Thread by @NeckarValue

Don't miss this profile of @wolfejosh

"His willingness to entertain the dark side — and to do so in such a fanciful way — is what has made him one of the most iconoclastic VC founders out there"

Lux invests in what Wolfe calls “deep science” or “matter that matters” ... nuclear waste removal and space manufacturing to drone sailboats and a far-flung search for scarce genetic trait

“You can see how almost every one of our companies has its basis in science fiction"

“I grew up sort of squinty-eyed, always distrusting, trying to figure out what’s somebody’s agenda and game,” explains Wolfe. “I’m always trying to spot the sucker at the proverbial table. If you sit down and you can’t spot the sucker, you’re it, you’re the patsy.”

“When I have these crazy, cutting-edge people come in, you don’t know at the moment when they’re pitching you whether they’re going to be the next Thomas Reardon, who’s a guy that we backed that is doing brain machine interfaces, or if you’re going to see an Elizabeth Holmes”

"My No. 1 fear when an entrepreneur walks in is, ‘Am I going to get defrauded right now? Is somebody going to try to pull one over our eyes?’ To this day, I would say that if everybody at Lux shared my vantage point, we’d probably be a team of cynical short-sellers.”

The only child of divorced parents, Wolfe was raised by his mother, living ... with his grandparents — “a vibrant, debating, cursing household. People were opinionated.”

“I felt I was smarter than certain people. I was just born in different circumstances.”

“Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.”

“Everybody else was focusing on dot-coms and optical networking”

“I thought the next wave was going to be the physical, material sciences, breakthroughs in chemistry and physics and materials science...”

"while most of its investors now are endowments or other nonprofit institutions, Lux had a number of heavy-hitter financiers as investors in the early days, including Stanley Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, and Peter G. Peterson. "

Kurion (nuclear waste): “That is extremely psychologically rewarding. It happened to be financially rewarding to our investors. An idea that we conceived here, started the company, recruited the people, took the risk. As we like to say, we believed before others understood.

"If there’s a one-in-a-billion chance in real life [that] somebody has a special trait, with seven and a half billion people on earth, there should be seven or eight people walking around that have the ability, for example, like the Nepalese Sherpa to climb the Himalayas."

“The macro is insane,” he says. “Our main competitive advantage when the market turns — and I’m tracking for signs of when that will be — is our steely fortitude,” he says.

“I figure out what sucks about something. And let’s find an idea that addresses it, and fixes it, and makes life better for everyone. That’s a billion-dollar idea.”

institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1w8vb…