Backing the bold ideas that shape the future. Founder of @DFJvc, @drapervc, @Draper_U, @meetthedrapers. Pitch me: timdraper@draper.vc
Menlo Park, CA
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AI agents have created a new kind of business risk that almost nobody is covering yet: agents accumulate memory. Context, history, judgment built up over months of use. Lose that in an outage and you're not restarting an app but you're re-training a colleague almost from zero.
So it's great to see our portfolio company @ArpioRPO getting ahead of it. They just launched automated disaster recovery for agentic AI workloads on @amazon Bedrock, and the key piece is state recovery: the agent comes back with its memory, not as a blank slate. Full recovery in about an hour, where the average ransomware recovery drags on for three weeks.
The timing is right. @KPMG_US found that over half of large US companies are already running AI agents. Quietly, these systems have become critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure deserves protection you can verify.
Exactly what drew us to Arpio when we joined their $15M Series A at @DraperVC earlier this year: Doug Neumann and Shaw Terwilliger built recovery for the cloud era while everyone else was retrofitting the tape-backup era. Being first to protect AI agents is what that looks like in practice :)
Announcement links in first reply.
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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.
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Sabeer and Jack pushed back hard when I suggested putting a message at the bottom of every email.
They thought it would cheapen the product.
Then they tried it, and Hotmail spread across the planet without a dollar of advertising.
This lesson has stuck with me for 30 years: the founders had built the distribution into the product without knowing it. Every email sent was an invitation.
When an idea sounds too simple to work, it deserves a second look.
BEFORE IT WAS OBVIOUS: HOTMAIL. Distribution can be the breakthrough.
Hotmail did not originally walk into Draper Fisher Jurvetson as Hotmail.
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith initially came in with an idea for a web-building tool. As they were leaving, they mentioned another project almost as an aside: free web-based email for the world.
That became the company.
But one of the most interesting parts of @TimDraper's story isn’t the product itself. It’s what happened after Hotmail launched.
At an early board meeting, the founders asked how they should spread the word. Traditional answers were obvious: advertising, radio, billboards.
Tim suggested something much simpler: put a message at the bottom of every email inviting the recipient to get their own free Hotmail account. Every user would become a distribution channel.
The idea was controversial enough that the founders initially pushed back. But they eventually tried it, and Hotmail spread around the world. The approach became one of the early examples of what would later be called viral marketing.
Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997.
What looks obvious in retrospect wasn't obvious when the decision was made. Giving away email for free was itself unconventional. Turning every outgoing email into product distribution was even less conventional.
Why it matters for builders: sometimes the breakthrough isn't another feature. It’s finding a mechanism where using the product naturally creates the next user.
The best distribution loops don't sit on top of the product. They are built into the product itself.
#startups #founderstories #siliconvalley #beforeitwasobvious
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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.
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I backed Zest Protocol because this team has been building on Bitcoin longer than almost anyone, and they know how to ship great products with amazing user experience. Seeing real Bitcoin collateral working on mainnet, with the coins never leaving Bitcoin, is something I’m incredibly excited about.
Bitcoin Collateral Vaults demo is now on mainnet.
Deposit native BTC into a self-custodial vault on Bitcoin L1. Borrow Ethereum USDC against it. The capital layer for Bitcoin.
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Being interviewed live on TBOY podcast tomorrow night 7:00 pm at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Tickets still available. @tboypod
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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?
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Tim Draper retweeted
Payroll, taxes, suppliers, all on Bitcoin, no accountant, no lawyer, no bookkeeper.
@TimDraper gives an actual timeline for it, and it's closer than you think.
Full video in the comments 👇
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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: piped.video/watch?v=e_X6x2Ui…
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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.
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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: draper.vc/newsroom/how-we-bu…
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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!
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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.
👇
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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.
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@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.
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Announcing Poseidon Aerospace's $60M Series A, led by TQ Ventures with participation from JAWS, Hanwha, G Squared, Starship Ventures, Drover Ventures, and others.
At @poseidonaero, we are building the future of air logistics with autonomous cargo planes designed and built from the ground up.
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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: cryptoniteventures.substack.…
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