Our five-year time horizon is what separates us from Wall Street. They can't see past the next quarter. We're looking at where industries will be in 2030.
The biggest risk is not being in these technologies when they hit critical mass. Missing the boat is a bigger risk than volatility.
Elon is doing things that matter. SpaceX matters. Tesla matters. The rest of Silicon Valley is optimizing ads.
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
The first step is to establish that something is possible. Then probability will occur.
If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
Credit cards were designed in the 1950s. We thought maybe financial technology should actually use some technology.
We built Spark because we were frustrated users ourselves. The best companies come from people solving their own problems.
If you make something 100x faster, you don't just do the same things faster — you do entirely different things.
The lakehouse is not about combining two things. It's about eliminating the need to choose between them in the first place.
We didn't set out to build a better data warehouse. We set out to build data warehousing the way it should have been built if the cloud existed first.
Separating storage from compute sounds like a technical detail. It's actually a business model revolution.
Design is a team sport. The old model of a designer working alone in a downloaded app and then emailing a PNG was broken from day one.
The browser is the most powerful distribution mechanism ever created. If your product runs in the browser, everyone in the world can use it instantly.
The surgery itself takes about 15 minutes with the robot. The hard part is the decade of engineering that makes those 15 minutes possible.
The bandwidth between your brain and a computer is currently about 10 bits per second when you're typing on your phone. We want to make it millions.
If you can't go above it and you can't go around it, go under it. Simple as that.
The key to making tunnels affordable is making them smaller. A car is about 6 feet wide. Why are we boring 28-foot tunnels?
The hard part isn't getting to space. The hard part is making it routine and affordable enough that it actually changes civilization.
The defense industry hasn't innovated in 30 years. They build the same planes slower and more expensively. We build new things fast and cheap.
The safest car on the road is the one with nobody inside. You can't injure a passenger if there is no passenger.
We invented Stories. Then Instagram copied it. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then every app with a camera. You're welcome.
We didn't solve piracy by fighting it. We solved it by making the legal option better than the illegal one.
AIP lets a supply chain manager ask a question in English and get an answer from a billion rows of data. That's not incremental. That's revolutionary.
Agentless was the breakthrough. Security teams are exhausted from installing and maintaining agents on every server. We said: give us API access and we'll find everything without touching your infrastructure.
Cash-on-delivery was 80% of our orders in the early days. People didn't trust online payments, so we literally collected cash at the door. That's how you build e-commerce in a country without credit cards.
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page won't make a search engine.
We are going to make drug development faster and cheaper. The genetics will tell us which drugs to build.
Spreadsheets are the most popular programming language in the world. We just gave them a real backend.
We don't need better batteries. We need a better business model. Swap the battery like you swap a propane tank. The car never stops.
We built a car vending machine. An actual, multi-story, glass tower that dispenses cars with a coin. People thought it was a gimmick. It was marketing genius.
Moore's Law said chips get smaller. We said: what if they get bigger? Everyone laughed. Then they saw the benchmark results.
Secured lending — using your car or home as collateral — drops rates from 300% to 20%. Same borrower, same risk, but the bank charges 15x more for unsecured. We said: that's insane, let's fix it.
We put water tubes inside a mattress cover and let AI control the temperature throughout the night. It sounds ridiculous until you try it and never go back.
Construction hasn't changed in 100 years. We build houses the same way we did in 1920. I thought: what if we built them in a factory instead? Like cars. Like iPhones.
Our models are smaller and faster than GPT-4 for most tasks. Bigger is not always better. Efficiency is the real breakthrough — not throwing more GPUs at the problem.
EMI on credit cards at the point of sale — buy now, pay later before it had a name. We were doing that in India in 2012. Affirm and Klarna made it trendy. We made it work first.
We co-created Stable Diffusion. Then we built Gen-2, the first commercially usable AI video generator. Text to video. Type a sentence, get a movie clip. That's not incremental progress. That's a new medium.
We test designs with batches of 100 units. If it sells, we make 1,000. If it doesn't, we stop. Zero inventory risk. Traditional retailers order 10,000 units and pray. We use data. They use hope.
We designed a cylindrical solar panel that could capture sunlight from all angles without tracking the sun. The physics were beautiful. The economics were a disaster.
I built a stock market for sneakers. Literally. Bid, ask, price history, market cap — all the mechanics of a stock exchange, but for Jordans. People thought it was a joke until we hit $1 billion in GMV.
Insurance was the hardest problem we had to solve. Nobody had ever underwritten peer-to-peer car sharing before. We basically had to invent the category.
Recovery is the most important metric in fitness and nobody was measuring it. Everyone counted steps and calories. We measure strain, recovery, and sleep. That is the actual triangle that matters.
Perpetual swaps are the single most traded instrument in all of crypto. We invented that at BitMEX. Every exchange that copied it is paying us a compliment.
I created W Hotels because every hotel lobby in America looked like a dentist's waiting room. I thought — what if a hotel felt like the coolest bar you have ever been to? That was the entire idea.
We release 2-3 major new products every year. Most companies our size release one every 2 years. Speed is our competitive advantage — by the time competitors copy our last product, we have shipped the next two.
In China, if you don't cannibalize your own product, someone else will. WeChat was designed to kill QQ before a competitor could.
The most dangerous moment for any company is when it starts believing its own success is inevitable. That's when disruption walks through the door.
Change or die. Those are the only two options in retail. If you are doing the same thing you did five years ago, you are already dead — you just don't know it yet.
Uniqlo is not a fashion company. It is a technology company that happens to make clothes. Our fabrics are engineered, not designed.
I read a Vitalik blog post about automated market makers and thought "I could build that." Six months of coding later, here we are. Sometimes the best businesses start with a blog post and naive optimism.
The beauty of an AMM is that it replaces an entire industry — market makers, order books, matching engines — with a single mathematical formula. Math doesn't take days off or play favorites.
V1 was a proof of concept. V2 was a product. V3 was an optimization. V4 is a platform. Each version solves the problems the last one created.
We ran ConsenSys like a venture studio for years — dozens of projects, most of them experiments. A lot failed. The ones that survived — MetaMask, Infura — became essential infrastructure. That's how innovation works: you plant a hundred seeds and water the ones that sprout.
MetaMask started as an experiment inside ConsenSys. Now it has 30 million users and is basically the front door to Web3. The best products often start as side projects that nobody takes seriously.
Proof of History was my "shower thought" moment. If you give validators a cryptographic clock, they don't have to wait for each other. They can process transactions in parallel. Simple idea, brutal to implement.
SWIFT takes 3-5 days to settle a cross-border payment. Ripple does it in 3-4 seconds. The technology isn't the problem — inertia is. Banks move slowly because slow is comfortable.
The US government is pushing crypto innovation overseas. While the SEC sues American companies, Singapore, the UAE, and the UK are rolling out red carpets. If America isn't careful, it will regulate itself out of the future.
You can't beat piracy by fighting it. You beat it by offering something better. We made it easier to listen legally than to steal. That was the whole strategy.
India can't copy the West. We have 1.4 billion people, most of them on low incomes. We need solutions that work at population scale and near-zero cost. That's why we built digital public infrastructure — open, free, and universal.
Battery-as-a-Service means you can buy a NIO car without the battery and save $15,000. Then you subscribe to the battery monthly. Your car gets cheaper, and every year we can upgrade your battery to a newer, better one.
Battery swap is our unfair advantage. Drive in, robot swaps your battery in three minutes, drive out with a full charge. No waiting. No range anxiety. No other company has 2,300 stations doing this.
The Blade Battery cannot catch fire. We drove a nail through it on camera and it didn't explode. That's not marketing — that's chemistry. Safety should never be a premium feature. It should be standard.
The central inverter was a single point of failure for the entire solar array. We eliminated it by making every panel independent. That was the whole insight.
Heme is what makes meat taste like meat. We produce it through fermentation. One molecule changed everything about what a plant burger can be.
The Infinite Kitchen robot makes a perfect salad every time, faster than any human. That is not replacing workers — it is solving the labor problem that limits our growth.
A traditional rocket has 100,000 parts. Ours has under 1,000. That is what 3D printing does — it simplifies everything.
I was studying how to protect steel from rusting. Then I thought: what if I could protect an avocado from going bad using the same principle?
Traditional satellites cost $500 million and take 10 years to build. Ours cost a fraction of that and we launch dozens at a time. That is how you cover the whole planet.
The Concorde proved supersonic works. It just did it at the wrong price, the wrong noise level, and the wrong emissions. We are fixing all three.
Instagram copied our format with Reels. YouTube copied it with Shorts. The best compliment is when every competitor tries to become you.
The Origin was designed to be the first purpose-built autonomous vehicle — no steering wheel, no pedals, no compromise. The future just came a little later than we planned.
We built Darktrace on a simple idea: instead of looking for known threats, learn what normal looks like and flag everything that is not normal.
Antivirus is dead. I spent 18 years at McAfee watching it die. CrowdStrike was built to replace it.
Cybersecurity is an arms race with no finish line. The attackers evolve every day. If we stop innovating for one quarter, we lose.
The internet is the most important thing since the invention of the printing press.
I do not care what Instagram copies. By the time they copy it we have already moved on to the next thing.
When we started Snapchat everyone said disappearing messages was the dumbest idea they had ever heard. Good.
Instamart delivers groceries in 10 minutes. Two years ago people said that was impossible in India. Now it is expected.
Reusable rockets were not a dream. They were a requirement. If you cannot reuse a rocket space will always be too expensive.
If you are not a little bit scared of what you are building you are not building anything important.
I made 5127 prototypes before I got the vacuum right. Each failure taught me something the previous one did not.
If everyone says your idea is crazy that is not a bad sign. It means nobody has done it yet.
Flash loans are the most innovative financial product since the derivative. You borrow and repay in the same transaction. It sounds impossible. It works.
We solved the biggest problem in Ethereum staking: you had to lock up your ETH forever. Lido made staking liquid.
stETH is the most useful token in DeFi. You earn staking rewards while using it as collateral. That is financial engineering at its best.
If you are not doing some things that are crazy then you are doing the wrong things.
We should be building great things that do not exist. Not just making small improvements to things that already exist.
No software. That was our first slogan. Twenty-five years later the entire industry copied us.
We turned a steel mill in Newark into the world's largest vertical farm. Sometimes the future is built in abandoned factories.
The therapy establishment says texting is not real therapy. Our users disagree. Millions of them.
Electric vertical takeoff. Zero emissions. Less noise than a helicopter. This is not an improvement on aviation. It is a new category.
We built the Chimera engine. Turbine at low speed. Ramjet at hypersonic speed. One engine. Two modes. Nobody else has done this.
Beyond Meat engineered plant-based food by hand. We let AI find combinations no human would think of. That is the difference.
The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.
Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted, and very ethical.
When I first brought a computer to the trading floor, they told me I was cheating. I was just faster.
If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
We can dub a movie into 30 languages with the original actor's voice. That was science fiction two years ago.
Wool and eucalyptus make better shoes than plastic. Nature already solved the material science problem.
Insurance hasn't been reinvented in 100 years. That's not because it's perfect. It's because nobody tried.
Insurance is built on the conflict of interest between insurer and insured. We're trying to eliminate that conflict.
Infrastructure as code was a radical idea in 2014. Now it's how every serious company manages their cloud.
Cricket engagement was always passive — watch and cheer. We made it active — pick your team and compete.
SaaS companies have predictable revenue. That revenue can be traded for upfront cash. No equity dilution. No debt.
Good drivers subsidize bad drivers because insurance is priced on demographics, not behavior. We fix that.
You can educate at scale for free if you're willing to think differently about the business model.
I look for the next paradigm shift. File sharing, social networking, streaming — each one was dismissed before it was inevitable.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. That's what we did with cloud computing.
The world is going to change, and the people who change it are the ones who seem crazy at first.
We built AWS because we realized that the infrastructure we needed didn't exist, so we had to build it ourselves.
Running out of money is not the worst thing. Running out of ideas is the worst thing.
I knew headphones could be a fashion accessory, not just an audio device. Nobody else saw that.
Rock and roll and venture capital have more in common than you'd think. Both are about taking risks on something new.
The XPRIZE proved that a $10 million prize could catalyze a billion-dollar industry.
70 million test miles of autonomous driving. The future isn't theoretical — it's on our roads.
If something sounds crazy but the physics works, it's probably going to happen.
If something sounds crazy but the physics works, it's probably going to happen. The question is when and who builds it.
Founders Fund invests in companies building the future, not in companies copying the present.
The best bank distribution channel isn't a branch network. It's a messaging app.
A HELOC in 5 minutes instead of 45 days. That's not incremental improvement — that's a different reality.
We started on Facebook — as an app. Peer-to-peer lending as a social media feature. It actually worked.
We built the IPU from scratch for AI. Nvidia adapted a graphics chip. Architecture matters.
I've designed chips for AMD, Apple, Tesla, and Intel. Open-source RISC-V is the most exciting architecture I've worked on.
The developing world doesn't need to follow the Western banking playbook. It can skip ahead entirely.
We're replacing electrons with photons. Light is faster, uses less energy, and doesn't generate heat.
We turned every corner shop in Kenya into a bank branch. No marble floors required.
Real estate is illiquid. Our secondary market lets investors sell positions early. That changes everything.
We took genome sequencing from $3 billion to $200. That's not cost reduction — that's a revolution.
I kept winning data science competitions by trying every algorithm. So we automated that process.
Fractional ownership of a rental house starting at $5,000. Real estate just became liquid.
PUBG didn't just create a game. It created a genre. Battle royale exists because of us.
CubeSats the size of a loaf of bread collecting data that used to require billion-dollar satellites.
Let customers run their own software on our satellites. Space-as-a-service — literally SaaS.
I had no agriculture background. Sometimes an outsider sees the problems insiders have accepted.
The second-generation vaccines are more potent and don't need ultra-cold storage. The science is improving.
We convinced millions of Americans to mail their poop to a lab. That's marketing.
Multi-cancer blood screening — detecting dozens of cancers from one blood draw. That's the holy grail.
Live classes with real teachers, real-time quizzes, and AI tracking attention. Not passive video — active learning.
Pistons instead of magnets. Liquid metal instead of a vacuum. Our approach is gloriously weird.
Q-Chat turns flashcards into conversations. AI transforms passive studying into active learning.
SideScanning reads cloud infrastructure directly from the provider. No agents, no gaps, no excuses.
You don't need to install software inside cloud workloads to scan them. That insight built a company.
Singapore approved lab-grown chicken before any other country. The future of food started in Asia.
Why do we need billions of chickens to make an egg? We found a plant that does it better.
We proved that people would spend real money on virtual cows. That insight created a $200 billion industry.
Why does an ultrasound machine cost $100,000 when a smartphone has more computing power?
Fraud detection at PayPal was an arms race. The fraudsters were incredibly creative. We had to be more creative.
AR isn't the future. It's already here. 250 million people use our AR lenses every day.
The camera is the new keyboard. That was our bet from the beginning.
All Weather was designed to answer one question: what portfolio performs in every economic environment? That question changed the industry.
The blockchain is a public ledger. Every transaction is visible. Why was nobody using this data? That's the question that started everything.
I've built 20 protocols. Not all worked. But the ones that did changed DeFi forever.
Flash loans are the first truly new financial primitive in decades. Zero collateral, zero duration, infinite size. Only DeFi can do this.
Universal basic income isn't charity. It's infrastructure for a knowledge economy. You can't innovate if you're worried about rent.
The Dutch have been building payment systems since the 17th century. Adyen is just the latest chapter in a very old story.
Adyen means "start over again" in Surinamese. We rebuilt payments from scratch because the existing infrastructure was broken beyond repair.
I funded SpaceShipOne because I wanted to prove that private citizens, not just governments, could reach space. We proved it.
The Fortnite concert changed everything. 10 million people watching — that is what happens when you put your music where your audience actually lives.
The future of cars is electric, connected, and autonomous. Every company in our group is building toward that. If we’re wrong, we’re all wrong together.
They said we were just cheap labor. Now we make the most sophisticated consumer product in human history. Who’s cheap now?
Performance management is broken because it was designed for the industrial age. Knowledge workers need continuous feedback, not annual reviews.
We built Workstream because filling out a job application should not take longer than ordering a pizza.
Career fairs are broken. A student walks into a gym with 200 booths and somehow that is supposed to be an efficient talent marketplace. We can do better.
We can bundle home and auto insurance in 30 seconds because we use data that already exists instead of asking you 50 questions.
Most insurtech companies are just putting a pretty website on top of the same old insurance. We rebuilt the entire stack from scratch.
Pay-as-you-go insurance is not a gimmick. It is the only model that makes sense for flexible workers. Why should you pay for coverage when you are not working?
WebstaurantStore was a bet that restaurant owners would buy supplies online before anyone else thought they would. That bet built a billion-dollar business.
Indian insurance forms were 15 pages long. We cut them to one. That single decision changed everything about how people felt about buying insurance.
We do not compete with traditional homebuilders. We compete with the idea that building a house has to take six months and cost $300,000.
The housing crisis will not be solved by building the same way we have built for 100 years. Factory-produced homes are the only way to scale.
A backyard home should not take 18 months and cost $400,000. We build them in weeks because we control the entire supply chain from factory to foundation.
The articulated steering design lets all four wheels stay planted on uneven ground. That engineering decision in the 1960s is still the foundation of every Versatile tractor today.
The Zozosuit was my biggest failure. But I would rather fail trying something nobody has done than succeed at something boring.
The way businesses manage contracts hasn't changed in 20 years. We're still emailing Word documents back and forth like it's 2003.
I moved to a village because I wanted to prove that great technology can be built anywhere. You do not need Silicon Valley.
We built Everlaw because the incumbent tools were designed in an era before the iPhone existed. Legal technology deserved a fresh start.
In-memory computing will change everything about how businesses operate. The database is the bottleneck, and we just removed it.
Design thinking is not about making things pretty. It is about understanding what humans actually need.
FlexiPerk lets you cancel any booking for any reason and get 80% back. In the post-COVID world, flexibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's a requirement.
We replaced 200 pounds of physical weights with electromagnets. The physics is simple. The engineering is insanely hard.
Israel invented drip irrigation. We invented soil intelligence. Both solve the same problem: doing more with less water.
Pay what is fair. You decide what our services are worth to you. Some people pay zero. Some pay $10. On average, it works.
We put kiosks in grocery stores. Walk in for bread, walk out with a bank account. A debit card prints in 5 minutes. That's how you bank 9 million people.
Proof of History is just a clock. A really, really accurate clock for a blockchain. That's what was missing.
We started by making batteries for phones. Now we make the cars that phones control.
Biotech is the only industry where one molecule can change everything. That is terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure.
Every generation must build something meaningful. My generation built institutions. The next must build technologies that make those institutions irrelevant.
Technology can make insurance something people understand and want — not just something they're told they need.
Retail is dead only if you do not reinvent it. We chose to reinvent it around art and human experience.
The school system rewards memorization. Real life rewards the ability to think differently under pressure.
The Pentium was not just a chip. It was the moment computing became personal for everyone, not just engineers.
Competition is a gift. AMD forced Intel to be better. Intel forced AMD to be better. The industry is where it is because neither side could afford to stand still.
My grandfather invented the machine. My father made the science. My job is to make the science matter to the world.
Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation. Every layer of management you add is a speed bump on the road to the customer.
If you want to change an industry, you can't ask permission.
I am not interested in doing what has already been done.
In-play betting was the product the market was waiting for. We just got there first and built it properly.
We were not trying to make a new drug. We were trying to make an old drug tolerable. That turned out to be a bigger solution than anyone expected.
The circus was supposed to be dead. Everybody said so. But nobody stopped to ask whether the circus had just been done wrong for fifty years.
We have success and sometimes we have failure. And sometimes if I see no failure, I wonder if we didn't push it enough.
You have to be willing to cannibalize your own business before someone else does it for you.
As you grow, the hardest thing is to keep the bureaucracy away and keep the innovation alive.
I firmly believe that the most amount of innovation in cybersecurity comes out of Israel. It's not for debate. It's a fact.
China continues to be a compelling market and is poised to lead global innovation. The entrepreneurial spirit and many elements that shaped Silicon Valley are also taking hold here.
Technology does not just improve finance. It rebuilds it from the ground up.
Great technology should not be trapped by borders.
We could not win in Korea by copying the global players. We had to build something they could not.