Invest in Disruptive Innovation
Listen to Heidi Roizen discuss what piques the interests of DFJ Ventures.
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Listen to Heidi Roizen discuss what piques the interests of DFJ Ventures. DFJ looks for early-stage startups that have the potential to reinvent entire industries. Disruptive startups that sit on the edge between "crazy" and possible.
But you know, if you look at some of the more recent successes that DFJ has had: Tesla; Boxx, which we were in super early; Solar City; SpaceX — a lot of Elon companies — (thank you Elon we love you); Planet labs.
I think for example you know, you will see a theme around a lot of those as very disruptive and very disruptive in the space industry and that is a space that Steve Jurvetson got excited about very early… right?
If you look at Boxx, we were the first investors and that’s a space — enterprise SaaS — that Josh got excited about very early.
So I think the thing is you know, when you feel like – like I’ll give you an example. Food delivery. We don’t have a food delivery deal and you know what, here is the thing about food, big market. Everyone eats a couple of times a day and we have looked at food deals and it’s like, okay now everyone has their food deal and some of those are going to be successful.
But that might be where we say, okay now you know, maybe food creation or maybe artificial labs where they can make meat without animals involved, may be that is where we need to go if we are interested in food.
So we like to think that we live out a little bit on the crazy edge of what people are doing. But not with everything. You know, there are other investments that we make and another investment that we made is Doximity it’s not the business that you look at and go, oh those those people are crazy right. I mean it’s a business and I look at it and I say, hey, this is a rational reasonable business. And it is the next step in, you know, what happens when people want to socially network around a particular profession and provide services and it makes sense.
So, kind of you know what gets us excited is what I think gets us excited is that revolutionary stuff where you’re like, this person might be crazy, or this might really work. If it works, it’s a multi-billion-dollar opportunity, that’s the stuff honestly that we really get excited about.