How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
(This book is divided into two parts. Part one centres aro...)
This book is divided into two parts. Part one centres around a pledge that will guide you in your startup hero journey. Part two is a toolkit for approaching your current or future venture.
Timothy Cook Draper, or simply Tim Draper, is an American venture capital investor and entrepreneur. He is widely known as the founder of the firm that would become Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Draper University, Draper Venture Network, and Draper Associates.
Background
Draper was born in Illinois, United States, on June 11, 1958. He is the son of Phyllis (Culbertson) and William Henry Draper III, who founded the Draper & Johnson Investment Company in 1962 and was chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. He is the younger brother of actress Polly Draper.
Tim Draper's grandfather was William Henry Draper Jr., who founded Draper, Gaither and Anderson in 1958.
Education
Tim Draper was a student of Phillips Academy Andover, a co-educational university-preparatory school. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1980. In 1984 he earned his Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.
While at Stanford, Draper interned as a marketing engineer at Hewlett-Packard. He made national headlines as a student when he created the popular campus board game "Stanford - The Game" alongside Heidi Roizen. Roizen was a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Draper began his professional career at the investment bank Alex. Brown & Sons. In 1985 he left it to start his own venture capital firm, Draper Associates. His former colleague John H.N. Fisher became a partner in 1991. Steve Jurvetson became Draper another partner in 1994.
Due to his idea of automatically attaching a brief advertising message to the bottom of outgoing Hotmail emails, Tim Draper "invented viral marketing" in 1996. Draper and Jurvetson then came up with the term "viral marketing."
Tim Draper is known to be the first Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who invested in China through the global fund DFJ ePlanet. In 2001, he negotiated with CEO Robin Li of Baidu to purchase 28% of the company on behalf of ePlanet for USD $9 million.
Draper's father, Bill Draper, was an early investor in Skype, and Tim Draper's venture capital firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), supported Skype in 2004. DFJ owned 10% of Skype in 2005 when it was sold to eBay. Tim Draper and Niklas Zennström, a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur best known for founding several high-profile online ventures with Janus Friis including Skype, appeared in the first Skype video together in 2007 at Stanford University.
In 2006 Draper became an investor in the Series C venture round of Tesla through DFJ. The following year, Draper again invested in Tesla's Series D venture round, but this time through Draper Associates.
Tim Draper launched Draper University of Heroes, an educational program that offers a crash course in entrepreneurship, in 2013. The university's residential program is based in San Mateo, California, and the curriculum is designed by Draper himself.
On June 27, 2014, Tim Draper purchased nearly 30,000 bitcoins which had been seized by the United States Marshals Service and auctioned to the public. The accumulation of bitcoins has been valued at United States$19 million. On January 27, 2015, Tim Draper wagered about $400,000 that the bitcoin will rebound from its recent plunge. On November 29, 2017, the price of a bitcoin crossed the $10,000 mark.
Draper has become one of the first investors in the blood-testing startup Theranos. Its founder Elizabeth Holmes was later charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with committing massive fraud. In 2018, after the SEC had already charged Elizabeth Holmes, Tim Draper defended her, saying that she had been "bullied into submission."
Speaking about Draper's recent investments, they are centred around companies who use artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, blockchain, smart contracts, and computational genomics to apply to industries like finance, health care, and government. Among them are Robinhood Markets Inc, Coinbase, eShares, and OpenGov.
(This book is divided into two parts. Part one centres aro...)
2017
Politics
Tim Draper has spoken out for free markets and entrepreneurship globally. Besides, he spoke out against Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, asserting that they limit the viability of taking companies public.
To his mind, monopolies are bad because people get bad service for high prices, while competition is good because people get good service for competitive prices.
Views
Quotations:
"The long-term vision for bitcoin is to give the world economic emancipation. The potential if bitcoin is only limited by the imaginations of the entrepreneurs who work to drive this new virtual economy. To monitor and keep it honest, I believe that the community of users will ultimately self-regulate, possibly eclipsing or obviating the need for the various governments to regulate the crypto world. I’ve been through the ups and downs with bitcoin, and I am as certain as ever that the bitcoin revolution is coming."
"To change the world we have to change education."
"We need choices of government, just like we have choices of tables or chairs or cell phones or coffee."
"You're best off when you're part of the centre of the creative universe."
"For me, travel happens when I see an interesting opportunity happening."
Interests
Politicians
Mikhail Gorbachev, George Washington, Deng Xiaoping, Toomas Hendrik, Taavi Rõivas
Connections
Tim Draper is married to Melissa Draper. The couple gave birth to four children: Eleanor, Jessica Cook "Jesse", Adam and Billy.
Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World
Drawing on interviews with investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, as well as a host of case studies from Google to Paypal, Piscione argues that Silicon Valley's unique culture is the best hope for the future of American prosperity and the global business community and offers lessons from the Valley to inspire reform in other communities and industries, from Washington, DC to Wall Street.
2013
Connected Marketing
Connected Marketing shows how businesses can harness connectivity between clients, customers and consumers as powerful marketing media for driving demand.
2007
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders and reveals how established companies and institutions, from IBM to Intuit to the U.S. government, are also learning how to incorporate starfish principles to achieve success.