Tim Draper

Bio

• Timothy Draper is an American venture capital investor, and in 1985 founded the firm that would become Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). Draper is also the founder of Draper Associates and Draper University. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized Bitcoins from the Silk Road marketplace website.
• According to Forbes "Meet the Crypto's Richest" from 5-2-2018 (just around the end of the bull market of 2017:

The formidable Silicon Valley venture capitalist became a Bitcoin enthusiast before it was cool. He says he started thinking about digital currencies 15 years ago when he met a guy in South Korea who had bought a virtual sword for his son with regular cash. As currencies proliferated in videogames, Draper started looking for ways to convert one game currency to another.

The moment Draper heard about Bitcoin, he was in. Draper invested $250,000 when the price was at $6. He lost it all in the collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange in 2014, but Draper was not deterred. In the same year, he is reported to have paid less than $20 million for nearly 32,000 Bitcoin auctioned by the U.S. Marshalls Service — coins that had been confiscated from Ross Ulbricht and his online black marketplace, Silk Road. Since then Draper says he has made 40 more crypto investments.

"I don't know why anyone would want to go back to fiat when crypto is distributed, secure and global, while fiat is subject to the whims of political forces," says Draper, 59, who disputes Forbes estimate of his crypto wealth. "I believe that Bitcoin and crypto will drive most of the commerce of the world."

Occupations

• Draper Dragon; founder

Investments

• Draper Associates got put in the B category on a Crypto VC list (29-8-2022).
• Was ranked among the crypto billionaires by Forbes with $1.5 billion (7-4-2021). Dropped to $550 million.
• Aragon. Tim Draper has taken (19-2-2020) a 1 million ANT stake (worth about $760,000 at press time) in Aragon.
• A Bitcoin whale with over 29,000 BTC (12-2022).
• Factom announced the success of a $4.2 million Series A capital raise, led by billionaire investor Tim Draper. (Draper auspiciously stated afterward: “I believe that the Factom team has the opportunity and the potential to build a company greater than Oracle and Palantir and IBM combined.”).
• Handshake. One of the backers of a $10.2M token sale (7.5% of the supply) for Handshake (3-8-2020).
• Globe; derivatives platform. Was part of the $3 million in seed investments (20-11-2020).
• Keep Network. Is mentioned as a staker on the network (12-11-2020).
• Ledger; part of a $380M Series C funding round for the hardware wallet (10-6-2021)
• Nifty's; part of a pre-seed round (26-3-2021) through Draper Dragon.
• Oasis Network; Draper Dragon is one of the contributors to the $160m Ecosystem Fund (17-11-2021)
• Unstoppable Domains. Has Draper Accociates, which backs (11-10-2019) Unstoppable Domains.
• Tezos; publicly backed the fundraiser in 2017. From a Tezos blog (16-4-2021): "His investment arm Draper Goren Holm has invested in several Tezos projects, and most recently received an investment from the Tezos Foundation to fund blockchain startups building on Tezos. Draper University & Tezos Israel partnered together to launch a blockchain pre-acceleration program to connect Silicon Valley experts and investors to innovative entrepreneurs building their projects on blockchain. "