Kimbal Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, The Kitchen, and Launching His First Company with Elon

In 2023, the U.S. federal government spent a staggering $1.5 trillion on healthcare, yet Americans are becoming unhealthier by key measures like obesity, maternal mortality, and life expectancy. This unsustainable trajectory not only undermines public health but threatens the fiscal future, with healthcare spending growing faster than the economy and consuming nearly 30% of the federal budget. Despite challenges, the path forward lies in incentivizing innovation, reforming payment structures, liberating healthcare data, and reducing fraud. By fostering a competitive, entrepreneurial healthcare system and embracing cutting-edge technologies like AI, the U.S. has the potential to improve health outcomes while controlling costs and ensuring a brighter, healthier future.

The rapid evolution of warfare has exposed critical gaps in US capabilities. Conducting ground offensives over complex terrain, and protecting the troops who carry them out, will both be dramatically different missions in 2030. Over the first quarter of the century, from the GWOT’s infantry campaigns to today’s increasingly autonomous combat, ground operations have meant constant and intensifying danger to the warfighter. From 2006-2021, 44% of US forces killed in action were caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Avoiding IEDs often forces tactical vehicles off-road, multiplying the risk of accidents. From 2010-2019, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps reported 896 tactical vehicle accidents, many involving fatalities. Today, ground forces are even further exposed with the rise of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles and distributed sensors, and asymmetric conflict is shifting ground operations to the most difficult terrain.

Last month, the first company I co-founded, Palantir, joined the S&P 500. For most of 20 years, the naive mainstream view of Palantir was that it was a “glorified consultancy” – a services firm and not a real tech innovator building SaaS “products” or “platforms”. To dismiss Palantir early on was short-sighted, given they’d hired some of Silicon Valley’s top tech talent, but it was based on a factual observation: unlike most software businesses, many of our engineers spent significant time working alongside our customers. We called this team “Forward Deployed Engineers”, and they obsessed over the intricacies of our customers’ daily work, business models, and pain points. 

8VC was founded to address major market gaps, and we’ve found several surprisingly close to home. We cofounded Affinity after seeing firsthand how legacy CRM falls short of real relationship intelligence, and today their platform is used by 3300 + investment firms. We noticed a similar gap in portfolio management and performance tracking, where manual work and nonexistent data were the norm. Driven by our own frustrations, we co-founded, seeded, and led the series A for Standard Metrics, which has grown to over 100 top investment firms and 7000+ companies while revolutionizing the efficiency and quality of data collection, portfolio analytics, and reporting. Now, building on the data foundation they created, they have launched Global Benchmarking, adding deep utility and macro awareness to match their micro abilities.

We were thrilled to host June's Chat8VC event alongside our portfolio companies Ramp & Vercel in NY. We were honored to feature Nik Koblov (Head of Engineering) and Nico Bevacqua (Head of UI / UX Engineering) from Ramp as well as Guillermo Rauch (CEO) and Lee Robinson (VP Product) from Vercel for a discussion anchored around the future of frontend engineering.

Recruiting is a founder’s most important job. The returns on top talent, and the network effect of smart people pulling in smart people, are the not-so-secret secrets to our work at 8VC - and building Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, and Saronic, to name a few. Yet conventional hiring is slow and expensive. You need to ramp up in-house recruiters to overcome scaling bottlenecks (creating fixed costs for variable needs), or pay contract firms steep commissions (up to $20-40,000 for senior technical hires). $250 billion a year is spent on recruiting in the US, almost entirely on labor. Software only represents 2.6% of that spend, and is mostly mediocre. It’s also built for recruiters, not hiring managers, highlighting a bigger issue: recruiting outsources input away from a new hire’s future team, while steadily increasing overhead.