What keeps Excel Venture Management’s Juan Enriquez awake at night? Sheer excitement about our new golden age of discovery.

Question: What keeps you up at night?

Juan Enriquez: You know, the thing that keeps me most awake is the desire and curiosity to learn more.

I sit there and I think, “I didn’t get through all of this, I didn’t learn more about that, I forgot to follow through on this link. There was this really interesting idea that I could have followed through on.” There is so much extraordinary opportunity if you’re curious, if you’re interested.

It’s not fear that keeps me up. I mean, every generation has thought, this is the worst generation; the world’s going to hell in a hand basket. The reality is, people are living longer, and they’re living better. There are less interstate conflicts today than there have been traditionally throughout history. Yeah, the economy is a mess. Yes, government has done some stupid things. Yes, there has to be some more regulation. But our kids have this incredible buffet of they can work in genomics, they can work in pre-omics, or they can work in robotics, or they can work in this, or they can work in that. And within the next five years there will be entirely new industries that come out of nowhere that kids are working in that would have been inconceivable when they started college. Not when we started college.

And so, it’s such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don’t want to miss it. I mean, it’s a really neat historical period. There’s a creativity, a power, an energy, an ability to do things unlike any other period in history. It’s a little bit like sitting in the Renaissance, but multiplied a thousand-fold. And if you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that’s where all these incredible stuff we’re still living with comes out of.

And now we have an opportunity to create that.

Recorded on November 9, 2009
Interviewed by Austin Allen