Tim Draper

Tim Draper is a third-generation venture capitalist, widely nicknamed "The Risk Master of Silicon Valley." He was born June 11, 1958, in East Chicago, Indiana, and moved to California as an infant when his family joined his grandfather, William Henry Draper Jr., at Draper, Gaither and Anderson — often cited as one of Silicon Valley's first venture capital firms, founded in 1957. His father, William H. Draper III, was also a prominent VC and head of the U.S. Export-Import Bank and UNDP. Tim earned a BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University (1980) and an MBA from Harvard Business School (1984), and holds two honorary doctorates. He began his career briefly at the investment bank Alex. Brown & Sons.

In 1985 Draper founded Draper Associates. John Fisher joined in 1991 and Steve Jurvetson in 1994, and by 1997 the firm was known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), which became one of the most influential early-stage funds of its era. Draper also built out the Draper Venture Network, a global affiliation of regional venture funds, extending his reach into China, Europe, India and beyond. He is credited with pioneering "viral marketing" — the concept originated with the famous "P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail" footer attached to outgoing Hotmail messages, a growth tactic still copied by consumer startups today.

Beyond investing, Draper is an educator and civic activist. In 2011 he bought a historic 1927 hotel in downtown San Mateo and in 2012 opened Draper University, an entrepreneurship school that has graduated thousands of alumni from over 100 countries who have launched thousands of companies. He also founded BizWorld (youth entrepreneurship education) and Innovate Your State (government innovation), and co-created the reality TV pitch show "Meet the Drapers." He is one of the best-known evangelists for Bitcoin and blockchain, famously winning a 2014 U.S. Marshals Service auction for nearly 30,000 bitcoin seized in the Silk Road case, paying roughly $18.7M (about $632/BTC) — a position now worth billions.

• Contrarian by design: Draper's stated approach is to "find the thing everyone else thinks is either crazy or finished, develop a specific and testable reason to believe in it, and hold longer than the market expects." He avoids crowded categories — if 100 competitors are doing the same thing, "it's already too late" and becomes a race to the bottom.
• Funds "rebellions": He describes backing controlled explosions — ideas so innovative they initially seem impossible or dangerous to the status quo.
• Founder traits he screens for: (1) Customer obsession — founders must "love," not merely understand, their customers; (2) Optimism — "Pessimists don't build trillion-dollar companies"; and (3) a "pro-noid" mentality — founders who operate as if the universe is conspiring to help them succeed.
• High risk tolerance: He openly expects ~60% of his investments to lose money, so he is not paralyzed by fear of failure; he focuses on how profoundly a startup could transform society if it works.
• Crypto maximalism: He is heavily concentrated in Bitcoin, blockchain, and 50+ crypto companies, and recommends corporate treasuries hold bitcoin reserves.