Timothy Cook Draper (born June 11, 1958) is an American
venture capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...
investor, and founder of
Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...
(DFJ),
[ Entrepreneurs page]
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA ...
website, ''accessed April 16, 2014'. Draper University, Draper Venture Network, Draper Associates and Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include
Baidu
Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the l ...
,
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
,
Skype
Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debi ...
,
Tesla,
SpaceX
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and a satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal o ...
,
AngelList,
SolarCity,
Ring,
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
,
DocuSign
DocuSign, Inc. is an American company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that allows organizations to manage electronic agreements. As part of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature, a way to sign electronically on dif ...
,
Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headqua ...
,
Robinhood,
Ancestry.com,
Twitch,
Cruise Automation
Cruise LLC is an American self-driving car company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology. The company is a largely-autonomous subsidiary of G ...
, and
Focus Media
Focus Media Information Technology, formerly Focus Media Holding, is a Chinese company which operates out-of-home advertising in China which consist predominantly of digital signage screens and claims to own the country's largest Internet adver ...
. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage for his purchase at a
US Marshals Service
The United States Marshals Service (USMS) is a federal law enforcement agency in the United States. The USMS is a bureau within the U.S. Department of Justice, operating under the direction of the Attorney General, but serves as the enforce ...
auction of seized
bitcoins from the
Silk Road
The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and rel ...
website. Draper is a proponent of
Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distr ...
and decentralization. Draper was also one of the first investors in
Theranos
Theranos Inc. () was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists a ...
.
Background and education
Draper is the third in a familial line of venture capitalists and government officials. He is the son of Phyllis (Culbertson) and
William Henry Draper III
William Henry Draper III (born January 1, 1928) is an American venture capitalist.
Early life
Draper was born on January 1, 1928, in White Plains, New York, the son of Katherine Louise (née Baum) and banker, general, and diplomat William Henry ...
and the younger brother of actress
Polly Draper
Polly Carey Draper (born June 15, 1955) is an American actress, writer, producer, and director. Draper has received several awards, including a Writers Guild of America Award (WGA), and is noted for speaking in a "trademark throaty voice." She g ...
. His father is the founder of Draper & Johnson Investment Company and former chairman and president of the
Export-Import Bank of the United States. His grandfather,
William Henry Draper Jr.
William Henry Draper Jr. (August 10, 1894 – December 26, 1974) was an American army officer, banker, government official, and diplomat.
Early life
William Henry Draper Jr., was born on August 10, 1894 in Harlem, New York City. His parents w ...
, founded Draper, Gaither and Anderson in 1958 and served as the first ambassador to
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two N ...
.
[
Draper attended ]Phillips Academy Andover
("Not for Self") la, Finis Origine Pendet ("The End Depends Upon the Beginning") Youth From Every Quarter Knowledge and Goodness
, address = 180 Main Street
, city = Andover
, state = Ma ...
before matriculating to Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
, where he graduated with a BS in electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
in 1980.[Melissa Lee Parker Becomes the Bride Of Timothy Cook Draper in California]
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
, August 15, 1982. He later earned an MBA
A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...
from Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world and offers a large full-time MBA ...
in 1984.[
While at Stanford, Draper interned at ]Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
as a marketing engineer. Draper made national headlines as a student when he created the popular campus board game
Board games are tabletop games that typically use . These pieces are moved or placed on a pre-marked board (playing surface) and often include elements of table, card, role-playing, and miniatures games as well.
Many board games feature a co ...
"Stanford - The Game" alongside Heidi Roizen, who was a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business
The Stanford Graduate School of Business (also known as Stanford GSB) is the graduate business school of Stanford University, a private research university in Stanford, California. For several years it has been the most selective business schoo ...
at the time.
Investment career
Early business career
In 1985, Draper left the investment bank
Investment is the dedication of money to purchase of an asset to attain an increase in value over a period of time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset, such as time, money, or effort.
In finance, the purpose of investing i ...
Alex. Brown & Sons to start his own venture capital firm. Former colleague John H.N. Fisher became a partner in 1991, and business student Steve Jurvetson
Stephen T. Jurvetson (born March 1, 1967) is an American businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly a partner of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), he was an early investor in Hotmail, Memphis Meats, Mythic and Nervana Systems. He is curr ...
became the third partner in the firm in 1994.
Hotmail and viral marketing
Draper invested in Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, who presented him with their company, Hotmail. While numerous publications intimate that he "invented viral marketing
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
" in 1996, this major acclaim was his early support for the founders, due to his idea of automatically attaching a brief advertising message to the bottom of outgoing Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
emails. Draper and Jurvetson then coined the term "viral marketing," though the neologism
A neologism Ancient_Greek.html"_;"title="_from_Ancient_Greek">Greek_νέο-_''néo''(="new")_and_λόγος_/''lógos''_meaning_"speech,_utterance"is_a_relatively_recent_or_isolated_term,_word,_or_phrase_that_may_be_in_the_process_of_entering_com ...
itself is documented as early as a 1989 edition of '' PC User''.
Baidu
Draper was the first Silicon Valley venture capitalist to invest in China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...
through the global fund DFJ ePlanet. In 2001, Draper negotiated with CEO Robin Li
Robin Li Yanhong (; born 17 November 1968) is a Chinese software engineer and billionaire internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of the search engine Baidu. As of March 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$8.5 billion.
Li studied inform ...
of Baidu
Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the l ...
to buy 28% of the company on behalf of ePlanet for USD $9 million.
Skype
Draper's father, Bill Draper, was an early investor in Skype
Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debi ...
, and DFJ backed Skype in 2004. The company owned 10% of Skype in 2005 when it was sold to eBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...
for US$4.1 billion. Draper and Niklas Zennström appeared in the first Skype video together in 2007 at Stanford University.
Tesla
In 2006, Draper through DFJ was an investor in the Series C venture round
A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among ...
of Tesla. In 2007, Draper again invested in Tesla's Series D venture round through Draper Associates.
Bitcoin
On June 27, 2014, Draper paid about US$19 million for nearly 30,000 bitcoins which had been seized from the Silk Road
The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and rel ...
by the US Marshals service and auctioned to the public.
On September 23, 2014, Draper told Fox Business
Fox Business (officially known as Fox Business Network, or FBN) is an American business news channel and website publication owned by the Fox News Media division of Fox Corporation. The channel broadcasts primarily from studios at 1211 Avenu ...
that he predicted that one bitcoin would reach $10,000 "in three years"; on January 27, 2015, Draper wagered about $400,000 (which is 2000 bitcoins with $200 price) that the bitcoin will rebound from a recent plunge. The price of a bitcoin crossed $10,000 on November 29, 2017.
On April 21, 2018, Draper predicted during an Intelligence Squared
Intelligence Squared is a media company that organizes live debates and other cultural events around the world. It was founded in 2002 in London, where its head office is based, and has affiliates in the US, Australia, and Hong Kong. The debat ...
debate that "In five years you are going to try to go buy coffee with fiat currency and they are going to laugh at you because you're not using crypto."
In December 2019, he predicted that bitcoin would reach US$250,000 by the end of 2022.
Cruise Automation and Twitch
After funding Twitch, which was sold to Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...
for $1 billion, Kyle Vogt
Kyle Vogt is an American engineer, entrepreneur, technology executive and robotics pioneer. In 2013, Vogt founded Cruise Automation, where he currently serves as the company's President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer. Cruise ...
, a founder of Twitch, took Draper for a ride in the Cruise Automation
Cruise LLC is an American self-driving car company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology. The company is a largely-autonomous subsidiary of G ...
self-driving car. After nearly crashing, Draper funded Cruise. Cruise went on to be sold to General Motors
The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...
for $1 billion as well.
Theranos
Draper was one of the first investors in the blood testing start up Theranos
Theranos Inc. () was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists a ...
, whose founder Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Anne Holmes (born February 3, 1984) is an American convicted fraudster and former biotechnology entrepreneur. In 2003, Holmes founded and was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Theranos, a now-defunct health technology company th ...
was later charged by the SEC with committing massive fraud. In 2018, after the SEC had already charged Holmes, Draper continued to defend her, saying that she had been "bullied into submission".
Recent investments
Draper's recent investments include Robinhood (company)
Robinhood Markets, Inc. is an American financial services company headquartered in Menlo Park, California, that facilitates commission-free trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies as well as individual retirement accou ...
, Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headqua ...
, eShares, Tezos
Tezos is an open-source blockchain that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts. The native cryptocurrency for the Tezos blockchain is the tez (ISO 4217: XTZ; sign: ꜩ). The Tezos network ac ...
, DefiMoneyMarket, and OpenGov
OpenGov is a government technology company that offers cloud software for public sector accounting, planning, budgeting, citizen services, and procurement. OpenGov serves over 1,000 cities, counties, and state agencies across 49 states. In Apr ...
. Draper's recent investments are centered around companies who use artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
, Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency that can be transferred on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distr ...
, blockchain
A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, ...
, smart contracts
A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the re ...
, and computational genomics Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data, including both DNA and RNA sequence as well as other "post-genomic" data (i.e., experimental data obtai ...
to apply to industries like finance
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of f ...
, health care
Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health pr ...
, and government
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government i ...
.
Politics
Draper has spoken out for free markets and entrepreneurship globally, and against Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, stating that they limit the viability of taking companies public.
In 2000, Draper spent $20 million on a failed measure to support school voucher
A school voucher, also called an education voucher in a voucher system, is a certificate of government funding for students at schools chosen by themselves or their parents. Funding is usually for a particular year, term, or semester. In some cou ...
s.[Carla Marinucci. July 15, 201]
Six Californias measure heading for 2016 ballot, backers say
''SFGate.'' Retrieved: July 15, 2014.
Split California Proposal
In early 2014, Draper filed a petition which was accepted by California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen to begin collecting signatures to divide California into six smaller states, arguing that California is "increasingly ungovernable" as one state. However, on September 12, 2014, it was announced the plan fell short of the required amount of valid signatures to land it on the 2016 ballot.
In April 2018 Draper announced collection of "about 600,000" signatures for a new petition to divide California, this time into three new states. In June 2018, the petition collected a sufficient number of signatures to qualify as an initiative in the 2018 general election.
On July 18, 2018, the day before ballots were sent to print, the California Supreme Court blocked the measure from appearing on the November 2018 ballot.
Educational program
In 2013, Draper launched Draper University of Heroes, an educational program that offers a crash course in entrepreneurship. The university's residential program is based in San Mateo, California
San Mateo ( ; ) is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. About 20 miles (32 km) south of San Francisco, the city borders Burlingame to the north, Hillsborough to the west, San Francisco Bay and Foster ...
, and the curricula are designed by Draper.
Publications
*''When A Venture Capitalist Enters California’s Political Matrix: Innovation Meets The Status Quo'', 2018
*''How to be The Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs'', 2017
See also
*
*
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Draper, Timothy C.
1958 births
Living people
Stanford University alumni
Harvard Business School alumni
American financial company founders
People from the San Francisco Bay Area
American venture capitalists
People associated with Bitcoin
People associated with cryptocurrency
American billionaires
Draper family
Skype people