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.
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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…”
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”
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…”
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…”
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. …”
Wolfe: Secondaries will thrive as overextended venture investors need liquidity
“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…”
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: Meta acquired CTRL-labs for slightly under $1 billion
“Coincidentally, Meta bought that for a little under a billion dollars, started by this guy Reardon.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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…”