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 26 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
Wolfe: Scientific wet lab research will be completely automated by robots
“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…”
Wolfe: Oligopolistic M&A bidding wars generate better returns than IPOs
“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…”
Wolfe: VCs Will Never Admit Slowing Investments to Protect Deal Flow
“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.”
Wolfe: Denying Early Liquidity to CTRL-Labs Founders Was a Colossal Mistake
“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 …”
Wolfe: Lux Avoids Nuclear Startups Because Timelines Depend on Public Acceptance
“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.”
Lux Capital partners get one 'override' investment per fund despite team disagreement
“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 …”
Wolfe: Lux Capital hasn't used a financial spreadsheet in over a decade
“I joke, I haven't looked at a spreadsheet in over a decade. There's nothing for us to model.”
Wolfe: Venture capitalists have shifted to funding irrelevant 'fufu' mobile apps
“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…”
Wolfe: Varda Will Launch First Space Manufacturing Mission in Late 2022
“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.”
Wolfe: Lux Startup Got 2.5x Valuation Term Sheet in One Hour
“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…”
Wolfe: Capital allocation will shift toward asset maintenance technologies
“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.”
McGurk: Raising Middle East capital is difficult as region prioritizes domestic jobs
“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.”
Wolfe: Future Technology Will Digitize and Replay Scent
“The directional arrow of progress clearly points to the ability to capture and eventually replay scent for all kinds of things.”
Wolfe: Lux Plans $20M–$25M Target for African Startup Investments in 2022
“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…”
Josh Wolfe: Lux Capital is investing aggressively across all defense domains
“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.”
Wolfe: VCs must be cynical and distrustful to spot carny charlatans
“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…”
Lux-backed Kurion handled Fukushima cleanup and sold to Veolia for $400M
“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”
Wolfe considers a 3.5x return on Crystal IS a process failure
“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. …”
Lux Capital passed on Cruise at $80M pre before GM's $1B acquisition
“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…”
Lux Capital limits its entire seed program to one core position's size
“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…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital divides investments equally across biotech, aerospace/defense, and core tech
“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…”
Wolfe: Lux focuses on starting deep-tech companies with under five competitors
“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.”
Lux Capital targets 25 to 30 core positions of $15M-$25M per fund
“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…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital manages under $1.5B and raises $400M every two years
“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.”
Wolfe: Lux Capital manages 120+ portfolio companies with a 10-person team
“Between, we've got a 120 plus companies, we've got 10 people on the investment team.”
Wolfe: Carlyle Co-Founder Bill Conway Seeded Lux Capital and Its Management Company
“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 …”