1/ A few select excerpts from Lux Q2 letter to LPs…
“The best hedge against running out of cash—is raising it”
2/
-“Question your teaspoon”
-“While many talk of discouraging ‘conflicts of interest’
few appreciate and encourage ‘interest in conflicts’
-The Binary (dichotomous, stark contrasts)
-The Blur (dialectic, smooth continnum)
3/ “We don’t mistake for genius what is partly attributable to central banks buying …driving rates low…and raising asset prices”
“Means may move (upward) but a reversion to the mean (downward) may move away people’s means….
4/ “Eventually the proverbial bath water will turn from TAINTED to TOXIC
& babies may not just be thrown out with the bathwater––but forcibly hurled”
The effect will eventually be the cause of low returns
We know that eventually “eventually” will arrive—but not when “when” will
5/ Lux is increasingly backing entrepreneurs hailing from—or building—overseas…
London, Dublinm Berlin…
The sun hits first and the day starts ahead in Europe—as do many trends from hairstlyes (via soccer stars) to regulatory watchdog decrees (from GDPR to new AI regs)…
6/ Decentralizing + Recentralizing
-Mechanical fans moved off our computers and en masse into server farms
indentured servitude of machines of loving grace
on China v US
-Dependence demands concessions + compromises
-Independence supplies indifference + comprises self-reliance
• • •
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10 Yrs ago Lux asked
Q: “What Sucks?” with nuclear.
A: waste
Lux tried to find a high-tech venture to fund. Finding none we started one.
We funded it, hired team, set budget for tech R&D, did M&A
And got VERY lucky. cen.acs.org/environment/po…
2/ One tech we had in our portfolio @ our venture (Kurion) pulled radioactive Cesium + Strontium from salt water. Nobody has this as nuclear reactor water is ~100% pure.
When Fukushima disaster struck, hundreds of milllions of gallons SEA WATER were dumped to prevent meltodown…
3/ This little US company with a TOTAL of $3M of invested capital ($1.5M from Lux and we owned 35% between common + preferred) funded at $3M pre…
ended up with $40M of EBITDA and sold to Veolia for ~10x.
Lux made 43x on that $1.5M which returned an early fund + then some
2/
-“Index funds exist because security prices are nearly impossible to predict. So if expert computer modelers can’t yet predict temperatures in a single complex realm—climate—how can we take seriously BlackRock’s triple extrapolations of the climate, the economy and finance?”
3/
“Who wants to bet BlackRock, which just won a first-of-its-kind approval to operate in China, won’t force every Chinese firm to submit to Mr. Fink’s climate vanities in the name of fiduciary risk management, or even saving the planet?”…
1/We started Coney Island Prep public charter school >12yrs ago to give kids
the right heroes
deep desire to learn
high expectation
to get into college & career of their choice
From 90 5th graders in a room in the projects to > 1100 scholars + 200 staff + 💯college acceptance
🤯