Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture

If you like space, you'll like this talk.

So, uh, my background—uh, in brief—I'll talk a little bit about Zip 2.

And uh and PayPal.

Uh, and then uh mostly about space and what we're doing in space.

Um, so I originally came out of California to do energy physics at Stanford.

Actually, um, and ended up putting this on hold in '95 to start Zip 2.

Um, and Zip 2—I'll tell you a little bit about the thought process of exactly what happened there.

Um, in '95, it wasn't at all clearEasy to understand that the internet was going to be a big commercial thing.

In fact, most of the venture capitalists that I talked to hadn't even heard of the internet—which sounds bizarreVery strange and surprising.—on Sand Hill Road.

Um, so uh—but I wanted to do something, and I thought it would be a pretty huge thing.

And um, I thought it was one of those things that only came along once in a very long while.

So I got a defermentThe action of delaying something until a later time. at Stanford, and I thought I'd give it a couple quarters.

And if it didn't work out— which I thought it probably wouldn't—then I'd come back to school.

Um, and actually, when I talked to my professor and told him this, he said, 'Well,

I don't think you'll be coming back,' and that was the last conversation I had with him.

So um, but there weren't a lot of ways to get involved—

the only way to get involved with the internet in '95 that I could think of was to start a company,

because there weren't a lot of companies to go and work for—apart from Netscape, maybe one or two others.

So um, and then I didn't have any money, so I thought, 'Well, we've got to make something that's going to return money very, very quickly.'

So we thought, 'Well, the media industry would need help converting its content from print to electronic, and they clearly had money.'

So if we could find a way to help them move their media to the internet, that would be an obvious way of generating revenue.

There was no advertising revenue on the internet at the time.

So uh, and that was really the basisThe main principle or foundation of an idea or system. of Zip 2, and we ended up building quite a bit of software for the media industry—primarily the print media industry.

Uh, so we had as investors and customers Hachette Corporation, Knight-Ridder, um, most of the major US print publishers.

We built that up, and then we had the opportunity to sell to Compaq in early '99

and basically took that offer—it was for a little over $300 million in cash—and that's a currency I highly recommend.

Um, so we had that, and um—but I wanted to do something more after Zip 2.

So uh, post the sale—in fact, immediately post the sale—I didn't really take any time off.

Um, I was trying to think of where the opportunities were.