Lux Capital

“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…”

“We have implemented, starting about five years ago, a process where if there's a super strong table pounder, where the vast majority of the team does not agree, but somebody is psychotically passionate about a particular entrepreneur and opportunity, they get …”

“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.”

“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”

“I joke, I haven't looked at a spreadsheet in over a decade. There's nothing for us to model.”

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

“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. …”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“And I think that that guard has given way to people that are funding, you know, what I consider fufu apps and You know, mobile stuff that I think has very little relevance, but like real hard technology. It's provable. It's real. It's verifiable. It's not, you…”

“Next year, this time, so it's gonna be a Q-three, Q-four, 20, 22, they will launch the first manufacturing thing in space, and that was wheeled into existence.”

“We had a company that tipped off a fundraise to a large growth investor on a Sunday evening through a board member. On Monday, they met at noon. At one PM, the meeting ended at one, 12 PM. They had a market clearing offer in their inbox and accepted it. That w…”

“We will never publicly come out and say, we're slowing down our pace. Because anybody that does that is going to lose deal flow.”

“What I realized was what I should have done, which was a colossal and historic mistake, was make sure that we gave some interim liquidity. Because if we had put a few million dollars in that founder's pocket early on, the ability to stay the course would have …”

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

“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…”

“People that are pursuing nuclear power today, at the moment, do not count us as investors. Because I believe that the timeframes are not dependent upon the technology development. They're dependent on popular acceptance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Today, if you're a scientist, you have to go to a scientific lab, a wet bench, a white lab coat. You're working with pipettes and beakers, centrifuges, shaking tables. All of that is going to be done by robots. Completely automated labs operated in the cloud w…”

“The pendulum is going to shift. Maintenance is going to be in high demand. That means that there's an opportunity for new technologies to help maintain existing assets.”

“Our best outcomes, as an aside, have always been an oligopolistic industry structure where there's three or four players who are going to irrationally compete to own the asset because they want it and they don't want their competitor to get it leads to the bes…”

“It's not the easiest environment to raise capital right now. They are looking for opportunities that benefit themselves domestically as they're looking ahead with a young population, trying to create jobs, particularly in Saudi Arabia.”