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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1/ On Feb 21 I told my boss aka my wife @LTwolfe that I had my third conviction call not yet appreciated + to buy a basket
*In 2016 it was NVDA, pitched publicly at Invest For Kids in Chicago (80x+) when Lux portfolio company Zoox was using NVDA chips and I predicted the narrative would change from gaming consoles PS4/Xbox to simulation and AI…
3/ In the fall is 2024 I pitched SK Hynix, Micron, Samsung and we bought in our pa
Mostly because I had read a technical paper about LLMs and inference on device with local flash (again changing narrative from commodity memory players to coveted attach rates on HBM AND edge)
1/ New paper from @ylecun et al on alternative approach for AI to learn more biologically...
paper basically says AI is super smart but still can't learn like a toddler can...
the main critique
the main critique...
is that top models today dont learn once deployed.
and curating data + training pipelines + filtering out noise is all done by humans in loop instead of being an intrinsic skill of the AIs...
here's Claude explaining the paper simply
3/ not quite Kahneman style but they call it System A +B
System A = learning from observation
this is self-supervised learning like predicting next word or video frame. good at making representations but passive and struggles to understand cause + effect...