The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Josh Wolfe: Tourist VCs investing in frontier tech will lose a lot of money
“I think that there are a lot of tourist VCs who are in these domains that are going to lose a lot of money”
Wolfe: Tech's Praise of Failure Is Disingenuous and Founders Are Faking It
“I think that there is a culture that talks about praising and prizing failure, but I think it's disingenuous. I think people pretend to wear failure on, you know, as this badge, and every time you ever see an entrepreneur and you ask, oh, how are things going,…”
Wolfe: The future of AI and machine learning is in GPUs
“The future of AI and machine learning is going to be in GPUs.”
Wolfe: Cognitive diversity is the form of diversity that matters most
“My whole view is that the diversity that matters most is cognitive diversity.”
Wolfe: Next generation of industrial titans will be scientists and inventors
“The next generation of industrial titans are going to be scientists, technologists, inventors”
Lux Capital Missed a $4B Exit by Selling Nervana to Intel Early
“In that case, I think we would have loved, collectively, amongst the other syndicate investors as well, that maybe we waited for You know, a year or two, because we probably, instead of selling for four hundred million to Intel, could have sold for four billio…”
Wolfe: Investing with a 3-10 year horizon creates time arbitrage advantage
“If the public markets are thinking one or two years out and discounting back, and VCs are thinking one or two years out, then if you are thinking three, four, five, or let alone 10 years out, then you've got a time arbitrage advantage.”
Wolfe: Lux Debates Small Checks More Than Large High-Conviction Deals
“Our internal partnership debates are usually the fiercest over the smallest dollars of what we have low conviction. When we have high conviction, our dollar checks are the highest, and everybody is near consensus.”
Josh Wolfe: Big Breakthroughs Come From Renaissance-Style Interdisciplinary Founders
“And so I think the same thing is sort of happening in the entrepreneurial community on the one hand, where to make that incremental advance, you have to be really specialized, but because people are so specialized in all these different fields, the people that…”
Josh Wolfe: Lux Capital is willing to take market and tech risk
“You have some firms that will say, we don't take market risk, and you have other firms that say, we don't take technology risk, and we'll actually take both.”
Josh Wolfe: Best VC returns come from novel technology in new markets
“Some of the greatest inventions, some of the greatest technology, some of the greatest companies, and some of the greatest venture investments came when you had that combination of a novel technology into a new market.”
Wolfe: Kymeta is the only board Bill Gates joined besides Berkshire and Microsoft
“It's the only company that Bill Was on the board of besides Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft.”
Wolfe: Planet operates history's largest Earth-imaging satellite constellation
“They would end up buying Google satellite imagery, which was something Google acquired called Skybox, and they now have the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history up in space.”
Wolfe: Intel acquired Lux-backed Nervana Systems for $400M within a year
“And it leads us to a company called Nirvana Systems, and we fund those guys, and within a year, they're bought by Intel for four hundred million dollars.”
Wolfe: The three sources of investment edge are informational, analytical, and behavioral
“I've got a rule of thumb that there's basically three sources of edge. You've got informational edge, analytical edge, and a behavioral edge.”
Wolfe: Lux Capital avoids early-stage fundamental science risk
“We're not funding true science risk, right? Those are things that are coming Maybe five, 10, 15 years incubated, often publicly funded government science out of universities, but there reaches a point where you can see that they're starting to do something in …”
Wolfe: Bill Gates Focuses on the 10% of Subject Matter Worth 90%
“He would listen and sit And think, and then it would be the ninety-ten of it, meaning he would get to the 10% of the subject matter that had 90% of the value. He was exceptionally tuned in to supporting founder, CEO, very astute on the economics of product, of…”