cause we're thinking long term and, and it really helps, I don't know, keep me on the, you know, how should I put it, the right path of filtering for. What I say I'm doing, which is companies that are gonna change the world for the better over 50 year timeframes. Well, if I'm holding for 50 years, you know, that tends to be self-reinforcing.

Paul Shapiro: Right? All right. So let's talk about those numbers then. Mm-hmm. . So if you, if you Google your name and net worth, you got very, you get a very wide range. But you know, not to be untruthful. I'm [00:42:00]

Steve Jurveston: really disturbed by the way that A, you've done this and b, that it pops up as you just letter a few letters on my last name, the Google search.

Yeah. You know, algorithm suggests that that's what you'd wanna look for. Indeed, it

Paul Shapiro: does. Although, I will say it's actually a pretty common thing when you type in people's names for net worth to come up as a, as a suggestion. So if it makes you say any

Steve Jurveston: better, it's a sad reflection of humidity.

Paul Shapiro: Very sad.

Yeah. What do you do with that? It's also like height comes up. I mean, it's like a really Oh yeah. Yeah. So just start Googling, just start Googling people's names and see what it drops down. You'll see. I mean, it's, these are the things people care about. I mean, it's just the reality, you know, that's, Nobody's Googling.

How much good has Steve JSON done in the world? Sorry to tell you,

Steve Jurveston: but let me just tell you one thing. It's nothing podcast, but I have to share it now. Okay. Okay. Funniest Google exercise. A standup comic shared this type in. How come. And then a letter of the alphabet and then a model populate the most common questions that someone thought the phrase is.

How come? Okay. Well, we'll, and, and this is a certain segment of America. It is mind boggling. Wow. What comes

Paul Shapiro: up? Pick any letter. I can't wait to see. Yeah. I'm gonna do this. Mm-hmm. , I promise you I'll do it. And if [00:43:00] I see anything funny, it'll be in the show notes at at business for good podcast com. So, pretty impressing.

Yeah, so, so was much of the life. Yep. But I wouldn't be so unru as to ask you your network, but as you know, there are many articles out there saying that, you know, this guy's worth a couple billion dollars. And they refer, they constantly are referring to these articles, say billionaire, Steve Json. I've talked to many billionaires and you know, many of them, they have yachts, they have got private queens.

I mean, you don't have a yacht. That's right. You don't have any private plan. Nope. One time I talked to you, you were in an airport, you were getting off of Southwest, you said mm-hmm. From what I can, Are

Steve Jurveston: we flying it again next month?

Paul Shapiro: I know you're on Southwest next month, right? San Diego, Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And so my question is like, what do you do with your money? Like, cuz you know, you have all this money that's locked up in the shares of these companies, but you've had big exits for that. They were cash. And you know, like you have enough money to lead a comfortable wife. So what do you actually spend your

Steve Jurveston: money on?

Well, investment startup, so I invests, you know, the single biggest investment make is in. Future Ventures fund. Cause

Paul Shapiro: I like, why not? So you, you're an LP in Future Ventures as well? About 5% of the fund.

Steve Jurveston: [00:44:00] And again, most of the investments are shares and so they're not, unless I sell them and I'm not selling them, they just accumulate and I give 'em the charity.

Mm-hmm. . So I basically, I'm trying to become smarter as a FLA for us. There's a couple major themes that my wife and I are super passionate about. We're learning, right? And we, I realized, looking back 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I donated to things I didn't care as much about, I mean, the report land conservation, for example, moderately important, but not, it's so incremental and so localized.

Anyway, so So, so there's other things that have been intrigue me, and then I just sort of just accumulates. I, I just don't need things I like, right? Like, I enjoy experiences with people. Meaning I would enjoy going on someone else's boat or someone else's plane to an interesting place to have some fun.

But I don't really see it as a good use of money to spend on these things myself and also incredibly wasteful resources. Yeah, it's insane, right? Yachting in particular. So I mean, power yachts not sailboats, right? So I just, you know, accumulates our space artifacts, but that doesn't really add up to that much.

So what

Paul Shapiro: if you had more, you know, [00:45:00] let's say some event occurred and you had a hundred million dollars more than you do now, would it, would you do something different? Manual life? Wow.

Steve Jurveston: No. That, that, and that fluctuation happens sometimes the month and, and so I think I lost a hundred million already this month.

Yep. .

Paul Shapiro: Okay. So your life maybe because of your wealth or maybe because of the success that you've had with picking all these companies like you, you have had much higher than market returns. Like if somebody just put their money with you, they're not getting like the average like s and p 507% on average per year.

What are they getting with you? If somebody invests in, in future ventures and obviously past performancest guarantee future performance, but what do you tell 'em? Like, Hey, here's what my investments have averaged over the time. What, what? Well, generally we

Steve Jurveston: don't answer it. I, I will. No one's asked me this before, believe it or not that it is, that is, they might in private the conversations. Yeah. And, and, and we never broadcast it. You won't find it written ever anywhere online, so that probably shouldn't answer. So let me, I'll weigh my hands a little bit. It's, it's over 40% annual compounded so far, but it's early days to future ventures.

This firm is four years old, you [00:46:00] know. Wouldn't normally measure, normally a venture fund by the early stage venture fund. The irr, meaning the annual rate of return, is negative for the first year or two. It's called the J curve. Yeah, not named after me, but it's a phenomenon that looks like a J because you're incurring expenses, you don't have any IPOs yet, right?

In the first year or two, you don't have any acquisitions of companies. So what's generating value? And, you know, private markets come later, So make a long story short. Nevertheless, we're up above 40. In both our funds and then also going back five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. I think in 25 years it's the same above 40%.

Yeah. Throughout

Paul Shapiro: my entire career. It's pretty substantial. I mean, so basically you're, you're beating the market by, you know, fourfold or, or fivefold, or even sixfold. I mean, that's that's, this is something to, to sneeze at. So, going back to my question though, so because you're generating those type of astronomical pun intended returns, And, and maybe, you know, just cuz of people's fascination with this of great means, like your life has become pretty public.

Like you end up you know, in the news because like Serge, Brandon, Elon Musk are at a party of yours. Or there's like, you know, [00:47:00] these, you know, the, the.

Steve Jurveston: So I'm really good about not letting that get out there. The first, the way the news got out is Elon shared a photo he took

Paul Shapiro: there, like, Oh my gosh. But yeah, I mean, you were in the news because, you know, with the Twitter acquisition stuff mm-hmm.

like they were saying, like you were texting Elon about people who you thought from Microsoft, he could, you know, hire and so on. Mm-hmm. , you know, things that you do in your day to day life end up making the new. So my question for you is this, like how does that impact how you live? Like you're saying you're good about not letting those type of things get out there, but knowing like, you know, you know, Steve JSON 25 years ago probably could have led a different type of life than Steve jts today.

And so how does it impact, like how you live knowing that merely text messaging a friend of yours might end up in the New York time?

Steve Jurveston: That's weird if you think about it. Like let that sink in a message that's completely unrelated. To anything suddenly becomes a public thing. It's kind of mind boggling. I didn't know that was

Paul Shapiro: possible.

Yeah. So that, like the fact that like text message you send to a friend might end up in the New York Times, how does that impact,

Steve Jurveston: And by the way, I'm [00:48:00] never even remotely implicated anything that's going on with that legal case. Yeah, I'm

Paul Shapiro: not, You're on the, you're completely on the opposite. Very

Steve Jurveston: on the outside.

Yeah. So it is even more bizarre, right. Okay. So it definitely makes me a little more gun shy. I'm a little slow learner in this regard of like, okay, I like years ago, would say things. You know, never email anything that you don't want to eventually see in the papers and be ashamed that, or embarrassed.

Right. So I, I've always known not to email something that might eventually become public. Mm-hmm. , it didn't occur to me that texting was equally just kind of dumbly, but like, Wow. And then things that don't seem embarrassing really. In context can become really embarrassing out of context, right? Like when shared did the way we do in modern media, let's take the salacious little tidbit and and blow it up, right?

Yeah. Or make it delicious when it's not. So that is difficult. And I think, you know, speaking beyond myself, I know for a variety of tech entrepreneurs and others who just love to have an all activity, they'd be able to kick back on a weekend and hang out with friends and, and the fact that everything they [00:49:00] do could end up in the press, like they confiscate cameras, they.

I mean, you have phones, right? The count, cate all phones at the door, all these headaches just to like, we don't really want, we like to have a party this weekend without even taking photos. Like, Right. Yeah. You have to do that. So I haven't stopped living my life, but it just, it's anxiety provoking and a lot more screening on who you invite to come over to your house.

It's like, do you trust everyone? And like, inevitably, I guess, I don't know if the press offers money or how they get people to talk about things that really they, it's like really,

Paul Shapiro: like, yeah. Some to me, I, I think that some people just may like to feel important that a national journalist wants to talk to them and they, but

Steve Jurveston: when they do it anonymously, it's kind of weird.

Yeah. It's like, why, why,

Paul Shapiro: why, why are you doing that? I don't know. It's mysterious to me. Yeah. You have led a illustrious career. You've had more success than those people ever dream of having. There's a lot of people out here who are listening to this show who are interested in having some type of success.

Maybe they're an investor, maybe they're an entrepreneur, maybe they're end up being both of them at some point in their life. [00:50:00] What resources would you suggest to them? Anything you think that would be useful? Maybe it's been useful for you, or just that you recommend that you think they should check out?

Books, speeches, anything else that you think would be useful for them? For entrepreneurs in particular?

Steve Jurveston: Yep. So it's a tough one. The, the, It's tough because there's such diversity of entrepreneurship. So it'd be like saying, who should you model yourself after if you wanna be a successful ceo? Well, gosh, that's a not a simple answer.

There isn't in fact, a single role model. There isnt a single, and all our heroes are imperfect as Joseph Olin's song about. And everyone's different, right? So I would say certainly for venture capitalists, there's an enormous diversity of backgrounds that I think correlate with success in different models, different strategies.

Similarly for entrepreneurs, even more so, it's like it's all over the map, you know? Do you need to be an extrovert? No, of course not. Do you need to be. High basal metabolic rate, which I once thought, but then I realized, you know, in, in my own folley, that's what we call homo bias. Like, I think that what it takes to be successful in general is, you know, attributes that sound like myself, [00:51:00] right?

Like, do you speak quickly and articulately? You know, like whatever

Paul Shapiro: I might think of myself, I did. Start with, Well of course that's what it would take

Steve Jurveston: to succeed to be like me, right? But it, it takes conscious over coming to that to then look around at the data and say, Well, shit, people who are completely unlike me are doing quite well in venture capital with strategies that have nothing to do with technology centric investing, have nothing to do with changing the world for the better, or chasing the latest thing in crypto or gaming and whatever, and they're making money hand over this.

God bless, right? But that's not what I want to do. But I got acknowledge they're doing just fine. So same with entrepreneurship and. What one might read or consume might be slightly filtered by the belief I have that a many different backgrounds can be successful. B, having a co-founder that's cognitively diverse is probably more important than just thinking, do I have it all figured out?

So like, who do I wanna actually start this company with? Almost every great company I can think of has, has like a copilot. Sometimes they're invisible, like Larry Ellison had one in the form of Bob Miner, or they're very visible, you know, like Jobs and Nia Classic. [00:52:00] Example, everyone knows of, you know, there's extrovert, that's introvert, it's marketer's, engineer, They're as different as they come, like Laurel and Hardy, but they had respect for each other and built a culture that respect for cognitive diversity.

I think that unfolds from that. Same for Tim Draper when I joined him at Draper Associates and so forth. So that's one important guy. The second is therefore whatever advice I can give on, hey, read this book, follow this example, eh, it's gonna differ and in fact, the advice I would give on entrepreneurs, Think about what you uniquely can do in this world that there aren't a hundred other.

That could do it. So hopefully it correlates with what you're passionate about. But it could be something as bizarre as, Oh wow, I had to spend a big part of my life taking care of an elder parent who was sick and dying, and I happen to have interesting language skills in some other area. Well, okay, if I take those, what insight did that give me?

Perspective empathy, the AHA for helping with elder care, maybe in certain regions of the world that no one else is doing. Like I alone could do this. That could be, as an entrepreneur, an important field like my. You know, it's a great idea, but why am I the one that would go after this? And usually it's taking advantage of [00:53:00] something bizarre in your background that not everyone else shares, right.

Passion for animals, perhaps in your case. Whatever it might be. So then, given that there are of course, I think a synthesis abouts, there's been a lot of great, you know, books on entrepreneurs and leaders, Walter Isaacson's book come to mind. Whether it's, you know, his book on Steve Jobs here Exactly.

Steve Jobs, which I loved, or his new one on just starting on Jennifer Dudina. Or who, who invented crispr. Exactly. Yeah. Codebreakers is the name of that book. Or, you know, recent books I've read, like Founders by Jimmy Sony about PayPal. It's early days and since I gave the first term sheet to PayPal, I was just kind of curious on everything I missed having not invested in that one by not chasing it higher.

There's some other great books that I've loved. Basically just tracking people in their stories and, and the reason I say this more generally is some will resonate more from what you might know the founders than others and might go to those books. That sound amazing. I think those stories are really what we synthesize when we think about what correlates with success.

So I've found by the way that ever since I gave up drinking about four and a half years ago, that I could read books again at night instead of having to drink every night. It just, it's astounding to [00:54:00] reclaim that it's something that could, for many people, re perceived as a superpower. In fact, I think the Baldon says, like his superpower is, he reads a lot.

And like just do it. And I only you the too, So this, this is, I see you smiling. I mean, I'm preaching to the choir, but if you were to read a book every two weeks, In areas that seem like a random walk around what you're interested in, you're gonna be so much more capable than those who don't. Cause there's that long form.

Thinking someone actually to synthesize their thoughts into a book format makes it very different from me. Just scroll hauling through social media all day long. Right. You know, as your spare time.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. So I am smiling for the reason you noted one, I I, I do try to read a lot, but I, I have tried to maximize my time while reading, and so I have a rule that.

Only read while walking on a treadmill. And so I can get in any type of cardio I want to get in for that day while reading. So good light pack. Yeah, it's definitely like, you know, feeding two birds with one SCO to use an animal friendlier version of that, of that thing there. Yeah, I was also smiling cuz you're talking about how you don't drink and I was thinking, you know, Very few people don't drink.

I am one of them who [00:55:00] also doesn't drink. Mm-hmm. . And I do think that one day we will both share not only a teetotaling behavior, but in a mee toting behavior. We'll see. We'll see what, Oh, I know.

Steve Jurveston: I'll with you. We'll see what you got. I'll be with you. I was for six months and then I fell off the wagon.

Yeah, you're one

Paul Shapiro: of, you're one of the 90% finally 7,000 pitches per year. But obviously there are companies that you want to see. So what other. That don't exist, but you hope somebody will exist or, or will create, will bring into existence?

Steve Jurveston: So one that I can't really define very well is something that will radically improve construction.

By the way, so I think an epiphany that occurred in some later stage investors and public market people was like, Wow, look what Tesla did the automotive, look what SpaceX did. The aerospace like no competitive response from incumbents, massive, formally unattractive industries, frankly, became radically restructured as a software centric, simulation driven kind of business with dynamic change in excitement once again.

Right. So much more life in the automotive and aerospace sector than before. Construction's kind of like that, right? 30 years of backwards backsliding on the labor productivity. A huge construction project across the [00:56:00] street. As we're recording this, I've watched this take over a year to build. It's just insane.

The way construction is has not approved and it's growing. This presented gdp, so just, I don't know what the solution is, but. 50 years from now, this should be automated, digitized in many different ways, whether it's prefab, you know, something,

Paul Shapiro: right? It could just be autocracies like China. I mean, they, they seem, Oh yeah, a hundred x faster is feedback struck quickly, Tweeted,

Steve Jurveston: Yeah, I don't know if that's the answer or, because they also tend to make these just completely homogenous looking stamp and

Paul Shapiro: repeat.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Also list parts like pretty, pretty bad for the environment too. Yep. Okay,

Steve Jurveston: so that's one, but I don't have the answer. Here's one where a more precise answer to your, Kind of like I said five, you know, 10 years ago I put out this thing saying, Hey, who can figure out how to scale settler manufacturing as we call today?

In a way that was believable. I want to invest in that there. I only have one of those currently outstanding, like a specific thing I wanna see someone do, and that is what I affectionately call free healthcare forever. The idea is the vast majority of healthcare is diagnosis, not surgery. And if you need, if you need to do something, it's like take this pill or what have you.

Right? And, and for most of the [00:57:00] developing world, it die real diseases. And this is like it. You could do a lot over a cell phone. So the, the idea I have is you're gonna have the next two, 3 billion coming online, like the startling pre preposition. You can't, I can't imagine a future given current income disparity that I think will continue growing.

For reasons we can get into if you want. Where we'll have a stable future in a society we wanna live in. If basic human needs are not provided for, if basic human needs at the bottom line as how food, shelter, clothing, and I would education in healthcare, right. And education's being in free online education.

I, That one's being addressed. I strangely, I think food, shelter, and clothing are gonna gimme, everything's gonna cost a dollar a pound in the future and is not gonna be the thing that you're, How should I put it? Starving for. But healthcare is, it's currently broken. It's not available to many people, even within rich countries.

It's not good and not available to a lot of people, and it's just completely outta control. So what would be an alternative? I can't imagine a future where you'd pay for information, search on health. Like what's my situation and what should I do about it [00:58:00] is like a Google search for your personal health.

Given all of the advancements being made across the medical field, that should. Because like Google, there's all kinds of other ways to make money on a true, unbiased AI that provides information on what to do. So what I'm envisioning is something that bootstraps in the developing world, probably from a company not based in America, that is ignoring the fda, is ignoring reimbursement insurance.

Just like I'm never gonna talk to a regulatory body, I'm never gonna talk to an insurance company. I can actually help. Right, and this is time to get started cuz people need to trust this product in it's legend years. So I don't know how you get started, but I've seen a bunch of people with proposals on how to get started who are trying to do this.

But probably for less than 10 million you'd be bootstrap this business get started. If you could find adoption and you'd have the most data, cuz the ti for tap would be, I will give you the best unadulterated information. Yes, you should take this pill. No. Or you should go in and see a real doctor in, in the village of your far, far away from the.

In exchange, you're just telling me what happened. It's basically real world outcomes, . So the only thing you gotta give back as [00:59:00] a consumer is you tell me what you did and did it, Did you take the, you know, local shaman's, you know, route. Sure. Tell me if he did. Did it get better? Did you take an aspirin and call me in the morning, Call me ignoring, Tell me if the aspirin worked.

That ti or tap is the base core of the data feed. We don't have it today. The fact that we don't close that feedback loop is astounding. You'd have the best AI soon on planet Earth, and I think it starts with a voice interface. So illiterate people open and access it as well as literate. And eventually we'll be better because of the.

And by crude analogy, the best eye surgery is on these clinics in India that do it all day long, right? Like set up for the experience curve. The physicians have done the most procedures. They have the best success rate, not surprisingly, at that eye surgery. Similarly, with the most data, you're gonna have the best ai, you know, the best diagnostic tool in the industry.

So eventually it'll switch to these cameras to bring your dermatology analysis, you know, and all kinds of other things you can use with the camera that comes later. But initially it's just gonna be like, Tell me what? Tell me what you got and I'll help you out.

Paul Shapiro: Well, you heard it here, what Steve Jerson is looking for to exist that [01:00:00] doesn't yet exist.

I, I had a great time in the conversation as a lot I still want to talk about maybe some other time, especially Russia and Ukraine, which we, I know you have very strong views on not just socially but also from an investment perspective. So some other time we'll talk about that in a whole host of other things.

And I hope that somebody pitches you on this free healthcare forever, Please uh, idea as well. So Steve, great to talk with you. Thanks so much and I will be rooting for your continued success.

Steve Jurveston: Aw, thank you.