Steve Jurvetson

Steve Jurvetson is an early-stage venture capitalist best known for leading foundational investments in SpaceX and Tesla. He began his career as an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where several of his chip designs were fabricated, and later held product marketing roles at Apple and NeXT before working in management consulting at Bain & Company. He completed his undergraduate Electrical Engineering degree at Stanford in 2.5 years, graduating first in his class, and went on to earn an MSEE and an MBA, also from Stanford.

For roughly two decades Jurvetson was a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), the firm that bore his name, where he built a track record of early bets on Hotmail, Baidu, Skype, Interwoven, and others, and led founding investments in five companies that went public. He departed DFJ in November 2017 and, in April 2018, co-founded Future Ventures alongside Maryanna Saenko, refocusing on deep-tech and frontier-technology companies.

Jurvetson has held influential board seats, including Tesla (2009–December 2020), SpaceX (current), Planet Labs, D-Wave Systems, Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel in 2016), and Synthetic Genomics. He was appointed by President Barack Obama as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, has appeared multiple times on the Forbes Midas List (2011–2016), and was named "Venture Capitalist of the Year" by Deloitte. Future Ventures today manages roughly $1.3 billion across its funds.

• Invests in founder-led, mission-driven companies "at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation."
• Concentrates on frontier / deep tech: space, AI and deep learning, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, robotics, synthetic biology, and cultivated meat / sustainable agriculture.
• Leads or co-leads early founding rounds and takes a long-horizon, conviction-driven approach — he has publicly said he has "never sold a share in any company he holds," reflecting a buy-and-hold, decades-long mindset.
• Emphasizes market timing and backing category-defining founders rather than incremental businesses; comfortable with capital-intensive, technically hard "moonshot" bets others avoid.
• Future Ventures' most recent fund (~$169M) was explicitly oriented toward AI, alongside continued space and deep-tech investing.