Draper Associates @DraperVC

Congrats to the OpenYield team on the $6M raise led by @levelmarkets Excited to be part of it with @DraperVC Bringing equity-style transparency, speed, and firm pricing to the $150T fixed-income market is exactly the kind of modernization bond trading needs. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

In 1983, Heidi Roizen and her brother Peter Roizen founded T/Maker. It was a software company built to serve a market that barely existed yet. They started on CP/M and MS-DOS platforms, building digital image libraries. When Apple launched the Macintosh in 1984, they expanded into it fast. Their Mac product, ClickArt, became one of the defining applications of the early desktop publishing era. We backed them through Draper Associates II because a document without visual language looked unfinished, and most people didn't have access to professional designers. T/Maker solved that. ClickArt put a visual vocabulary in the hands of anyone with a Macintosh. What made Heidi and Peter the right founders to back wasn't the product. It was the instinct. The software problem wasn't the hard part. The hard part was seeing which problem to solve at the precise moment the hardware made it solvable. T/Maker grew and was acquired by Deluxe Corporation in 1994. If you're building something the market hasn't understood yet, you know where to find us.

We backed Tesla before the money ran out, before the NUMMI plant, before 8.5 million cars. Here is how we got there. Ian Wright came by the DFJ office and gave Steve Jurvetson and Tim a ride in his WrightMobile, an early electric vehicle held together with PVC pipes and duct tape. It took off like a rocket. Both of them felt like the world was never going to be the same. That feeling led to Martin Eberhard and the first real conversation about Tesla's architecture. Small lithium-ion batteries running in parallel, software that routes around failure so the passenger always arrives. A fundamentally different category of machine, not a refinement of the one it was replacing. We invested. Within a year, the company was out of money. Elon Musk offered to take over management and put in $6.5 million of his own. He persuaded the US government to loan Tesla $465 million, acquired the NUMMI plant from Toyota and converted it, and said the cars were going to be built. He was right. Tesla has now sold over 8.5 million cars. Nearly every major automaker has followed suit. Electric vehicles are now the standard. At Hero City in San Mateo, there's a Tesla Model S chassis that an artist converted into a reception desk. Built-in desk, drawers, and shelving. We call it the Deskla. When Tim told Elon he wanted to build it, Elon said to take a chassis from the factory. The license plate on Tim's truck that day read RISK MR. That plate still fits the story. From a jalopy strapped together with tape to over 8.5 million cars on the road, Tesla is what happens when founders are missionaries about the mission and VCs back conviction before the outcome is clear. That's the only way to be first.

Incredibly excited to be a part of NewLimit’s story. Their commitment to expanding human life is a mission that’s easy to get behind. Their medicine creation timeline has shrank from 10+ years to next year. Proud to be a part of the work that they’re doing! Congrats to Jacob Kimmel and the whole NewLimit team on their Series C.

MONSTER CONTRACT WOW congrats @navierboat

Navier @navierboat

a week ago

100 electric hydrofoil boats. A ~$100M contract. We are building a first-of-its-kind water transit network to transform how people move across the Maldives. To scale this, we are partnering with Dubai-based JIH and its Maldives affiliate HARIM, led by Mohamed Ali Janah — a team

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Tim met Ted Leonsis at a Preview Travel board meeting. You know how some people walk into a room and everyone just feels better? That's Ted. In 1983, he had a near-death experience on an airplane. After landing safely, he sat down, and wrote out 101 life goals. All the things he wanted to do before he died. The list included: "#20. Start a company and sell it." "#22. Create world's largest media company." "#40. Own a sports franchise." "#41. Win a world championship." He built Redgate (one of the first technology media companies). He sold it to AOL and joined Steve Case and helped build AOL into what it became. He did well enough on AOL stock to buy the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals. Then the Capitals won the Stanley Cup. Write the list. Then go build it.

So excited about my latest investment in education with Edvisor (edvisor.ai)! They're shaking up higher ed at institutions like Berkeley, Duke and 50+ others! The $200B educational materials market has barely changed in decades, and there is an enormous opportunity to transform the industry. When an industry operates as a monopoly or oligopoly and provides poor service at a high price, there is an opportunity for a startup to take new technology and have a forcing function that makes the customer (the student) receive a better service for a lower cost. Edvisor is doing just that.

We're excited to lead Edvisor's Pre-Seed round. They're taking on the dinosaurs of the textbook industry and reinventing learning for the AI-era. Students are paying $150 for a static textbook they barely use. Degrees keep getting more expensive without teaching students skills for an AI-native world. Students and employers are rightly questioning the degree's usefulness. Edvisor (edvisor.ai) is rebuilding higher education for the AI-native world. The answer isn't more chatbots. Classrooms need to be redesigned from the ground up with AI in mind. Edvisor allows courses to be redesigned in minutes. Not weeks. Saves educators a 100 hours per semester and teaches students vital AI-fluency before they even graduate. In just a year Edvisor is live at over 50 universities including Berkeley, Duke, and more.

The best pitch Tim ever heard came from a guy swimming in a pool. 🏊‍♂️ Jim Hornthal, founder of Preview Travel, swam over to Tim in John Goodrich's pool and started talking fast. Tim had to slow him down just to make sense of his ramblings. According to Tim… that's usually a good sign. Jim was building a video/travel company smack in the middle of a time when nobody thought the internet could handle that kind of business. Bandwidth was a massive bottleneck so the idea looked early at best and asinine at worst. Tim backed him. Preview Travel went public in 1997 and then merged with Travelocity in 2000. This is the Draper pattern… Innovation sounds wrong until it's obvious. That window between wrong and obvious is exactly where we invest.

We got about 1,000 applicants for our Hawai’i episode. 🤙 Four made it on stage. Last week, we filmed Season 10 of Meet the Drapers in Kāneʻohe, Hawaiʻi, with the Ko'olau Mountains behind us. Marc Benioff and Chenoa Farnsworth from Blue Startups joined as guest judges and heard pitches from four founders with ties to the Islands: → Miki Hardisty: ʻŌlelo Intelligence, Waimānalo → Kevin Davies: Energy Quotient, Honolulu → Bernard Mendez: Black Sand, Maui → Ioana Cuzmata: G-Space, Sunnyvale Ioana advanced to the semifinals, where she'll compete against roughly 10 winners from other cities. Three finalists will compete for a $1M investment. Three more will be chosen by a global viewer vote. The reason why we decided to go to Hawai’i was summed up by something Miki Hardisty said during the episode, "You can't just have defense and large enterprise and tourism. We need more diversity in the types of businesses we have. Hawaiʻi was built on small business." Hawaiʻi has a real tech ecosystem growing. It's early, but the talent is there, the community is building, and founders like these four are proof of it. "Building a business is not for the faint of heart," Miki said after her pitch. "But you don't have to do it alone." That's the point of Meet the Drapers.

A friend of mine had her embryos screened by Herasight and they found one with an IQ score in the 99.99th percentile

Bitcoin is the largest idle asset in the world. I backed Zest Protocol because they're the team putting BTC to work. BTC-backed lending is a trillion dollar market and @ZestProtocol has the track record to win it.

$1.5T in BTC sits idle. Borrowing against it without giving up custody changes that. Zest Protocol lead investor @TimDraper on what the team means for the Bitcoin economy.

We are only just beginning to help our users, such as @goon_crypto, @PoodleFi_, @iMithrandir_, @PolVirtuals, etc unlock earnings through $FACY access to our Truth Terminal ("TT"). Once our TT users reliably turn into Polymarket sharks, we will set up mechanisms so that premium features lead to payback and burns of $FACY. Anyone else interested in learning how to become a Polymarket Shark and helping us improve the TT? Please join our TG channel today in the link below ⤵️

Virtuals Protocol @virtuals_io

3 weeks ago

finding deltas between prediction market prices and source-based reasoning - cool terminal from @ArAIstotle

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Salt Lake Business Journal covered our Meet the Drapers event in Salt Lake City! ICYMI, Shurugwi Prime Breeders won $20,000 as part of the Tim Draper Utah Entrepreneur Challenge. The founder (Liya Ngabola) is a student at Ensign College and her company raises chickens and creates jobs in Zimbabwe. The event was hosted by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute at the University of Utah. Dozens of teams from schools across Utah showed up to compete and more than $75,000 in awards were given. Thank you to Salt Lake Business Journal for covering the event and thank you to the student entrepreneurs for coming out! slenterprise.com/index.php/news…

Advice to founders: “Hire slow, fire fast.” Everyone says that, but only a few actually follow it. Here’s what hiring slow actually means: "Wait until the wheels are coming off your business to add a new person. Wait until people are screaming at you that they've missed, you know, their kid’s baseball game four weekends in a row and they just can't handle it anymore..." And on firing fast: "If somebody is in there and they just don't seem to be pulling their weight... think of them as if you're in a boat, you're in a refugee boat and you're all paddling forward and there's one person paddling back the other way. You don't need that in the boat. And if you need to let them go tell them, look, you're a great person, these are your strengths, they're fantastic, but they're not a good fit for what we're doing here... There's always a better job for somebody if they're not really helping you."

CredShields is now the official Audit Partner of Canton Network. 🎉 Canton processes $8 trillion in tokenized transaction volume every month and settles $350 billion daily in on-chain U.S. Treasuries. The biggest financial institutions in the world are moving real assets onto this infrastructure right now (HSBC and JPMorgan to name a couple). Canton's privacy architecture lets each participant control exactly who sees what at the sub-transaction level. CredShields was built specifically for this with smart contract audits for Daml-based applications, AI-powered risk detection, and continuous monitoring for on-chain environments. Institutional finance is accelerating onto blockchain infrastructure faster than most people realize and the security layer has to keep up. Congrats to Shashank and the entire CredShields team. 🔐

52 pitches in 52 minutes. All below 40 degrees. I've sat through thousands of pitches over 40 years inside conference rooms, coffee shops, Zoom calls, and pretty much any venue you could think of. The ones that stick out are the ones where a founder is so convicted they'll pitch through anything. So… I took 52 pitches in 52 minutes sitting in an ice bath at below 40 degrees. What I was watching for was the founder. How do they carry themselves when conditions are uncomfortable? When the circumstances aren't ideal and the room (or in this case, the water) is working against them? Pitching through stress is practice for everything that comes after. For the moments, where inevitably, everything is harder than they thought it would be. Great founders push through it all to find success, and that's why founders are heroes. I'm not a frequent cold plunger, but it was a fun experience! Next time, we need the Guinness Book of World Records there. Have an idea you want me to hear? Meet me in the ice bath. 🧊 Thanks to Business Insider for covering: businessinsider.com/tim-draper-sta…

Excited for Consensus to announce their Series B ($30M)! 2.5 million researchers are using Consensus right now to find papers, validate claims, and move their projects forward faster. The goal from here is to reach the next 10M researchers and build the operating system for how research gets done. Congrats to the team on a well-earned milestone!