https://www.youtube.com/embed/iI5Dth5yC98
great tim i appreciate so much the time thanks so much for doing this for the german community great thanks for having me on your show julian hey i would uh love to kind of start off with a question that i had no clue that if this was a question that it was crowdsourced on twitter by someone and that's what i would what the love lead away with um someone on twitter said asked him if he would invest in a crypto project started by a 12 year old i didn't find anything on the internet about it i was like okay let me leave with that question and see where this takes us so yes the the answer is yes because i did um there's a company called pocketful of quarters that was a contestant with the 12 year old and his father were the 12 year old was a contestant very impressive guy on the show we've got meet the drapers and meet the drapers is a little like um a kinder gentler shark tank but the viewers can invest through crowdfunding and we now have 12 million viewers around the world and not that many in germany so we're looking forward to maybe some of them joining up but we did i backed him he's great and uh so far we've had an up round cool okay great nice uh to start with that i didn't know that okay let's go to some uh serious topics i would really love to kind of discuss a bit of some current uh things el salvador just announced that they were gonna accept bitcoin as legal tender there how do you see that and i would love to obviously tackle it a bit from a from a political also aspect i mean the imf has kind of voiced some concerns there would love to see how you think the us is going to deal with that uh yeah what are your thoughts on all that well first it makes me want to go visit el salvador um i we have something called the draper innovation index at draperhero.org and that is an index of all the countries in the world and how they are accepting of startups and innovation and really we're just measuring their trust and their freedom if you've got freedom and trust um that that's that's the best way to build a great economy the more freedom for people to innovate and try new things and the more trust and trustworthy and trusting a government is the richer it becomes and i can i might just use as an example um korea so korea um there was the war in korea and then they um for peace they drew a line between uh north korea and south korea and in the north they took on marx's philosophy a socialist dictatorship everything was government-controlled they all determined uh everybody's life was pretty much determined by the government how what they did what they ate all those things and in the south south korea it was completely a free market democracy capitalistic open system open borders uh free trade and now that experiment has gone 70 years and the average south korean now makes 460 times what the average north korean makes uh in a given year and uh and that is accounting for purchasing power and they are now four inches taller than the average north koreans so freedom works it just works so that's freedom trust my best example for trust is that that singapore used to be the poorest country in the world and it was very untrustworthy and uh people looked at the world as a zero-sum game if you for me to win you have to lose that kind of attitude and uh and then lee kuan yew came in there and he built trust in singapore one brick at a time just one year at a time he kept building more and more trust and now i would say singapore is the most trusting and trustworthy country in the world and it's one of the richest so the same 70 years has shown that trust is incredibly valuable um so you put those two things together and and you build for a great economy um el salvador has just shown that they recognize that trust and freedom are really important to them because bitcoin represents trust in that it is um they're trusting um a series of algorithms that are going to always be the same and always be uh taken seriously by um by everyone involved and they're all um watched over regularly by uh by a hundred thousand bitcoin miners uh and it's freedom in that they um that these this is a currency that you are that is open and transparent and global anyone can use it it's recognized the values recognized globally and uh and that makes it a um a good place to start for el salvador and um and i kind of look at el salvador as you know a poor untrustworthy untrusting government that is now looking and saying hey if we bring on bitcoin suddenly there is a store of value that everybody can trust people can build something of value they know that the government can't take away from you know if you're in a lot of countries in africa some in southeast asia if they if if you've built something of great value the government just comes in and either they take it or they inflate out of it and you you end up with nothing one of my friends from argentina said to me when he was pitching me his business that my family has built a fortune three times um and lost it to uh currency manipulation in argentina and and each time they've built the built the value and then lost it built the value lost it he said three times and i'm only 30 years old so during my lifetime uh every decade the government has completely taken away their the value that they created uh through currency manipulation el salvador has just said hey we have a currency you can trust so if you're an entrepreneur come here all of a sudden el salvador moves up 10 20 places on the draper innovation index so this is really exciting and um and and bitcoin is a great vehicle for a country to say hey we're in business we're allowing our people to earn to build something of great value and keep it for me personally when i invested the first time like first time i invested in bitcoin was 2014 when i invested serious amounts was 2015 and my thesis was never that of a cryptocurrency because i always mentally struggled that someone wants to use something as a currency that is deflationary and therefore probably sort of gonna appreciate in value rather than decrease in value do you see this as a possibility for them that actually things will be priced in bitcoin do you actually think people will use bitcoin as a currency or do you rather think it's a great escape mechanism whenever needed that people can leave the dollar whatever local currency to go into bitcoin and actually use it as a currency rather than just as a store of value as an asset well actually i've been when i went to tokyo the last time i saw um this this jewelry priced in um yen and priced in bitcoin um i think there are places all around the world that are starting to say hey um you can get it in dollars you can get in bitcoin you can get it in euros or you can get it in bitcoin when i went to buy a house they knew who i was and they knew i was big in bitcoin and they said hey you can pay us in bitcoin and i said no i've got diamond hands i don't want to give up and uh and the same thing when stanford was asking for money they didn't want dollars from me they wanted bitcoin so it's starting to be recognized as something that has a value across the board and actually a value that is not tied to any political force any government any um anybody who wants to inflate their economy you know their these fiat currencies are a thing of the past in fact somebody asked me or everybody asked me when are you going to sell your bitcoin and i say into what what would i possibly want to sell my bitcoin into take the currency of the future and turn it into the currency of the past it's like i want to take my euros and convert them to you know french market yeah yeah for deutsche yeah i i don't want to do that i want to go for the for the currency of the future and um so i look and i say this is what people will build businesses around and it's where they will they will look to how much bitcoin they are able to grow and that will be a determination of how much they've been able to store how much value they've been able to create and store uh so i think it's great and and knowing that it doesn't inflate whenever every all these fiat currencies are inflating people say but it's very volatile and i say wait a second no one bitcoin is still worth one bitcoin all these other currencies are very volatile as they slowly disappear from use and i think that's the way the world is moving and as these governments get more desperate they print more money they they're just showing their cards they're just showing that they they cannot handle a a flat they can't handle an economy that doesn't have inflation built in at the moment el salvador is pretty much the only soldier as a country kind of doing that do you see them japan was really first because right uh they accepted bitcoin as a currency um four years ago pretty sure that malta will take bitcoin anytime anywhere and uh and i'm i think there are several others but but uh el salvador made that statement just after that great bitcoin event in miami and i think that that uh that was very wise how do you see the u.s and the imf dealing with that i mean i i don't know i don't know this is great yeah i am i i you know i had this conversation with the president of argentina at the time president mccree and i'm i met with him in 2016 no 28 2017 whenever bitcoin hit 10 000.
I think 2017. and i said um i told him all about bitcoin i said you guys should put some of this into your national treasury whatever then i came back two years later and uh 2019 and bitcoin had fallen to four thousand dollars and i said you know i told you about bitcoin and it's gone from ten thousand to four thousand he goes yeah and i said you know but but the argentinian peso's gone from 75 cents down to 25 in the same time and i said i'll make you a bet if you um if if argentinian peso outperforms bitcoin in the next year then i will double my investment in argentina but if bitcoin outperforms you've got to make bitcoin a national currency and buy some for your treasury well if he had done that today they would have paid the imf everything they owed them their entire debt would have been clear but instead he just you know he got elected out and some socialist has come in and now all the brain drain leaving argentina going to uruguay to where the there is a much freer country um so the imf i mean this is the imf could have had their entire debt paid by argentina yeah maybe it doesn't like that maybe they want to lure this over argentina but argentina would have been cleared of their debts elizabeth warren just came out or two days ago three days ago and the voice and really based on some false facts uh negative concerns against bitcoin how do you see that you know i i think politicians are they're going through a learning process um i know you know janet yellen is also going through a learning process where at first she said oh it's all criminals and whatever then they realize that actually if people use bitcoin they're more likely to get caught if they're criminals if you're a criminal use cash yeah we saw this with the cyber attacks just um one week ago where there was the yeah where the fbi caught this right and the u.s marshal's office has known this for years but um but i think that they're they're still responding to uh uh articles that they read about bitcoin five years ago ten years ago maybe um they are not up to date and they need to get up to date before they start spouting off about whatever they need they think that should happen with bitcoin i think it is um it is really clearly very important if all these governments are all up in arms trying to figure it out you know bitcoin is a very important part of our future and here's how i look at it we've always been tribal we draw a line we say hey you don't go over this border i don't go over this border and we'll have peace and we'll both prosper right that happened for a long time and then all of a sudden the internet opened opened up the world and we realized hey i can trade with you and we're both better off and uh and and you you multiply one trade by the eight billion people around the planet and we're all a part of this intricate web of um of economic systems and economics and uh and deals and business and whatever and it's all interrelated and and you know now we realize how wrong the shutdown was because now we've got shortages in all sorts of areas that we never thought would have been a shortage but they become became big shortages so i think you really want i mean you want freedom and you want trust in your system and uh and now we become a global people and uh and and in some governments some people in some governments are trying to go back to being tribal and these geographic borders are meaning less and less and less to all of us we're able to move freely around the world and find the government that's right for us you want to start a new business you can go to our draper innovation index and you can see where germany fits and you can see how it compares to switzerland and how it compares to france and how it compares to uk um and how it compares to the us and then you decide well where do i want to start my business well it's going to be the country that provides the best freedom and the best trust and that and that trust if you're using bitcoin you have the most trust because you you realize you can build value in bitcoin and then you you can pay your taxes do all the other things that you would need to do but um the governments that are the most accepting of bitcoin are the ones who are going to thrive and the u.s benefited hugely i remember all these arguments about the internet and they were going to shut it down and tax it do whatever else and then they started to realize that this internet thing is bringing in huge economic value to the country and they said oh okay hands off let's just see how it goes and i think they should do the same thing with bitcoin let's hope um i want to talk about a fellow billionaire of yours uh elon musk about uh obviously him being him being a a a uh yeah a big cheerleader in february and uh kind of going uh the other way a bit now he has kind of uh back battle a bit with the mining i actually want to ask you about the mining a bit later on kevin o'leary also came out with the green energy kind of focused there but first i want to get your thoughts on elon's back battling a bit do you think a lot of rumors obviously on the internet go around that the us pressured him with all the the carbon credits or the green credits um how do you what do you think went on there well first elon let's face it greatest entrepreneur we've ever had he's so extraordinary um he's so extraordinary he's created so much incredible value he's focused on like we want this world to be greener and better and so he's created the tesla and it's fabulous car it's better than anything else on the road he's he said well we want to hedge our bets and go into into space and maybe we need to populate another country so that i mean another country another planet here another heavenly body um and and he created spacex that guy has done so much for humanity well he's gotten a lot right but uh and and he got bitcoin right and then he got i don't know i don't think he responded to pressure i hope he didn't and i don't think he's responding to how you know the fact that he can move the market i i sure hope he's not front running his his tweets but um i think he got it right and then he got all this weird all these people were telling him oh it's not that green because it uses a lot of energy and then what happened was he realized that oh well actually this is really good for clean energy because uh all these bitcoin miners are are innovating and finding energy where there never was before and the price overall price of energy is going down and over time uh the amount of energy it costs to throw a switch continues down um it doesn't quite work according to moore's law but it used to be five volts to throw a switch and then it was three and that was one point eight and it was 1.3 and then it was 0.8 or 0.9 and it has continued down and it will continue down so what we're going to have is a whole bunch of innovation in clean energy gleam green and clean and because of bitcoin and then we're going to see how little energy we're going to see the you the need for that energy continue down over time so bitcoin ends up being a real boom to clean energy we it it was i think elon went from hey this is really fantastic to uh oh maybe it uses too much energy to oh wow the long-term effects of bitcoin are going to be really good for our earth and certainly it's a lot better than the banks the banks i mean what you drive to your bank branch a whole bunch of people drive to their to commute to their bank branch and that's then you know if god and if i've got to send money from one place to another i have to talk to somebody get a wired agreed to have the other bank have that wire agreed to it uses a ton of energy um and then here's here's the real killer they talk about how much energy it uses per every time you move the blockchain well it turns out that um the blockchain moves very slowly but all of these solutions now that go off of lightning network or or open node are allowing the retailer to have faster response times than the visa network and use a fraction of the energy of the visa network and so um open node now i could be a retailer i can bring open node into my system it brings what it does is it takes the exchan it takes the transactions off chain so they don't have to all go through the blockchain and so you don't need you know the miners wasting a lot of energy on small transactions and that was one of the arguments that people were making uh so i think that that that was all overblown and i'm really thrilled that elon has now kind of come back and he realizes hey overall this is a lot better bitcoin is a lot better and he's accepting bitcoin for tesla's again so good for him he's gone through the whole thinking process and i think he's come out to the right conclusion um retail obviously follows him closely how closely do you think institutional investors hang out with individuals pay attention to his opinion on bitcoin do you think they they move independently they're like screw what he thinks like i can make my own opinion or do you think they get influenced obviously retail always wonders elon's got 20 he's got 20 million followers i think i've got like 200 i think he has 60 i think he's blowing up and crazy on twitter i think he's insane right yeah okay 16 million and i've got like 200 000.
So he when he speaks i i don't know whether institutional investment i'm sure there's some institutional investors that are following i'm sure there's some individuals who are following and they're saying wait if he says yes yes he says no no because he's been so prescient before with paypal with tesla with spacex he's he he's he's been extraordinary and i think that naturally he'd have an ex extraordinary following of individuals institutions of all sorts and if he says something's the case i understand that they'd want to follow him almost blindly um but when he reversed his decision on bitcoin the first time went from positive to negative he was wrong and now he's back and he's right um and i think that uh you know all visionaries make mistakes you know you got to be willing to fail if you're going to succeed that big and he has what i've done he's been right a lot yeah i mean definitely um and you don't always have to be right um what are the projects inside of bitcoin that you are looking at um obviously you have invested i think you were really early as a vc to invest in many many other coins aside of bitcoin um yeah you have seen value in those earlier we backed the two first icos we backed taizos and bancor and we got a little bit of arrows in our back but we ended up by being pioneers but we ended up with um a couple of really good tokens there were fabulous then there was a flood of them and uh you know maybe i should have just backed them all but i i kind of pulled back a little i just picked the ones where i thought the entrepreneur was extraordinary and doing something that wasn't just a copy of bitcoin because i think those copies of bitcoins will go by the wayside i think bitcoin is the great store of value it's the best place to be but the copies um if they had really good uses for them i i like them um and then uh you know we back coinbase uh and that has been a fantastic company will continue to be a major are you still holding even dodea public yeah diamond hands baby um yeah um and uh and the uh uh and so i i i think that this is um this is something that uh first we're watching the the entire financial system be um transformed i know these wealth managers who are saying oh my god what can we do we're losing all of this money all these all my investors money is now going into crypto what can we do and so then they're thinking they're rethinking their business and their brief they're thinking how do we create a crypto economy a crypto uh product for them um i think this is um it's just a unique time you're you're going to see the transformation of some of the biggest industries in the world finance banking i think um you know we have a company encrypt investment in crypto which um allows you to take the uh blockchain data and turn it into financial statements and that will make it so that i can have my my big dream of raising money okay can you freeze just for a sec sure pausing uh so this kind of company cryptio can give me my my big hope of raising a fund uh all in bitcoin investing it into a bunch of portfolio companies in bitcoin having them pay their employees and suppliers in bitcoin and have the entire system on smart contracts and then what can happen is that the taxes can be taken out automatically the accounting the auditing the bookkeeping can all be done automatically you don't need the accountant the auditor or the bookkeeper to do that gives them a higher and better use for their high brain power and and then the legal can all be built into software on a smart contract and the lawyers no longer need to fight about it because it's already everybody's agreed to the smart contract so i actually think this is going to be a whole new way for business to operate and i'm hoping that um that it comes soon because uh i would much rather uh raise a fund in bitcoin and operate it in bitcoin then raise them funded fiat and then you know operate the old-fashioned way what other sectors other than crypto are you looking at in investing um or is crypt the only thing you're looking at at the moment i would assume you you look at other sectors as well i i look at everything um i i love healthcare i love what is happening in healthcare all the diagnostic treatments are um are because of uh are all data now they're all data driven so now you can have in fact our company cloud medics allows you to um to uh do a they did a better job they outperformed the average doctor in diagnosing disease and the way they did it was just with people's health care records well you combine that with their blood test results with their genetic history with the airplane seat they sat on the food they ate the where they've been how they've who they've interacted with you start putting all that data together you're going to have a really good idea of of how diagnostics can just be done by data and when combined with a doctor they'll be even more productive and then therapeutics are going to go through that um a big change too because you notice that uh we were able to come up with a vaccine for covet very quickly and that was because the entire wet lab has been completely transformed into the dry lab the dry lab is using computational biochemistry to design drugs and uh and and it's amazing how these drugs can predict how something would happen in the wet lab in the chemical uh when you're actually combining blood with drugs and seeing what happens um and so we ended up with a vaccine faster than ever before and that has uh that has real that is really the beginning of really changing health care as we know it i think that's going to be fabulous we have a couple of companies atomwise at atom wise and verge genomics that are just going after computational biochemistry and hopefully they'll be able to solve problems like als and cancer and cova cool tim i promise you we're going to stick to around 30 minutes is there any last topic where you felt i didn't ask or something you want to get off for the viewers um yeah you know there are other things i i i'm kind of looking for so any entrepreneurs out there on tim at draper.vc only if you have a business plan don't send me your life story or anything but entrepreneurs please do send me your business plan particularly the things of particular interest to me are um any kind of uh decentralized world that we're going to move into where the borders become less relevant any kind of new health care system any new um using bitcoin for insurance where you i actually imagine an insurance company of the future where you you you have you pay your premiums into bitcoin uh wallets for the insurance company and then the insurance company uses surveillance and they say uh and you actually get the money into your bitcoin wallet before you know that your house burned down or you have cancer or whatever because they used surveillance techniques that weren't available when old insurance companies were created so i actually think that we will now move into a period where there's a new kind of insurance company and what is government but a series of insurance companies your healthcare insurance your workman's comp your your unemployment insurance your pension your social security they're all welfare they're all insurance programs so uh insurance can be done uh without uh any uh idea of how to it can be done where where it's completely automated and that automation is going to be able to replace many many government workers and those government workers will then have higher uses um people my son said ai's going to take everybody's job and i i laughed and i thought you know he's right ai will take everybody's job but then their jobs will be much more interesting and more valuable and more creative and that's what's happened you know i mean the plow or the tractor they've made all of our lives much more interesting and uh and artificial intelligence is just yet another anthropological leap so very exciting so i'm after whatever you as entrepreneurs are um are generating i'm very interested in hearing what you're doing tim eight draper dot vc will link that up down below your twitter handle anything else uh we should look at tim draper very simple that's my twitter handle and uh and i encourage you to uh if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to figure out uh how to build your business or if you have what it takes to build your business i encourage you to try draper university either the online program or the hero training which is in person uh turns out we've we've turned out a couple of unicorns and some extraordinary entrepreneurs from draper university so uh and it's only 10 years old so uh we're making a lot of progress and we encourage anybody with entrepreneurial verve and a little passion uh to apply cool we'll link everything up down below and uh i'm sure a lot of people are gonna be interested in that oh yeah and then they can go to meet the drapers.com uh to either apply to be on the show uh it's interesting these entrepreneurs are getting like a million dollars of crowdfunding uh for being on the show and uh and now the limit has gone up to five million dollars in the u.s so that's going to be very exciting too we'll see you next next season so meet the drapers.com very exciting cool so thank you so much for having me julian i appreciate the time thank you we're gonna be in touch thank you all the best bye-bye bye thank you
As found on YouTube
No comments:
Post a Comment