Here's a very interesting (and prescient) talk by Elon Musk (founder of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and X.com/PayPal). (October 08, 2003)
"Elon Musk, co-founder, CEO, and chairman of PayPal, shares his background: He was accepted into Stanford but deferred his admission to start an internet company in 1995. His company was zip2 which helped the media industry convert their content to electronic medium. Then, he sold the company for over $300 million and never came back to Stanford."
Historical notes: At the time of filming the US Space Shuttle fleet was still grounded after the destruction of Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003. SpaceX was less than a year and half old (it had 30 employees and outsourced the heavy machining work, now it has 3000+ and outsources very little) and Tesla Motors had been founded just 3 months earlier.
In the talk, he also discusses the fledging private space industry with Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com), Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack of iD Software) and Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne (Burt Rutan). He also mentions the (still) under-development Boeing X-37 "space plane" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Space_Plane_Program
The Q&A session begins about halfway through.
(This video was originally split up into 23 different files by Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner, I ripped all the videos and combined them. The audio becomes out of sync about halfway through, sorry. There's a link to the original source is available here: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=377)
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"SpaceX is the third company founded by Mr. Musk. Prior to SpaceX, he co-founded PayPal, the world's leading electronic payment system, and served as the company's chairman and CEO. PayPal has over twenty million customers in 38 countries, processes several billion dollars per year and went public on the NASDAQ under PYPL in early 2002. Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal until the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002.
Before PayPal, Mr. Musk co-founded Zip2 Corporation in 1995, a leading provider of enterprise software and services to the media industry, with investments from The New York Times Company, Knight-Ridder, MDV, Softbank and the Hearst Corporation. He served as Chairman, CEO and Chief Technology Officer and in March 1999 sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in an all cash transaction.
Mr. Musk's early experience extends across a spectrum of advanced technology industries, from high energy density ultra-capacitors at Pinnacle Research to software development at Rocket Science and Microsoft. He has a physics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a business degree from Wharton and originally came out to California to pursue graduate studies in high energy density capacitor physics & materials science at Stanford.
Related Links: www.spacex.com
Last Updated: Wed, Apr 19, 2006"
[Source: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=377]
