Steve Jurvetson is more excited about San Diego than most San Diegans.
He surveys the geometric pattern of the cliffs at Torrey Pines and posts a pic on his Flickr photostream: “The Purple Beach of 92037” — “ ’tis a magical place.”
But Jurvetson is no tourist. It’s the beach above the beach that brings him down from Menlo Park to La Jolla: “Biotech Beach.”
Board meetings. “San Diego’s ground zero for the renaissance that I call Biotech 2.0,” he tells me, and he Flickrblurbs: 2.8x as many companies as the next biggest node, South San Francisco.
“With so many biotech companies, DNA ordered by 11 p.m. arrives the next morning, delivered locally by minivan.”
Jurvetson, 44, is managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, $7 billion in funds, 600 companies funded, offices planetwide. (Jurvetson doesn’t say “world.” He says “planet.”)
In San Diego, he sits on the board of Synthetic Genomics, Craig Venter’s and Ham Smith’s algae and virology shop on the Mesa, as well as their new agricultural spinoff, Agradis, and he is also a board adviser to Genomatica, the sustainable chemicals and microbial engineering company about to IPO on Wateridge Circle.
For biotech, at least, Jurvetson may well be San Diego’s pipeline to Silicon Valley.
Though the startups and the ideas burst out of San Diego, the money comes down on the plane.
“There aren’t many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors,” he tells me. “It’s pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley. It’s like a power lock,” he explains. The big VC money in tech doesn’t come from New York, or Seattle, or Texas, either. It comes from Silicon Valley and Boston.
Why?
“Combination of historical artifacts. Harvard in the east. Silicon Valley with Stanford and Berkeley, Apple and HP, out here,” he says. “Capital formation is more prevalent near these tech centers. We are trying to overcome that problem by partnering with local groups around the U.S. and the world. DFJ is different from other VC firms, more like a franchise model. We have an office in Santa Barbara, and we are working our way south.”
San Diego’s culture of entrepreneurship and leadership in biotech leads Jurvetson to think there’s no real reason for entrepreneurs to move north, at least if their prospective company is in the life sciences, wireless, or perhaps medical devices.
Still, there’s that little matter of big funding.
How does Jurvetson choose the entrepreneurs he wants to back?
Let’s say you are that ambitious postdoc at the Salk Institute, or that microbiologist picking up a business degree at Rady or San Diego State, what should you expect from Jurvetson, when you are the one taking the plane, only the other way, from Lindbergh Field north to SFO, and then the long, anxious cab ride to Menlo Park? What will be waiting for you and your business plan?
“We look for people with infectious enthusiasm,” he replies, “individuals who convince us that they have the best thing ever. That make us jump out of our seats. We look for intellectual agility and, frankly, for enough self-confidence that you can still be humble, that you don’t pretend to have all the answers like a salesperson.”
There’s got to be that dream of innovation, an explanation of how “what you got” will change the world in 20 years. But don’t forget, this is no longer just about research science, not when you step out of the cab. VC’s are into 10X returns, with 100X oh-so-much-sweeter.
DFJ invested $8 million for 28 percent of Baidu — the Chinese equivalent of the Google search engine — in the beginning and then a total of $5 million more in the follow-up rounds to maintain their ownership, for a total of $13 million. They were the largest shareholder.
They then distributed those shares to their investors and did not sell them. Now, Jurvetson says, that $13 million investment is worth about $13 billion, depending on the day of the week. (Not a bad return in a down economy. No reason not to be excited.)
Yet at the same time, there’s got to be a hard-nosed and pragmatic explanation of how the company will succeed in four months to a year. Nobody wants the run money to run out.
So what exactly is San Diego’s next big thing, this Biotech 2.0 that’s catching the eye of smart funders to the north?
Basically, it’s synthetic biology, the concept of building living pieces and sometimes living things from the ground up with no animals involved. It’s artificial evolution rather than intelligent design. Venter and Synthetic Genomics launched the charge a year or so ago when they created an artificial cell which could reproduce itself. Mom was a computer and Poppa was a rolling algorithm.
What was science fiction five years ago, and science five months ago, has become the basis of fundable spinoff companies today. Jurvetson, strategic adviser to many, and not just in San Diego, explains:
“The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science. You can run many more experiments, hundreds going to millions, whereas in the past it was one or two per year. The whole pace of innovation is exploding.”
Results can be dramatic, boosting crop yields, monkey-wrenching microbes to prevent pathogens from attacking plants, converting municipal waste and sewage to fuels or useful plastics and chemicals with a high profit margin, pulling CO2 out of the air, he says.
Jurvetson talks faster than a Canadian supercomputer, the quantum model he believes will have more computational power than all the human brains on Earth at the same time, sooner than many of us know, or care to think.
The next 10 years will surpass the past 30, he feels, always the tech optimist, because computational power — Moore’s Law broadly defined — is what drives all sectors of tech, making San Diego’s Biotech 2.0 finally possible.
“The intention is to rewrite the code of life as if it were a computer program or a poem!”
Jurvetson’s excited. He’s always excited.
He sees the possibilities.
He surveys the geometric pattern of the cliffs at Torrey Pines and posts a pic on his Flickr photostream: “The Purple Beach of 92037” — “ ’tis a magical place.”
But Jurvetson is no tourist. It’s the beach above the beach that brings him down from Menlo Park to La Jolla: “Biotech Beach.”
Board meetings. “San Diego’s ground zero for the renaissance that I call Biotech 2.0,” he tells me, and he Flickrblurbs: 2.8x as many companies as the next biggest node, South San Francisco.
“With so many biotech companies, DNA ordered by 11 p.m. arrives the next morning, delivered locally by minivan.”
Jurvetson, 44, is managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, $7 billion in funds, 600 companies funded, offices planetwide. (Jurvetson doesn’t say “world.” He says “planet.”)
In San Diego, he sits on the board of Synthetic Genomics, Craig Venter’s and Ham Smith’s algae and virology shop on the Mesa, as well as their new agricultural spinoff, Agradis, and he is also a board adviser to Genomatica, the sustainable chemicals and microbial engineering company about to IPO on Wateridge Circle.
For biotech, at least, Jurvetson may well be San Diego’s pipeline to Silicon Valley.
Though the startups and the ideas burst out of San Diego, the money comes down on the plane.
“There aren’t many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors,” he tells me. “It’s pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley. It’s like a power lock,” he explains. The big VC money in tech doesn’t come from New York, or Seattle, or Texas, either. It comes from Silicon Valley and Boston.
Why?
“Combination of historical artifacts. Harvard in the east. Silicon Valley with Stanford and Berkeley, Apple and HP, out here,” he says. “Capital formation is more prevalent near these tech centers. We are trying to overcome that problem by partnering with local groups around the U.S. and the world. DFJ is different from other VC firms, more like a franchise model. We have an office in Santa Barbara, and we are working our way south.”
San Diego’s culture of entrepreneurship and leadership in biotech leads Jurvetson to think there’s no real reason for entrepreneurs to move north, at least if their prospective company is in the life sciences, wireless, or perhaps medical devices.
Still, there’s that little matter of big funding.
How does Jurvetson choose the entrepreneurs he wants to back?
Let’s say you are that ambitious postdoc at the Salk Institute, or that microbiologist picking up a business degree at Rady or San Diego State, what should you expect from Jurvetson, when you are the one taking the plane, only the other way, from Lindbergh Field north to SFO, and then the long, anxious cab ride to Menlo Park? What will be waiting for you and your business plan?
“We look for people with infectious enthusiasm,” he replies, “individuals who convince us that they have the best thing ever. That make us jump out of our seats. We look for intellectual agility and, frankly, for enough self-confidence that you can still be humble, that you don’t pretend to have all the answers like a salesperson.”
There’s got to be that dream of innovation, an explanation of how “what you got” will change the world in 20 years. But don’t forget, this is no longer just about research science, not when you step out of the cab. VC’s are into 10X returns, with 100X oh-so-much-sweeter.
DFJ invested $8 million for 28 percent of Baidu — the Chinese equivalent of the Google search engine — in the beginning and then a total of $5 million more in the follow-up rounds to maintain their ownership, for a total of $13 million. They were the largest shareholder.
They then distributed those shares to their investors and did not sell them. Now, Jurvetson says, that $13 million investment is worth about $13 billion, depending on the day of the week. (Not a bad return in a down economy. No reason not to be excited.)
Yet at the same time, there’s got to be a hard-nosed and pragmatic explanation of how the company will succeed in four months to a year. Nobody wants the run money to run out.
So what exactly is San Diego’s next big thing, this Biotech 2.0 that’s catching the eye of smart funders to the north?
Basically, it’s synthetic biology, the concept of building living pieces and sometimes living things from the ground up with no animals involved. It’s artificial evolution rather than intelligent design. Venter and Synthetic Genomics launched the charge a year or so ago when they created an artificial cell which could reproduce itself. Mom was a computer and Poppa was a rolling algorithm.
What was science fiction five years ago, and science five months ago, has become the basis of fundable spinoff companies today. Jurvetson, strategic adviser to many, and not just in San Diego, explains:
“The first generation of biotech physically cut and pasted from one organism to another. You learned that taxol helped cure cancer, then you found the source organism and extracted the genes to make your drug. Now physical science is becoming information science. You can run many more experiments, hundreds going to millions, whereas in the past it was one or two per year. The whole pace of innovation is exploding.”
Results can be dramatic, boosting crop yields, monkey-wrenching microbes to prevent pathogens from attacking plants, converting municipal waste and sewage to fuels or useful plastics and chemicals with a high profit margin, pulling CO2 out of the air, he says.
Jurvetson talks faster than a Canadian supercomputer, the quantum model he believes will have more computational power than all the human brains on Earth at the same time, sooner than many of us know, or care to think.
The next 10 years will surpass the past 30, he feels, always the tech optimist, because computational power — Moore’s Law broadly defined — is what drives all sectors of tech, making San Diego’s Biotech 2.0 finally possible.
“The intention is to rewrite the code of life as if it were a computer program or a poem!”
Jurvetson’s excited. He’s always excited.
He sees the possibilities.
