After seeing over the years what entrepreneurs go through to make their dream come true - from jeopardizing their social life to running into bankruptcy and sometimes worse - I always considered them the true heroes versus financiers, e.g. venture capitalists or bankers, trying to make a quick buck off of their ideas.

Inspite all that, I never heard a VC really acknowledging it so bluntly... well until today when VC Tim Draper went on stage for the final keynote at the SVASE Launch event.

"I look at you all as heroes. And I think you know that but I think you probably don't hear it. We get so many business plans, so many entrepreneurs coming through and sometimes we forget how heroic you are taking these huge risks", Draper said.

Draper's speech to entrepreneurs was so inspirational and drop dead funny that it was just impossible to edit out anything he said. So you'll have to watch the entire keynote (below) to get an idea of what's interesting or not for you.
He started talking about leadership and how employees are mimicking top executives and that you, as a founder have to lead by example. Do the hardest/toughest things at the company (firing, reorg, cuts...). Try also using viral marketing to grow your company exponentially like Hotmail did, or ICQ, Kazaa, Skype and now GLAM.
The number of inventions are also growing exponentially. According to Draper we'll see the same number of breakthrough inventions in the next 2 years than in the past 20 years.

Here are some of the best advices he gave:

"If you smoke, they smoke. If you exercise, they exercise. If you are lazy, they are lazy. If you are passionate, they are passionate... You have to be willing to show that you have fail, so they [employees] know that they can fail and not be executed [sic!]".

And,

"If the press says its tacky then you're onto something... You don't care what people thinks but what your customers do", citing Hotmail, Overture and PayPerPost examples.

Finally,

"If you want to be one of the greatest companies in the world, look at an industry that is old and tired, and beaten down and bureaucratic and go after it. Like Hotmail took on the post office and Skype took on the entire telecom industry. eBay took on how trade is done. Overture took on advertising. Google, Baidu have taken on the media business and the libraries... Myspace and Facebook took on what we knew as the neighborhood".

In terms of investing, Draper's VC firm is looking for:

"Passionate, energetic heroes who are willing to take that risk on overthrowing lazy bureaucratic incumbents with new business models".

Great future opportunities: Healthcare and Mars exploration!

Draper told a funny story about how people are living much longer now than just 150 years ago. Which is a great opportunity for healthcare start-ups:

"In 1854, we all lived about 24 years: you learn till 12, then work for 12 and then you're done. Now every 3 years we've added a year. So you live 3 years you get 1 FREE!".

For Draper, the other big idea is to go to Mars because we are all gone to die, either because of a nuclear war and/or global warming. So his concept is to shoot all the "nukes" Mars, create a nuclear winter (I guess it's kind of sterilisation process!), send the plants first to create oxygen out of the abundant CO2, move nitrogen from the Triton moon to Mars. And then to warm up Mars' atmosphere the VC suggests a combination of nukes and global warming! So lots of business opportunity there!