How I Invest with David Weisburd
E157: DA Wallach: Spotting Genius in Elon & Zuck's Early Days
Tue, 22 Apr 2025
D.A. Wallach’s journey is one of the most unconventional paths in venture capital. He went from fronting a rock band discovered by Kanye West and Pharrell, to investing in Spotify, SpaceX, and founding a biotech VC firm reshaping human medicine. In this episode, we dive into his evolution—from artist to investor—and what he’s learned from being in the room with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Ron Burkle. D.A. shares why great investing is an act of taste, how he earned his first big break with Ron Burkle at Inevitable Ventures, and why he believes biotech is the most exciting place to invest over the next decade. We also discuss how aesthetic intuition applies to investing, how to think in second and third order effects, and what it really means to be contrarian when contrarianism has gone mainstream.
Chapter 1: How did D.A. Wallach meet Elon Musk and invest in SpaceX early on?
Well, I got to know Elon socially here in LA. He lived here at the time. And that was before SpaceX and Tesla were household names. So I think Tesla at that time just had the Roadster out. And SpaceX had been doing a bunch of launches, but they hadn't yet done their first reusable proof of concept, which was a major turning point for the company. So I was really excited to meet Elon.
I met him at a dinner through friends and obviously was just super impressed by the kind of intrepid stuff he was doing and asked him if I could invest. So he facilitated that. And yeah, it was, I think, nine or 10 years ago. And Been a great investment.
So this was around 2014, 2015, and you guys were talking about AI. Tell me about his views on AI a decade ago.
Well, no surprise. I mean, he was early to recognize that technology was going to have a major impact. And I think he at the time knew Demis Hassabis quite well, who had been the founder of DeepMind. And that's a company that Google ultimately acquired. Demis now runs an AI group within Google. Elon kind of opened my eyes to the advances that were starting to take place in that area.
I think at the time, the major innovations had really been these things Demis had put together that enabled an AI to play certain human computer games. like video games. And Demis came out of a game development background. So he really understood that world.
And I think to anyone who understood those games and how challenging they might be for a human player, it was really impressive that the AIs were able to start doing things successfully in that space. So it was kind of the proof of concept that years before had been reached with chess being demonstrated in much more complex games. And Elon rightly appreciated that was just the beginning.
And I think at that point had started to talk to Max Tegmark, who's at MIT, and other thinkers who were influential in sort of calling out the significance that AI was likely to have in the years ahead.
Elon was already known in Silicon Valley. He had sold Zip2. He had started...
paypal with peter thiel through a merger is but but he wasn't anywhere close to how prevalent he was today what did you see in elon that made you believe that he could build a rocket company he had already built a rocket company and it was already launching rockets so that alone was already amazing i think the big uncertainty at that moment was just whether he would be able to reuse the rockets
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Chapter 2: What was Mark Zuckerberg like during Facebook's early days?
Don't know what it's like to be an investor who wasn't a recording artist first. So all I can comment on is where I see some parallels in the way I approach music from the way I approach investing. I think the common thread is
having a sense of taste and a confidence in your taste and that you could just call instinct or intuition but the truth is when you're making a song or any piece of art it's just the product of a thousand little choices you make and you're making those choices constantly what is the next note in the melody What chord should go under this? How should I voice the chord?
What's the right sound or texture to use? You have to like expressing yourself through choices. And there has to be something that feels good to you about communicating your vision or your personality through those choices. And so I think everything in life you can kind of depict in that way because you're constantly making choices. Who do you spend time with? What do you read?
What do you focus on? How do you organize your schedule? As an investor, obviously the reason someone's paying us is for judgment and to try and make choice to outsource choices to us. So part of what we do is somewhat rote and formulaic, meaning when we're diligencing a company, there are a set of questions we have to answer. There's information we need to find out. We need to do evaluation.
We need to do the same things any responsible investor would do. But at the margins, the thing that is going to make us invest in something or not probably comes down to personal taste and judgment. And I think that it actually is possible to bring a sort of aesthetic point of view to investing.
It's hard to put your finger on, but when people and a business plan and a strategy line up in a particular way, there's a kind of beauty to that. And It's a little cheesy to talk about things in business as being beautiful, but that is how I experience it. And when I recognize that, I want to go after it. And by contrast, things can be ugly.
And sometimes even things where the people seem really greedy and smart and motivated, you look at it all together and it just doesn't hang together in a cohesive way. And I've passed on things that were like that and then they worked. But my experience is usually if it feels ugly, don't do it.
And ultimately I do think that's connected to the aesthetic judgment that you cultivate as someone who creates art.
Tell me about the story, how you ended up working with billionaire Ron Burkle and running Inevitable Ventures. Thank you for listening. To join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes, please click the follow button above to subscribe.
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