Steve Jurvetson wins 2004 World Technology Network Award in Finance (Individual) category.

Nov 6, 2004

The World Technology Network (WTN) is a cross between a global meeting ground, a virtual think tank, and an elite club whose members are all focused on the business or science of bringing important emerging technologies of all types (from biotech to new materials, from IT to new energy sources) into reality. WTN's membership is comprised of over 800 individuals and organisations from over 50 countries nominated and judged by their peers to be the most innovative in the technology world.

The WTN brings key players together – from the most cutting-edge technologists to the most forward-thinking financiers, from the most conceptual futurists to the most grounded entrepreneurs, from the most insightful science writers to the most savvy marketers, from the most big-picture government officials to the most focused policy analysts, and from the world's leading corporations to the world's newest start-ups – helping to make things happen sooner and better than they might have.

The World Technology Awards are presented each year to the outstanding innovators from each sector within the technology arena, both as a way to honor those individuals and as a vetting mechanism to determine the newest WTN members. The Awards are announced each year in a gala ceremony at the close of the annual World Technology Summit.

Comment from Steve Jurvetson on DFJ and why DFJ is a World Technology leader:

"At Draper Fisher Jurvetson, we look for disruptive businesses run by entrepreneurs who want to change the world (our logo is the scientist's delta symbol for change with an overlay of the world). To be successful as early stage VCs, we have to identify technology waves early and act upon those beliefs.

We are seeing more innovation than ever before. And we are investing in more new companies than ever before. We have opened offices in most of the major tech centers of the U.S., and now internationally as well. We were early investors in the Internet wave, and by 1995, the Internet comprised 80% of our investments. Today, 30% of our investments are in the broad area of nanotech, MEMS and novel materials, and we have made more investments in this category than any other VC firm.

We are looking for entrepreneurs who have not been discovered by the mainstream and who are passionate about new ideas that are not universally regarded as good ideas. We find these entrepreneurs at the edge, at the frontiers of the unknown, and at the interstices between formal academic disciplines.

Just like the Internet cycle, we try to act as a magnet so the entrepreneurs to find us. This is an easier way to find the proverbial needle in the haystack of a new industry. The VCs that rely on classic “referral networks” for deal flow will not be not be early in discovering new industries, as those networks serve to perpetuate exclusionary stability in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

With nanotech, as with the Internet, we become active learners, visiting conferences and luminaries in the field. And then we become evangelists. We write articles, engage in the debate, and become active on the speaking circuit. Over the last year, I have spoken about nanotech at the NSF, Oak Ridge National Labs, NASA, FedEx Tech Institute, Merrill Lynch, NanoBusiness Alliance, universities from Rice to Berkeley, and keynoted numerous industry conferences, from Toronto to Singapore. I even co-taught a new class at Stanford with Larry Lessig entitled “The Code in Tiny Spaces” to explore the regulatory and intellectual property implications of digital matter becoming more like software, much as genes are like memes. There is nothing like teaching a class to terrify you into learning the subject matter!

Why Nanotech? At DFJ, we believe that nanotech is the next great technology wave, the next phase of Moore’s Law, and the nexus of scientific innovation that revolutionizes most industries and indirectly affects the fabric of society. Historians will look back on the upcoming epoch with no less portent than the Industrial Revolution.

We are entering a period of exponential growth in the impact of the learning-doing cycle where the power of biology, IT and nanotech compounds the advances in each formerly discrete domain. Nanotech strips the isolating systems vernacular and exposes the core areas of overlap in the fundamental sciences.
Nanotech is the nexus of the sciences.

Given that much of the abstract potential of nanotech is a question of “when” not “if”, the challenge for the venture capitalist is one of market timing. When should we be investing, and in which sub-sectors? We need to pull the sea of possibilities through an intellectual chromatograph to tease apart the various segments into a timeline of probable progression, an iterative exercise of exploratory learning and pattern recognition.

Bottom line, we conclude that it is a great time to invest in startups. As in evolution and the Cambrian explosion, many will become extinct. But some will change the world. So we pursue the strategy of a diversified portfolio, or in other words, we try to make a broad bet on mammals."