Founder & Managing Partner at Draper Associates · Joined 1985
View Live Interactive Profile →Tim Draper is a fourth-generation venture capitalist - his father Bill Draper and grandfather William H. Draper Jr. were both pioneering Silicon Valley investors - who founded Draper Associates in 1985 after graduating from Stanford with an electrical engineering degree and earning an MBA from Harvard. He grew the firm into Draper Fisher Jurvetson after John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson joined, backing Hotmail (where he pioneered viral marketing), Skype, Baidu, and Tesla, then relaunched the original Draper Associates in 2008 to focus on early-stage and frontier technology. Draper became one of Bitcoin's most visible advocates after purchasing nearly 30,000 bitcoin at a US Marshals auction in 2014, and founded Draper University in 2012, a live-in entrepreneurship bootcamp that has graduated more than 6,000 alumni from 104 countries. The firm now manages roughly $2 billion and has backed more than 60 unicorns since 1985.