1/ Releasing a redacted Lux quarterly letter to LPs.
Some strong views of
-a catalog of an excess of excesses
-what catalysts cause the current market frenzy to end
(preview: LP indigestion)
-what we are advising our Lux family companies
-much more…
2/-The importance of HEIGHTENED HUMILITY in times like these (where source of ‘success’ can be easily mistaken)
-Telepresence helps us connect with far-flung founders but true presence (in person) helps our team connect like never before
-Where a CONSENSUS of CONCERNS is CENTERED
3/ Time travel with us a year hence—
reflecting back on the year that was.
Which of the 2 paragraphs below do you expect to read in Q3 2022?
4/-Is now time for CAUTION or throwing CAUTION to the wind?
-Valuations have risen
diligence fallen &
EXCESS is in EXCESS
-Preparing for the turn—when it comes
is wiser than predicting—when it may
5/ An excess of excesses—or what things wicked may this way come…
As Fed + central banks dole out dramatic distortion of discount rates, duration and the “true” cost of capital into markets…
A scene from ‘Deadwood’ comes to mind…
6/ -In just the last 12 weeks, startups raised more than the entire 99-00 .com boom/bust
-Character is built thru hardship + steep slopes
Yet today’s hero’s journey has given way to flattened slopes
-Thus far all news has been good news—which to realists—portends bad news.
7/ Failures comes from a failure to imagine failure
Good times let guards down
making co’s vulnerable to the silent artillery of time
LP’s whiteboard of GPs coming to market
looks like A Beautiful Mind
indigenstion of LPs + pace of new commitments
cant match pace of new raises
8/…before continuing…
ht @TheRealCarlChi1 for the image of investor swim lanes then + now
9/ The “Hemingway Hinge”…
A few funds with AUM $50-100B taking page from Carlyle,Apollo, KKR + now TPG will…
turn once cultivated intimate partnerships
into calculated intentions to go public becoming institutional corporations, fully diversified supermarkets
10/
-We have benefited from unusual demand—just as we caution against its unlikely persistence in its current form.
-we said 90% of SPACs would be CRAPs
-Some deals will prove…less kosher than a kilebasa sausage smothered in swiss cheese
-The Appointment in Samarra…
11/ Indefinitely Modified Paths—the wisdom of William James & Jurassic Park.
“Life finds a way”… and so do incredible founders
in every cutting-edge industry we find + fund…
12/ Space race is real—over 12 nations have astral aspirations
took humanity til 1961 to launch 1st 👨🚀 in space
last mo there were 14 in space @ same time
Do wise things when others are doing provably foolish things
And do what may appear to be foolish that’ll prove to be wise
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-Over 50% of small VCs will involuntarily exit as ~5 VCs are planning to voluntarily exit (IPO)
-Lux team has invested over half a billion dollars across 82 companies (new + existing) in the past few months…
2/
-Zuck’s “ Poachapalooza 2025”
-L&A (License + Acquihire) is the new M&A
-the AI capex surge (5% of GDP) ~ fiber-optic + router binge of 2000 tech boom (5.2%) and short step below sheet-rock bonanza of 2005 housing bubble (6.7%).
-Open source vs Closed…
3/great irony in frenzy for ARTIFICIAL intelligence––what’s acquired isnt hardware but HUMAN intelligence
-frontier of agentic Al not defined by model size-but what we can verify
-99% reliable agent degrades to 60.5% after 50 sequential decision tasks––each error cascading like cracks in glass
NVDA = 19% of that––and 42% of NVDA revenue comes from just 5 Big Tech co's buying GPUs:
Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla
2/At recent lunch with LP who put Lux in business I talked about shift from consensus cloud inference (GPUs + datacenters + power) to on-device inference (memory + batteries)...
3/ This valued LP talked about CAPEX:
Meta, AMZN, MSFT, GOOG TLSA spending $560B by EOY 2025