Tipping Point: Timothy Draper
From June 2007
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“The founders of Sun Microsystems … had visited 21 venture capitalists and the 22nd one is the one who finally said, ‘Yes.’ The same is true of the Hotmail founders. They went to about 25 different venture funds and, at one point, they were looking at me and saying, why were you the one who said, ‘Yes’? That’s more encouraging for me than discouraging. They’ve been to 25 venture capitalists and they still believe it, and they’ve tested their idea against 25 people who are picking holes in it. But eventually these guys are going to come up with something interesting.
“I am looking for entrepreneurs who are great, and maybe they made mistakes along the way, but they have such a goal in mind that there is no such thing as failure.
“I’m very much a free-market thinker, so I’m always thinking in terms of creating the environment. If you are a government you create the environment you allow people to explore in that environment. And if anything ever becomes a problem, then you clamp down on that. Generally, the market clamps down. The market finds the problem and (it) solves the problem. It has a very good regulating effect. I think many times regulators feel they have to proactively jump when they see something that was a problem once. And I don’t think that is necessarily true. You can let it go a little longer than the regulators usually do.
“Arnold Schwarzenegger has done (something) that I’ve really been impressed with. And that is to connect the Democrats and the Republicans and bring the people together. As we connect more — Skype, Hotmail, whatever — we’re making geographic borders just crumble. And we’re making very strong bonds between people here and people in China and people here and people in India. And if we make all of those very strong bonds then the geographic barriers don’t matter so much.”
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