Not Tim Draper

"How did you KNOW Tesla would succeed?"

I didn't.

But I did the math.

And the numbers said: If this works, it's going to work REALLY big.

That's the calculation most VCs refuse to make. They want certainty. They want "safe bets."

But the safe ones aren't as safe as you think. And the risky ones aren't as risky as you think.

The difference is that the “risky” ones have 100x potential. The safe ones have 3x potential.

When you actually do the math, the odds of success are about the same.

So I'll take the weird founder with the crazy idea over the polished founder with the "proven model" any day.

One of them might change the world. The other one is among other “start” copycats.

What if treating mental health didn’t mean taking a pill every day for the rest of your life? We invested in Eywa Biotech because they are building for a different future. Moving mental healthcare from chronic daily medication toward medicines that can create meaningful, lasting change with one or a few treatments.

Now they are taking orders for their first GMP psilocybin capsules in 25mg, 5mg and placebo.

They are being produced for clinical trials and research, and for regulated and emerging markets including Australia, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.

Researchers, clinics and pharmaceutical companies interested in working with Eywa can reach victoria@eywa.bio or pablo@eywa.bio.

And they’re not stopping there. Victoria Costa Paz and her team are using synthetic biology to make these medicines more accessible and scalable.

Wow! I am in good company!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2026/09/24/forbes-250-americas-most-successful-living-builders/

I listed my island in Tanzania for sale and the offers started rolling in. Gold mines, houses, cows. One gentleman offered $1 with a promise to pay the rest when he could.

I admire the creativity.

The @NewYorkPost wrote the whole thing up.

Lupita started as a wacky idea after a family safari in 2004. Building a resort on an uninhabited island accessible only by boat sounded like a terrible plan. It turned out to be one of the great joys of my life. We just do not use it enough anymore.

$7.9 million or best offer. The cows are still under consideration.

Being interviewed live on TBOY podcast tomorrow night 7:00 pm at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Tickets still available. @tboypod

AI will take everyone’s jobs.

... until they invent new ones.

AI alone probably won’t take your job.

But someone using AI might. So you should lean in to AI.

People react to new technologies in three ways:

1. The Resisters: "AI is ruining everything!"
2. The Ignorers: “I don’t understand AI.”
3. The Adopters: "How can I use this to get better?"

It's not AI vs. humans. It's humans with AI vs. humans without AI.

We’re not cutting our team because of AI.

We’re GROWING it.

Our team with AI can accomplish 10x more than our team without it.

Businesses without websites died in the 90s.

Same thing is happening now.

If you're not experimenting with AI in your industry, someone else is.

And they're going to serve your customers better.

Faster.

Cheaper.

The buggy whip makers of the 1800s became car mechanics.

They pivoted or perished.

Which camp are you in?

I sat down with Kyle Chassé for a wide-ranging conversation, and he asked the kind of questions that let me get into the ideas I care about.

A few of the things covered:

Bitcoin as life management, not just portfolio management

A family needs runway. A corporate treasurer needs to make payroll no matter what happens to the banking system. Six months of runway in Bitcoin is a hedge against chaos, and I watched that lesson play out when Silicon Valley Bank went down.

Stablecoins as a bridge

They get people comfortable with digital payments and on-chain life. A positive step, even though a coin tied to the dollar inherits the dollar's problems.

The frictionless business

Imagine raising a fund in Bitcoin, entrepreneurs paying employees, suppliers, and taxes in Bitcoin, everything on-chain in smart contracts. Money that moves faster makes society wealthier. Gold and shells slowed the economy down. Bitcoin speeds it up.

AI and your job

You do not have to quit to innovate. Improve your job with AI, get better at it, and let the leadership around you encourage it. The saddle makers became car mechanics. The mathematicians figured out the computer.

Thanks for having me on, Kyle.

Go listen to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_X6x2UiQhg

At the Draper Summit, I got to share the stage with my son Adam Draper (Boost VC), former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, Co-Founder of Robinhood, Baiju Bhatt, Stanford President, Jonathan Levin, Education visionary, Sal Khan, Former Dallas Fed Chairman, Robert Kaplan, and Brit Harris, former CIO of UTIMCO.

The energy was incredible.

Entrepreneurs from over 50 countries, venture capitalists from over 50 firms, and over 50 corporate partners assembled for amazing speeches, pitches, and general networking.

Entrepreneurs come away with new relationships, new customers, new business models, and new investors.

The Draper Summit is extraordinary.

We recently published an article on how we’re building our own internal AI infrastructure for VC here at Draper. Custom workflows to help our team gather information faster, so they can get back to the true human work in VC: meeting with and being present with founders.

In 1985, I built my deal flow by knocking on the doors of the ten or so venture capitalists that existed and asking them to send me the deals they were declining. I needed to build knowledge so I could build judgment.

Forty years later, the team at Draper Associates built something I could only have dreamed of back then:

-One centralized database that holds a singular record per company that has all our internal data as well as enriched data from outside verified sources like Harmonic

-A machine learning model, trained on 40+ years of successes and passes, that reads the hundreds of deals we get every week and surfaces the best fits directly to the investment team

-A brief on every meeting before we walk in

-Warm intros drafted from a network of 15,000+ contacts

-Answers to any question from our own records in plain English across 400+ portfolio companies (and an extra info assist from our Harmonic API)

The AI/ML infrastructure handles the routine work, but judgment remains human: sitting across from a founder, recognizing a missionary, making the call while the idea still sounds crazy.

Now there are more hours for exactly that.

Read more about how we built this system, philosophically and practically: https://www.draper.vc/newsroom/how-we-built-drapers-ai-stack

Back in April, I wrote about one of our newer portfolio companies, HexemBio, and their idea that reframed aging for me: people don’t die of old age, they die of aging blood. As blood stem cells decline, immunity weakens and disease follows.

We invested because they rejuvenate a patient’s own cells instead of reprogramming them.

Now they’re unveiling a three-generation product line off of their core technology. The transplant therapy program, an injectable, and a skin and wound product.

That’s all that you can hope for when you back foundational science. You invest in one massive idea that turns into several products that can change the face of healthcare, because the underlying insight is so strong.

Congratulations to Gabriel Levesque Tremblay and team. We’re looking forward to what’s coming next!

My dad gave me a MILLION Confederate dollar bill when I was a kid.

When I asked him what I could do with it, he said, "Nothing."

That's what's coming for the US dollar.

First, a few retailers will say, "we accept Bitcoin” and then a few will say, "we ONLY accept Bitcoin."

The moment that happens, people will panic and run to the bank. They’ll pull their dollars out and convert to Bitcoin.

Please own some Bitcoin, so you don’t panic when people don’t accept your dollars.

This is why I'm telling everyone the same three things right now:

1. Buy enough Bitcoin to keep your family alive for 6 months.
2. If you run a company, hold enough Bitcoin to pay your employees for 4 weeks.
3. If you manage a government treasury, put some percentage in Bitcoin.

Full conversation with Coinage is linked below.

👇

My amazing dad, Bill Draper died yesterday. He was the best! We were so lucky to have him with us as long as we did. I know he touched many of your lives.

@PoseidonAero just closed a $60M Series A to build autonomous cargo planes from the ground up.

Autonomous aircraft carrying cargo sounds wacky to some people today. So did an electric car company. So did internet phone calls. So did digital money.

Every big idea I have ever backed went through the phase where the consensus called it impossible, and the entrepreneur saw beyond that.

Air logistics is a massive industry running on decades-old assumptions: pilots in every cockpit, planes designed around a crew. Remove those assumptions and you get to rethink the entire aircraft.

That is exactly the kind of rethink I look for, a team that does not want to just improve the existing model but replace it.

The Poseidon team is building for a world the incumbents cannot see yet.

Congratulations on the round.

I have a t-shirt that says Decentralize Everything. That is 40 years of observation compressed into two words, and I finally wrote the argument down as the first guest contributor to @CryptoniteRap.

The piece is about DeSci, decentralized science.

Every institution stagnates the same way. A small group ends up controlling the agenda, that group gets invested in the current framework, and challenging the consensus becomes a career risk. I have watched it in banking, telecom, rocketry, and now science.

After 40 years I boiled it down to two rules.

1- The Draper Equation: the likelihood that a society needs to rethink an industry is proportional to the number of people benefiting from existing theories without change.

2- The Draper Corollary: the more centralized the decision-making, the less innovation occurs. The more decentralized the operations, the more innovation occurs and the faster that sector grows.

The consensus mocked Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, Bitcoin, and SpaceX too. Every time, mockery was an excellent signal.

Read the full editorial: https://cryptoniteventures.substack.com/p/tim-draper-guest-editorial-on-desci

A wonderful perspective. Honor the workers, and the workers who created the tools that made them productive. Market Day. Great concept. https://open.substack.com/pub/cboyack/p/labor-day-why-not-market-day?r=17pb9&utm_medium=ios

An idea is like a keepsake.

Hide it, and you forget where it was.

Spread it to the world, and it grows more interesting and valuable.

Every time I give away one idea, I seem to get three more.

Don't worry about who gets the credit. Just move the technological ball forward.

When you go off the main path and do something else, then apply it back to the main path… the path gets more extraordinary.

I started @draper_u just to help entrepreneurs get started.

Now it's a major pre-accelerator, a great source of deal flow, a powerful network connector for my venture business.

Elon does this at scale:

→ SpaceX + Tesla + Battery factory + Starlink all helping each other

→ Connecting Starlink to cars

→ Twitter (X) + XAI using Twitter's data for better AI

→ That AI is improving space, cars, batteries

Synergies take time. You need a long vision.

But when you go deep into one category, then another, you can start thinking about how they mesh.

People ask where my optimism comes from.

When I was younger, I played football. I joined five benchwarmers in a challenge against the 6 best athletes on the team.

So...it seemed hopeless.

So we changed the game.

We ran routes they weren’t expecting.

We lined up in ways that confused them.

And we humiliated them.

As cliché as it may sound, that moment taught me everything: Anything is possible. There is always a way. The underdogs always have a shot. Try anything.

In my VC career, I had a couple early investment wins that nobody expected. Same lesson, different stakes.

That's why I invest the way I do. That's why I back the founders other VCs pass on. They are underdogs. They are trying new possibilities.

All because I've SEEN the benchwarmers win. Again and again.

They can always surprise you.

I am selling my island in Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania. Gorgeous place, but we don’t use it enough. $7.9 million or best offer. Anyone interested should contact me directly at tim@draper.vc

Independent Institute (@IndependentInst) just launched their 4th season of the hit dark comedy, “Love Gov 4”.

Gov is a character that keeps offering to help and protect the citizen, but really only wants to control her. Sound familiar? Watch it for a dark laugh.

Here is its home page: https://www.independent.org/lovegov/

Independent institute also provides us with Government Cost Calculator, MyGovCost (https://www.independent.org/mygovcost/), that seeks to increase awareness of young people of the true costs—including opportunity costs—of big government.

The new calculator produces personalized graphs that users are encouraged to share across social media.