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American businessman (born 1958)
Timothy Cook Draper (born June 11, 1958) is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Draper University, Draper Venture Network, and Draper Associates. Since 2019, he is a partner in Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, PrettyLitter and Focus Media.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0
Last updated Oct 21, 2026.
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Timothy Cook Draper (born June 11, 1958) is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Draper University, Draper Venture Network, and Draper Associates. Since 2019, he is a partner in Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, PrettyLitter and Focus Media. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized bitcoins from the Silk Road website. Draper is a proponent of bitcoin and decentralization. Draper was one of the first investors in Theranos.2
Draper stated that he met with—and donated to—both presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in "roughly equal amounts." He also stated that he was "endorsing both candidates."
From Wikipedia’s article on Draper Triangle, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4
In 1985, Draper left the investment bank Alex. Brown & Sons to start his own venture capital firm. Former colleague John H.N. Fisher became a partner in 1991, and business student Steve Jurvetson became the third partner in the firm in 1994.
Draper invested in Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, who presented him with their company, Hotmail. While numerous publications intimate that he "invented viral marketing" in 1996, this major acclaim was his early support for the founders, due to his idea of automatically attaching a brief advertising message to the bottom of outgoing Hotmail emails. Draper and Jurvetson then coined the term "viral marketing", though the neologism itself is documented as early as a 1989 edition of PC User.
From Wikipedia’s article on Draper Triangle, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4
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