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 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: AI will generate full feature films without actors or crew
“One of our companies, Runway ML, you can, and there's others that you can conjure. Today it's 10 seconds, but tomorrow it'll be two minutes, and full feature films with no key grips, no lighting, no costume design, no set design, no actors, and voices entirely…”
Wolfe: Childless CEOs over 50 tend to be overly controlling operators
“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”
Wolfe: Lux banned TikTok internally and helped push for its divestment
“TikTok, of course, a huge one, right? We banned it years ago, right when it had become TikTok from Musical.ly, in part because at the time, I seemed like a conspiratorial nut saying, I don't trust this with the Chinese Communist Party having control over this.…”
Wolfe: Automated 24/7 Machine-Led Scientific Discovery is Inevitable
“So I'm absolutely convinced. Like, high certitude. I don't know exactly which company will do it. We've invested in some. They haven't worked. We'll invest in more. Hopefully they will. But this directional arrow of progress of the idea, by analogy, of machine…”
Wolfe: Anduril will be a $30B–$50B public company with software margins
“I deeply believe that Anderil in the next few years will be a 30 to fifty billion dollar publicly traded business doing single-digit mid-billions of revenue with software-like margins that are not like these cost-plus margins, so that is gonna usher in a big w…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital's unanimous consensus investments have typically been very wrong
“And so, when the team has total consensus, we typically make an investment, and we've typically been very wrong.”
Wolfe: Only a dozen elite scientists generate America's deep-tech startup diaspora
“And there's probably a dozen such scientists in the war in the country. Where that you in the US where you can go and find these people and the postdocs and where they sort of, ah, traverse to and find that diaspora and develop relationships with them, stay cl…”
Wolfe: Disreputable advisory board members signal a startup CEO's poor judgment
“But then I see an advisory board with one or two people, and for me, these are, like, red flag people. They're, like, total BS scientists or promoters or, like, authors that I think are full of it, and I just, like, shake my head, and to me, it's a It's a sign…”
Wolfe: Psychology drives 90% of Lux Capital's successes and 99% of problems
“All that's important, but what really matters is understanding human nature and psychology, and so, 90% of our successes and 99% of our problems in our companies are us playing armchair psychologist and trying to diagnose, why is this team not effective?”
Wolfe: Investing drive is motivated by public status and getting credit
“I want to be right. I want to make money. I want the credit for it, but it really is about like the status because otherwise you would just do these things in private and totally in quiet.”
Wolfe: Lux Capital requires full-time in-office presence Monday through Friday
“Everybody is here Monday through Friday now. You know, at first it was Monday through Thursday, take Friday. Now I'm like, look, if you need to leave, you go family first. It's a principle here. Never miss a concert, a recital, a science fair, but we need to b…”
Colonna agrees with Lux Capital's Josh Wolfe: chips on shoulders drive success
“Josh Wolf, who is a VC at Lux Capital, likes to say, chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And he is right when he speaks about that.”
Wolfe: Lux partners get one solo high-conviction override investment per fund
“If you have one partner that is dogmatically table-bounding, and everybody else has said, I don't see it, what we decided to do for the tribe is, Is everybody gets one of those. So if I'm the one that sees it. Shane Parrish: One per year, one per career. Josh …”
Wolfe: Lux Capital seeks scientists possessing hidden technological secrets
“And then the final situation, which is where we spend most of our time, is the Schopenhauer dictum, which is talent can hit a target that nobody else can hit, and genius can hit a target that nobody else can see. And that goes back to the asymmetric informatio…”
Wolfe: Startup risk and enterprise value operate like the laws of thermodynamics
“In fact, I always think of this like the first law of thermodynamics, that energy is not created or destroyed. Risk and value themselves are just changing form. And every time that you can kill a risk, subsequent value gets created because a later investor arg…”
Wolfe: The directional arrow of computing progress is increasing physical intimacy
“The undeniable arrow of progress, that directional trend is more and more intimacy.”
Wolfe: Users will soon control ambient technology using neural micro-gesture wristbands
“What that implies is that you will wear something akin to a bracelet or a wristwatch, and you will be able to gesture like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice to flick your fingers to turn on the lights, to swipe like you would swipe in three dimensional, three Rai…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital Has Discussed Adding an AI Partner to the Firm
“We have not yet done this as a partnership, but we've talked about it. Having an AI partner.”
Wolfe: Lux Capital is funding a genetics company to sequence rare mutants
“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…”
Wolfe: Founders who speak over their teammates in pitches show poor leadership
“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 …”
Wolfe: Lux would rather lose half its investors than their capital
“The typical mantra we have internally is I would rather lose half my LPs than half my LPs money.”
Wolfe: Calliope reverse-engineers the gut-brain axis to understand human satiety
“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…”
Wolfe: Formally recording deal judgments is essential to prevent hindsight bias
“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 …”