The Ledger, every show

“Facebook made an initial entreaty. We rejected it. They effectively nearly tripled their offer. It became more financially attractive”

“The directional arrow of progress clearly points to the ability to capture and eventually replay scent for all kinds of things.”

“And so we are looking at technologies and investing pretty aggressively in every facet of air, land, sea, space, and cyber, and informational, on things that can give the US and our allies advantages.”

“So those are things that I feel like directionally, the demand for tools for science, what we call the tech of science, is going to have a big tailwind. And those companies will not just be speculative technology companies. They will be the future data hers. A…”

“You have people that were born and raised in Nigeria and Ghana and Kenya who have gone to Silicon Valley and trained at Stripe and Google and Facebook and Amazon and are coming back, and they're coming back Sent to millionaires. They've made hundreds of millio…”

“We have made a series of what I consider seed investments. Not all the companies are startups. They're, in some cases, larger. Valuations have been between 20 and a hundred and fifty million. We've looked at some that are approaching a billion dollars, and I m…”

“You have no prior comps that you can look at because the most important companies that are going to exist never existed before.”

“In venture capital, it's a really inefficient market because there is no known universe. You and I could be talking in a private room, and we could decide that we're going to start up a company tomorrow, and nobody else knows that information.”

“So for example, Bob Langer at MIT is a prodigious output of PhDs who are very commercially minded. This is a guy who has made hundreds of millions of dollars, created billions of dollars of market value in companies, and attracts postdocs that want to be like …”

“If somebody is there with three people presenting to us, and they do all the talking, and they are talking for the other people, it's usually not a great sign. If somebody sort of steps back and starts lauding, let's say a CEO is the founder, and they turn to …”

“You can use every tactic that Robert Cialdini has come up with, and every tactic from Munger, and every behavioral psychology thing you've learned from Kahneman, and you still get tantrums and crying and dogmatic, you know, intransigent kids”

“I am a hundred percent certain that Lux will be investing in the most cutting-edge crazy stuff that you can imagine over the next two years. The zero that follows is I have zero percent certainty what those things will be. No idea. Now I have an inkling, and i…”

“Which led to this company called Kymeta, which I co-founded with Bill Gates. And I'm in a board room with Bill Gates, and he's on the board of this company. It's the only board he's been on besides Berkshire and Microsoft.”

“This little company became the only US company picked for the cleanup”

“And so I'm doing this right now in the genetic space, you know, a space that I know a little bit about, but we started with this crazy thesis about X-Men. Could you find the rare mutants in the world and could you sequence them? And search for them, and then s…”

“The typical mantra we have internally is I would rather lose half my LPs than half my LPs money.”

“You've got all kinds of carny charlatans that basically sculpt you into a somewhat cynical, squinty eyed, distrustful person of, you know, somebody trying to scheme over you, which I think in my business where you never really know if somebody is going to be l…”

“We became the only U.S. Company pick for the cleanup, and we went from a million to 2040, 8000, 140. We sold that at forty million of EBITDA 10 times to a big French company, Veolia”

“We have an active seed program where you could do a lot of those, but what we limited is that the total aggregate dollars that we invest in seeds, which are typically sub-two million dollars, so it could be a quarter million here, half million there, a million…”

“The story which I tell publicly is about cruise automation. We offered them a twenty million dollar financing at a forty million pre, and they wanted eighty million pre money, and we thought that was absurd and too high. In the course of diligence, we introduc…”

“And here we ended up making three, three and a half times our money, but we considered it a process failure because all the expectations, all the modeling that we had and what the outcome could be, the reasons that a business would be bought all proved false. …”

“I think that secondaries are going to be a great spot for LPs, where there's going to be a lot of people that get out over their skis and are going to need liquidity, and people that have ready pools of capital, I think, are probably going to be well positione…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's the only company that Bill Was on the board of besides Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“We do everything at Lux from about a third in biotech and robotic surgery and med devices and another third in aerospace and defense and industrial. The other third on core technology, which is everything from non-invasive brain machine interfaces to everythin…”

“Coincidentally, Meta bought that for a little under a billion dollars, started by this guy Reardon.”

“I'm on AI easily more than Google now, but I don't know, 2:03 hours a day.”

“I will put them into three different models at the same time. So I will open three different browsers, you know, arrange them, and put it into ChatGPT, put it into Claude, put it into one of the perplexity models that's not running on those two, and, you know,…”

“In our ancestral environment you know, when you go to like a Dunbar's number of, I don't know, a 150 people, you had a smaller group of people. And so it was more effective to punish a cheater. And they would be publicly ostracized, you know, from a small grou…”

“Illumina was not focused on gene sequencing when they first started. They were doing like chemical sensing and other kind of random stuff. That was the intersection of like microfluidics that were based on a microchip and biotech and then ultimately genetics.”

“This was a guy who had made hundreds of millions of dollars, and had founded 17 companies from scratch, taking 14 of them public, cumulative market cap over fifty billion dollars Illumina, Pharmacopia, Ida, and Athena, NeuroKrin, just incredible, and had the c…”

“And so we are spending more and more time on the deeply technical, very hard to do Under five competitors and helping those entrepreneurs start those companies because we're not playing in an auction game.”

“They're not using tactics of like, you know, I know that you know, and just like a willingness to totally embarrass you in public and scream and throw a tantrum. And by the way, when they do those things, they do them because it works.”

“We back one guy. He happens to be this brilliant scientist at Columbia who reverse engineered the neural correlates for taste, and we funded him in a company called Calliope that is reverse engineering your gut-brain axis to understand how you feel the sense o…”

“The process of recording people's judgments and perceptions and observations at each deal is really important. Because what we observed before we started doing this in a very formal way was that people had very selective memory. They would say, oh yeah, no, I …”

“The great virtue in venture capital is you get to fund two milestones. So in a perfect world, we're able to put a little bit of money in, we can de-risk a set of things.”

“Nine months later, or 11 months later, GM buys them for a billion dollars, nominally. A little bit less, actually, but nominally a billion dollars. That would have been 11 X. In under a year.”

“Bill Conway, who was one of the founders of Carlisle, and he's not really bullish on venture. I mean, Carlisle is, you know, one of the greatest private equity and buy-off funds, But he doesn't love venture capital, but there was something, whether it was the …”

“Now just under a billion and a half. You know, we have periodicity where now we're about every two years raising about four hundred million dollars.”

“Between, we've got a 120 plus companies, we've got 10 people on the investment team.”

“Now, a fully funded, structured portfolio for us is somewhere between 25 and 30 core positions, which means that each investing partner is doing between one and two core deals a year. And a core deal for us Is investing somewhere between 15 and twenty-five mil…”