Building and launching rockets has been a lifelong hobby that my son and I share. We regularly travel to Nevada's Black Rock Desert to launch rockets.
When you lower the cost of access to space, a boom of innovation follows, just as low-cost fiber optics paved the way for the Internet and the cloud services that followed.
There aren't many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It's pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley.
One tech-related concern with religion is that it appears to be a positive feedback loop to the accelerating rich-poor gap, as the disenfranchised opt out of modernity.
If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.
The future will be less predictable, forecast rises will shrink, company lifetimes will shrink, new entrants will proliferate and it's going to just get more unpredictable.
Statistical physics or Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics. Very unusual properties of matter emerge at that scale, and you can think about building products in a very different way. You can think about interfacing to biology in a very different way.
Being slick is not the right answer.
The bad news is that most traditional VCs have a youth bias that they will state very overtly. You always wonder if that's a self-fulfilling prophecy or if it's something about the nature of those businesses.
IT is permeating more industries. Moore's Law knocks down simulation capabilities. We don't need wind tunnels anymore, for example. You can run experiments more quickly.
I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.
