Josh Wolfe Profile picture
Nov 14, 2021 12 tweets 5 min read Read on X
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… Image
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 Image
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? Image
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 Image
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… Image
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. Image
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 Image
8/…before continuing…

ht @TheRealCarlChi1 for the image of investor swim lanes then + now Image
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 Image
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… Image
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… Image
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 Image

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More from @wolfejosh

Aug 21
1/ Apple researchers just dropped NEW foundation model on BEHAVIORAL data from wearables.

Forget raw sensors—think steps, heart variability, gait

Trained on 2.5B hours via 162K people

Predicts age, sex, pregnancy, sleep like a crystal ball. Image
2/ Their new foundation model (WBM) trained not on noisy low-level sensor data––but on derived behavioral metrics via wearables

Outperforms raw sensor models in predicting sleep, injury, & infection.

When combined CRUSH it—predicting pregnancy w/ >90% accuracy. Image
3/ Contrarian take––Transformers may be overkill for everything

head-to-head on wearable data (Mamba-2) beat Transformers for health prediction. Simpler tokenization also won.

Lesosn: data’s unique physics (irregular, noisy)+ ignore the loud signals to hear the whispers––edge is in the architectureImage
Image
Read 4 tweets
Aug 21
1/ New Lux quarterly LP letter––Q2 2025

theme: “Friction Frontier”

-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… Image
Image
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… Image
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 glassImage
Read 8 tweets
Aug 18
1/ Beyond the hype + headlines

some eye-opening AI stats to consider

Today Mag 7 = 35% of US stock mkt value

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

The total AI revenue from that spend? ~$35B

That's not great ~6% return
Read 5 tweets
Jun 7
Apple just GaryMarcus'd LLM reasoning ability Image
2/ Apple tested today's "reasoning" AIs like Claude + DeepSeek which look smart—but when complexity rises, they collapse.

Not fail gracefully. Collapse completely.
3/ They found LLMs don't scale reasoning like humans do.

They think MORE up to a point…

Then they GIVE UP early, even when they have plenty of compute left.
Read 6 tweets
May 19
1/ Three big Lux things tonight

-@anduriltech founder Palmer Luckey on @60Minutes
“The Future of Warfare”

-@eGenesisBio on @CNN with Sanjay Gupta
“Animal Pharm”

-new Lux Q1 2025 Quarterly LetterImage
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Image
2/
This is one of my favorite letters we’ve ever written

The theme is PARTNERSHIPS

-between man and machine
-between present and future selves, decision, companies
-between us and our founders of Lux companies
-between Lux partners ourselvesImage
3/ word processor > spellcheck >grammar‑check > LLM “style‑check” if paragraph was birthed by human mind or statistical echo. We detect plagiarism but also something subtler—call it prompterism, prose coaxed from silicon’s
latent space rather than summoned from lived experience.Image
Read 9 tweets
May 9
BIG NEWS from Lux🚨…

American scientists––and those we attract to America🇺🇸––are what have helped make America not just great but absolutely + relatively EXCEPTIONAL.

We CANNOT cede scientific supremacy to China.
We don’t need talk, we need action…
2/ The 🇨🇳CCP “2035 Science & Technology Vision” states unapologetically “original innovation is the sharpest blade.” coupling that declaration w/ vast subsidies, talent visas + procurement guarantees which have helped them take lead in 37 of 44 critical and emerging technologies!
3/ Upending American science seemed an impossible order.

Regularly copied and always envied, but never rivaled.

Constructed by visionaries like Vannevar Bush in the ashes of WWII + propelled by brilliant legislation like Bayh-Dole Act––we did the impossible: an open scientific enterprise that could simultaneously probe into the furthest frontiers while translating the most original insights uncovered into the most prosperous companies in the world.
Read 16 tweets

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