Tim Draper’s next big bet: age reversal, robots and bitcoin
The Silicon Valley investor told MarketWatch he sees AI in a 1998-style boom and is backing biotech and robotics ideas that sound far out.
By Sal Moretti · Money Reporter
3 min read
Tim Draper made his name writing checks for tech ideas that many investors would not touch, and he told MarketWatch his next frontier includes age-reversing medicine, cloned human body parts and specialized robots.
In an interview with MarketWatch columnist Michael Sincere, the veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist said he is drawn to founders chasing ideas that appear too ambitious for conventional backers. Draper is the founder of Draper Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Draper University, and MarketWatch identified him as an early seed-stage investor in more than 60 unicorns, including Tesla, SpaceX, Twitch, Coinbase, Robinhood and Baidu.
Draper pointed to SpaceX as an example of the kind of gamble he likes. He said the company’s early rockets failed after his investment, but Elon Musk’s success in getting one off the ground changed the space business. Draper said Musk saw that rockets could be launched far more cheaply than government programs, and that the mission to reach Mars helped attract top engineers. Starlink, he added, emerged along the way.
He used Colossal, a company pursuing the return of the woolly mammoth, as another example. Draper said that in chasing that goal, the company hatched a chicken without an egg, brought back dire wolves and made healthcare discoveries.
The far-out bets now
Draper told MarketWatch that biotechnology is a major focus. He said some companies are working on taking cells from a person, returning them to an earlier state and putting them back, with the possible aim of reversing aging. He said that while pursuing that goal, those companies may make progress against liver cancer.
He also said other groups are working on cloning body parts, describing the idea as spare parts for people. In robotics, Draper said the route toward a conscious robot may first produce machines built for narrow jobs, such as a fast-food robot designed to flip 15 burgers at once rather than look human.
Draper also talked through the deals he missed. He told MarketWatch he had a chance at Facebook but was outbid by someone he knew. On Google, he said his firm already had six search engines in its portfolio and his partners decided that was enough. He said he misjudged Netflix because he expected streaming to arrive in about 18 months and did not see the point of mailing DVDs. He also said missing LinkedIn was his responsibility.
AI boom, bitcoin and no bear case
On artificial intelligence, Draper told MarketWatch that he thinks current AI companies are real businesses. He said OpenAI has the largest market share, Anthropic is gaining ground with corporate customers, and specialist AI companies in areas such as science, medicine and law may be protected from broader artificial general intelligence platforms.
Asked whether AI resembles the dot-com era, Draper said he thinks the market is around the equivalent of 1998. He said AI company valuations are about 100 times larger than internet-era counterparts, but argued that the general public has not yet bought into many of them. He expects more initial public offerings, and said the market may eventually be unable to absorb them all.
Draper declined to give a bearish AI case, telling MarketWatch, “I am an optimist.” He said people should use new technology and argued that humans adjust when things go wrong.
He also remains bullish on bitcoin. Draper told MarketWatch that bitcoin went through a hype-and-crash cycle in 2017, while engineers kept building. He predicted a bitcoin economy will arrive with many people barely noticing until they want to move dollars into bitcoin.
This story draws on original reporting from MarketWatch.