Scott Nolan

2008 comes around.

and SpaceX is now going through its launches had a couple launches that didn't work but was on a great trajectory to actually get the next ones to work and Founders Fund stepped up to lead one of the critical rounds in SpaceX to help it have the money to do those those additional final launches and keep momentum through that and then by 2011 really starting to think a lot about

you know, not only is there this core element of backing founders and running their companies, but how do we invest in things that aren't, you know, there's going to be a bunch of important companies that are built in consumer internet and in enterprise software, but how do we back things that otherwise won't happen?

These core technologies, whether they might be biotechnology,

They might be energy.

They might be space.

Things that are maybe even controversial at times.

Defense technology, like with Anduril.

At the time, nobody wanted to invest in defense in Silicon Valley, and even Google was canceling their program to work with the government on defense software.

And so by early 2010s, you saw this evolution or expansion from just let's back founders unilaterally

whether we succeed or fail, we are there for the founder and we're going to let them run their company the way they see fit to now let's do that while also backing important things that otherwise are not going to happen.

And so that that was really the evolution from 2005 to 2011 when I joined, got to, you know, be a part of a bunch of important investments across a bunch of different technologies.

And yeah, now it just continues.

To me, oddly, a lot of people ask for a long time, what's your favorite company in the portfolio?

And I was biased, but I thought, objectively, SpaceX.

Working on this thing that wasn't going to happen without SpaceX, bringing down the launch cost dramatically, leveraging that into enabling a bunch of other constellations, including their own constellation of Starlink.

And so, so much exciting stuff to do there.

That was a really important one.

a friend at a business school.

So I did business school between SpaceX and Founders Fund.