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Our producer Chris Gates and I talk about this newsletter in the new "Securities" podcast episode we just released this morning.🔊 Take a listen
Exits are the keystone of a robust venture economy. Ambitious entrepreneurs, helpful accelerators and fast-funding venture capitalists are all necessary inputs of course, but what attracts all this talent and capital in the first place is the opportunity to b…
One of the most important cognitive tradeoffs we make is how to process information, and perhaps more specifically, the deluge of information that bombards us every day. A study out of UCSD in 2009 estimated that Americans read or hear more than 100,000 words…
Capitalism has taken its fair share of hits over the past few decades, castigated for all that’s wrong in the world from wealth inequality to climate change. Those criticisms have provoked a range of responses, from revolutionary demands to the more mundane i…
This weekend, all of us here at Lux are taking a moment to reflect. In the spirit of Memorial Day, we first and foremost acknowledge the incredible sacrifices the members of our armed services have made around the world, including in Afghanistan, where 13 ser…
First up before the main story, Josh Wolfe has published some excerpts from our latest LP quarterly letter on Twitter (start of thread attached above). It was lengthy given the chaos of the markets and the sheer amount of macro changes transpiring right now, …
The first image of the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster, has been published by the Event Horizon Telescope team and an international consortium of research groups. It’s not just an amazing achievement of science, bu…
There’s just an incredible number of big news stories this week, and I am going to get to some of them. But I don’t want to overlook one of the most distinguished stories that sort of wafted past the attention of most of us as the markets vigorously gyrated t…
We take for granted just how effortlessly consistent our daily life is. Our stoves burn with the swoosh of a knob, our stop signs (at least in the U.S.) are a stable hue of red, our wall outlets haven’t changed prongs in decades. The stairs, the shower head, …
I’m traveling the next few weeks in Seoul, South Korea, and it’s always a delight to return here and see the technological ambition of this Asian Tiger’s entrepreneurs. South Korea has transformed into a major crypto innovation hub (arguably second only to th…
While the annals of history are rightly littered with the names of the inventors of wondrous technologies and breakthrough products, the true value of these innovations is only fully realized when they become widely accessible. Electricity, computers, genetic…
The dynamics of “watchwords” in the sweeping narratives of nation-states are peculiar and complex. “Democracy” and “equality” have a certain valence to Americans that’s unique, even to other democratic and equal places. This is to be expected after all: each …
“If you build it, they will come.”It’s an aphorism that gets at one of the key dividing lines in venture capital and industrial policy today.First, there’s the ironic interpretation that has disseminated across Silicon Valley and startup investing the past de…
I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve launched — in beta, if you will — our new “Securities” podcast. The series will cover the same topics as we do in the newsletter — science, technology, finance and the human condition. In our first week here as we quite lit…
There was a hot zone of debate in scientific circles this week triggered by an article in Nature Machine Intelligence by Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc.’s Fabio Urbina and three co-authors that explored what would happen if artificial intelligence tools …
I popped over to Boulder, Colorado briefly this week for a moderated conversation on antitrust and the future of big tech with Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the university there and who wrote “Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition…
America is undergoing a radical social experiment, the kind that we have undertaken only a handful of times in our history, and which is perhaps the most radical experiment so far this century: we are legalizing gambling, everywhere, all the time.The handful …
America has a problem with unspeakable evil: it, quite literally, can’t speak about it.Evils plague American society, of course. A modern census of American evil would include police brutality against people of color; a culture of sexual assault and misogyny …
The big news over here at Lux this week was that Grace Isford joined us as our newest investor, based in New York City. She’s going to be investing at the intersection of web3/crypto, data infrastructure and AI/ML, an area where there is an incredible amount …
You’re not wrong — “Securities” is a day late. My apologies.