Picto Diary - 17, 18, 19 November 2015 - LP Meeting

Above: The Bishop. Pointing at popovers. Union Square. San Francisco, CA. 17 November 2015.

TIMDT. Bishop. Shoe shopping selfie. Ecco. Grant St. San Francisco, CA. 18 November 2015.

Above: Founders Fund screen. Founders Fund Annual Limited Partners Meeting. Battery Club, San Francisco, CA. 18 November 2014.

Presentations:

Oscar: Mario Schlosser, CEO and Co-Founder -
Use of technology to make health insurance simple. Full-stack (new buzzword for me) insurance company now with 100K customers in NY, NJ, CA, and TX. 40% new signups come from friend and doctor referrals. Track medical records, doctor appointments all by mobile. Simple.

Stemcentrix: Scott Dylla, CSO and Co-Founder. Brian Slingerland, CEO and Co-Founder -
On the point of cure for small cell lung cancer with drug, Rova-T, now in clinical trials. Now, only 3% of afflicted have a 5 year survival rate.

Peter Thiel - Partner, Founders Fund -
We (Founders Fund) like founder driven companies (Netflix, Apple, Google, Amazon). They do much better than professionally managed companies (Ebay, Yahoo, AOL). Founders driven companies spend more on R and D and do less share buybacks. They invest in the future. Elon Musk said about his dream of going to Mars, "I will never give up." It is that attitude that propels founders companies to do better. Our current founder focused investments are performing well. SpaceX, AirBnb, Palentir, Stemcentrix etc.

The Bishop, in Q and A, asked Peter, "Is the petri dish that nurtures founders in America today still producing a good flow of new founders, particularly in the light of growing cultural indoctrination in higher education system?" Peter: "There is too much programming in higher education today... but, in a country of 300MM you are not going to brainwash everybody."

Breakout Sessions:

Tachyus: Dakin Sloss, CEO and Co-Founder. Silicon Valley meets the oil industry. How to make existing wells more productive by using big data analysis to make quicker decisions and lower costs. Reduce steam in fracking process. Reduce energy cost to run wells.

Transatomic: Dr. Leslie Dewan, CEO and Co-Founder. Wind and solar not solutions to renewable energy. Both are intermittent. Battery technology will never be sufficient to underpin a national grid. No new atomic reactor technology in 30 years. We are designing a new reactor that is safe... can't melt down, runs on low grade waste (solves waste storage problem).... is proliferation resistant.... and produces power that is cheaper than coal. We have support from US Department of Energy. We are working with Chicago Bridge and Iron... world's foremost power plant builders. We are working on a 520 megawatt plant that will be half the cost of a conventional nuclear plant. Prototype plant up and running by 2020.

Flexport. Ryan Peterson, CEO and Founder. We are creating a platform for global trade. Multi step freight forwarding process remains paper intensive, laborious, complicated and slow. Trade procedures are thousands of years old. You still need an actual piece of paper to obtain release of shipment. We can lower shipping transaction costs with software. We are fully licensed freight forwarding firm and customs agent. Market size of world shipping trade $1.1 trillion. We've been in business 18 months and have a 30% compound growth rate. There is room to make a lot of money.

Plethora. Nick Pinkston, CEO and Founder. Use of software to significantly speed up machine part production from concept design to actual production. We take out 90% of the engineering labor costs. We put brains of an engineer into our server. We take a process that typically takes two weeks and accomplish it in two hours. Most buyers, when they need a part "now" have little concern about how much they pay. This gives us great pricing potential.

AltSchool - Max Ventilla, CEO and Founder. Schools today are what our parents required, but, are outdated to meet the needs of the future. Private school initiative that uses software to create individualized learning tracks (playlists) student by student. Amazon strategy. Full stack. Now schools in LA, SF and NYC. When we get it working it will transform education and be adopted by public school systems.

Brian Singerman - Partner, Founders Fund. FF investment philosophy. Macro doesn't matter. FF invests in business, ideas and founders that can transform on a world scale. Our investments do well in up markets and down markets. In fact, sometimes down markets are better as there are more smart people available to hire. The recent Fidelity markdowns that have everybody worried, don't matter to us. Trends don't matter. Business sectors don't matter. We are agnostic to sector. Sometimes widely perceived "bad" sectors can have good investments. Voire Tachyus and Transatomic above. No way anyone can predict the next big winner. The next big winner requires critical understanding of the founder, the business plan, and the technology. One you find your winner, you must be able to "back your truck into it." That is to say, you must give your full support with your pocketbook.

Above: Partial schedule. Founders Fund Limited Partner's Meeting. Battery Club, San Francisco, CA. 18 November 2015.

Above: Luke Nosek, Partner Founders Fund, and Elon Musk, CEO SpaceX. Founders Fund Annual Limited Partners Meeting. Battery Club, San Francisco, CA. 18 November 2015.

Image captured off of one of several video screens in dining room.

Within five years we should have ability to offer individuals a trip into orbit. Cost? Um.... uh.... um.... well, for around $50K per person.

Employees who leave SpaceX don't go to other aerospace companies. They leave to form start ups... they burn out... then come back. We are the gold standard for aerospace.

Our rocket failures are part of the learning process. We knew we would have some fails.

We hope to launch a manned mission to Mars within 10 years.

Q and A

The Bishop: Did you read "The Martian? or, see the movie?"

Elon Musk: I read the book several years ago. i loved it. It was realistic. i think it made Mars seem like a real adventure and that's a good inspiration for us all.

Limited Partner: What is the state of American entrepreneurship?

Elon Musk: Quite good. I'm impressed with the number of new start-ups proliferating.

Above: Transamerica Tower. San Francisco, CA. 18 November 2015.

Image taken from The Battery, a club located at 770 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA.

Addendum:


Nice. Obviously all is well with you. Also good at my end. I’m still enjoying being the classroom and I’m writing a book on my work on why we fail in decision making.

Best,
Bob,
Washington, DC