“If disruption is what you seek, cognitive island-hopping is a good place to start, mining the interstices between academic disciplines.” — Steve Jurvetson
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types — from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books — the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors — in the form of books — from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.
Steve Jurvetson (@FutureJurvetson) is an early-stage venture capitalist with a focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation. Steve was the early VC investor in SpaceX, Tesla, Planet, Memphis Meats, Hotmail, and the deep learning companies Mythic and Nervana. He has led founding investments in five companies that went public in successful IPOs and several others that were acquired for a total of over a $100 billion in value creation.
Before founding Future Ventures and DFJ before that, Steve was an R&D engineer at Hewlett Packard and worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT, and management consulting with Bain & Company. He currently serves on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX, and D-Wave.
Please enjoy!
You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.
This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring Lion’s Mane. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet.
You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you’ll be disappointed.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…
Want to hear another episode of Books I’ve Loved? — Check out Seth Godin and Esther Perel’s contributions to the series here. (Stream below or right-click here to download):
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Connect with Steve Jurvetson:
Future Ventures | Facebook | Flickr | Twitter
Steve’s previous appearance on the podcast: 317
- The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind by Alison Gopnik , Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl
- The Long Now Foundation
- Santa Fe Institute
- Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World by Kevin Kelly
- The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil
- Moore’s Law over 120 Years by Steve Jurvetson, Flickr
- Imitation Game
- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Science Direct
- Boeing 777
- Reed’s Law, P2P Foundation
- Starlink
SHOW NOTES
- Who is Steve Jurvetson? [03:24]
- The book Steve gifts most to others (especially new parents): The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind by Alison Gopnik , Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl [04:16]
- The book Steve credits as being the most influential on him: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World by Kevin Kelly [09:05]
- What Steve considers the most important book of all: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil [12:21]
PEOPLE MENTIONED
- Alison Gopnik
- Isaac Newton
- Richard Feynman
- Geoffrey West
- Michael Merzenich
- Kevin Kelly
- Gordon Moore
- Ray Kurzweil
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Thomas Edison
- Nikola Tesla
- Guglielmo Marconi
- Hernan Cortes
- Richard Dawkins
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than 900 million downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
Wow – loved the concept of us all being in the information business