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2 episodes with Kymeta
2 episodes with Kymeta
Every quarter, Lux Capital, a leading venture capital firm known for investing in hard science and deep tech startups, publishes their investor letter offering a unique opportunity to gain insight into the firm's investment thesis and strategy. The firm has been an early supporter of the space industry with early bets in companies like Relativity Space, Epsilon3, Impulse Space, Astranis, Kymeta, Varda, Planet, and Hadrian.This week's Pathfinder features a deep dive on the firm's latest Q3 letter with General Partner Shahin Farshchi. In addition to Shahin's own background, the conversation covers:Lux's fundraise success having recently closed Lux 8, a $1.15B venture fundThe firm's investment thesis emphasizing the importance of non-consensus hypothesesGeopolitical shifts and how they're impacting long-term investingThe role of media and the importance of informative and nuanced reportingAnd much more…Lux's Q3 Investor Letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s5xiwjG9psi6xRQPsAcI-I7-g6k5Pe--/viewThis episode is brought to you by SpiderOak, a US-based software company that builds space cybersecurity products and solutions for civilian, military, and commercial space operations. Learn more at https://spideroak.com/ • Chapters •00:00 - Guest Intro & SpiderOak Ad01:18 - The Lux 8 fundraise02:33 - Shahin's background06:38 - How was Lux started10:10 - The firm's structure11:48 - A&D over the next decade15:30 - Investment highlights17:35 - Geopolitical shifts19:57 - A look at American Dynamism23:41 - Do you need to be a scientist to be a deep tech investor?27:03 - A thesis-driven strategy33:05 - Advice for emerging managers39:11 - The role of media42:33 - Starship launch predictions43:17 - The second most valuable space company • Show notes •Lux's website — https://www.luxcapital.com/Lux's socials — https://twitter.com/Lux_CapitalShahin's socials — https://twitter.com/FarshchiMo's socials — https://twitter.com/itsmoislamPayload's socials — https://twitter.com/payloadspace / https://www.linkedin.com/company/payloadspacePathfinder archive — Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@payloadspace Pathfinder archive — Listen: https://pod.payloadspace.com/episodes • About us •Pathfinder is brought to you by Payload, a modern space media brand built from the ground up for a new age of space exploration and commercialization. We deliver need-to-know news and insights daily to 15,000+ commercial, civil, and military space leaders. Payload is read by decision-makers at every leading new space company, along with c-suite leaders at all of the aerospace & defense primes. We're also read on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, and at space agencies around the world. Payload began as a weekly email sent to a few friends and coworkers.Today, we're a team distributed across four time zones and two continents, publishing three media properties across multiple platforms: 1) Payload, our flagship daily newsletter, sends M-F @ 9am Eastern (https://newsletter.payloadspace.com/) 2) Pathfinder publishes weekly on Tuesday mornings (pod.payloadspace.com) 3) Polaris, our weekly policy publication, hits inboxes Tuesday (https://polaris.payloadspace.com/) 4) Parallax, our weekly space science briefing, hits inboxes Thursday (https://parallax.payloadspace.com/)
Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... Product Mastery Now with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode: Today we are talking about how to create and use customer use cases to guide product design. Our guest is Dr. Lilac Muller, VP of Product Management at Kymeta Corporation. She oversees product strategy, definition, and launch activities for Kymeta's mobile satellite communications product line, which is making mobile broadband connectivity around the world ubiquitous. Lilac has over 20 years of product development experience in the telecommunications, consumer electronics, and medical devices industries where she has led cradle-to-grave product development efforts, and she holds 19 US patents.
Walter Berger currently serves as President and Co-CEO as well as a director of Kymeta Corporation. Under his leadership, the company successfully released its second-generation product and broadband service, improving performance through an integrated WAN device providing seamless satellite and cellular communications, accelerating Kymeta's global market penetration. Walter has served on several public boards including REG a renewal energy company and private boards including Sirius Computer Solutions, a national integrator of technology-based business solutions. He holds a BBA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Josh Wolfe co-founded Lux Capital to support scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time in order to lead us into a brighter future. The more ambitious the project, the better—like, say, creating matter from light. Wolfe is a director at Shapeways, Strateos, Lux Research, Kallyope, CTRL-labs, Variant, and Varda, and helped lead Lux Capital's investments in Anduril, Planet, Echodyne, Clarifai, Authorea, Resilience, and Hadrian. He is a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, which makes cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. In this presentation, Wolfe shares the principles that guide his entrepreneurship and investments, giving examples from companies he has founded and funded.
Synopsis: Josh Wolfe is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in emerging science and technology ventures. Josh joins us for a discussion centered around investing in biotech. He discusses the arc of his career and the forces that led him to pursue a path at the intersection of science and finance. Josh also talks about the current state of biotech investing, trends he expects to see in the future, his advice to founder-led biotech companies, what he believes are the top three criteria for success for biotech companies, and his thoughts on the future of biotech. It's an illuminating conversation you won't want to miss. Biography: Josh co-founded Lux Capital to support scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time in order to lead us into a brighter future. The more ambitious the project, the better—like, say, creating matter from light. Josh is a Director at Shapeways, Strateos, Lux Research, Kallyope, CTRL-labs, Variant, and Varda, and helped lead the firm's investments in Anduril, Planet, Echodyne, Clarifai, Authorea, Resilience and Hadrian. He is a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, making cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. Josh is a Westinghouse semi-finalist and published scientist. He previously worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and in capital markets at Merrill Lynch. In 2008 Josh co-founded and funded Kurion, a contrarian bet in the unlikely business of using advanced robotics and state-of-the-art engineering and chemistry to clean up nuclear waste. It was an unmet, inevitable need with no solution in sight. The company was among the first responders to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. In February 2016, Veolia acquired Kurion for nearly $400 million—34 times Lux's total investment. Josh is a columnist with Forbes and Editor for the Forbes/Wolfe Emerging Tech Report. He has been invited to The White House and Capitol Hill to advise on nanotechnology and emerging technologies, and a lecturer at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia and NYU. He is a term member at The Council on Foreign Relations and Chairman of Coney Island Prep charter school, where he grew up in Brooklyn. He graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in Economics and Finance.
Microwave Journal talks with Kymeta's Ryan Stevenson, VP & Chief Scientist, and Jon Maron, VP of Marketing, about their unique beam steering technology for SATCOM flat panel arrays and how they have evolved into a complete connectivity service company.
On this weeks episode of the Space Economy podcast our guests are Lilac Muller, VP Product Management and Jon Maron, VP Marketing of Kymeta. The company provides mobile internet solutions with their terminals connected to satellites and cellular networks. Today we'll be talking about the innovations the company has made in metamaterial made antenna's, the comms services they are now bundling with their terminals and what adding low Earth orbit constellations will mean for everyone wanting "comms on the move."
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup! Without further ado, the news update from the week of 28 December - 3 January. 1) Deep Blue Aerospace Completed Wet Dress Rehearsal & gives Hints on its 2021 CalendarLast week, DBA posted an update of the company’s progress, showing notably images of the completion of the wet dress rehearsal of their “Nebula-M No.1” experimental rocket. This included the erection of the LV, connecting electrical & hydraulic systems, and cooling/loading fuel.Nebula-M will not actually be a product of the DBA Nebula rocket family. Nebula-M is a small experimental test vehicle (only 7.3 m tall!), and its purpose is to test Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing (VTVL), a key technology for reusability. DBA is planning static firing tests in 2021, and if all goes well, it will proceed to “hops”, very much like what iSpace is planning (or what SpaceX initially did with the Grasshopper).2) OTT Airlines Maiden FlightOn 28 December, OTT Airlines (aka 1-2-3 Airlines) made its maiden flight from Shanghai Hongqiao to Beijing Capital. The China Eastern Airlines subsidiary was founded in February 2020 as a regional airline. The airline is noteworthy in that its order book is entirely Chinese--OTT plans to fly ARJ21s and C919s, both manufactured by COMAC (though with many foreign components, as we highlighted in our news update for the week of 7-13 December 2020). As a subsidiary of China Eastern, OTT Airlines likely has significant financial resources. The airline is another example of China’s localization drive, with most Chinese airlines today having large legacy fleets of predominantly Airbus and Boeing aircraft. Starting from scratch, OTT will be taking deliveries of several ARJ21 this year.3) China and Italy Celebrate 50 Years of Diplomatic RelationsChina and Italy celebrated 50 years of diplomatic relations this week, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Italian counterpart Luigi Di Maio having a video conference to discuss cooperation. Of note to the space industry is the fact that space was indeed an area of emphasis during the discussion. The most apparent example is that Italy will have a small payload on the Chang’e-6 mission.4) Not China-Related, but significantHanwha announced a $30 million investment into flat-panel antenna (FPA) company Kymeta. Kymeta is a company building FPAs for the LEO broadband constellations that are being developed by SpaceX/Amazon/etc. The company is noteworthy for having attracted significant funding from Bill Gates. This week, Korean conglomerate Hanwha announced a $30 million investment into the company. This follows Hanwha’s earlier acquisition of Phasor, another FPA manufacturing company. Moving forward, as China builds out its own industrial base for a LEO broadband constellation, it is noteworthy that Korean companies such as Hanwha are getting increasingly significantly involved in the space. Such companies will likely serve as competitors to Chinese companies such as CETC, who are also working to develop the ground component of China’s LEO broadband ambitions. This has been another episode of the Dongfang Hour China Aero/Space News Roundup. Thanks for watching, and we wish you a wonderful year in 2021!---------------------------------------------Follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter (https://twitter.com/DongFangHour), as an audio podcast, and on our official website: https://www.dongfanghour.com/
In this conversation I talk to Ilan Gur about what it really means for technology to “escape the lab”, the power of context to shape the usefulness of research, the inadequacies of current institutional structures, how activate helps technology escape the lab *by* changing people’s context, and more. Ilan is the CEO and founder of Activate, which is a nonprofit that runs a fellowship enabling scientists to spend two years embedded in research institutions to mature technology from a concept to a first product. In the past, he has also served as a program director at ARPA-E and was a cofounder of Seeo, where he commercial new high-density battery technology. Links Activate Ilan on Twitter Ilan on My Climate Journey Podcast Transcript In the past, we've talked about the, how the whole process of really turning hardcore scientific research into products that have an impact on people's lives is fairly abstract to people outside of the system. Since you've both walked the path and now help other people do the same, let's round the conversation. would you go into detail on what the actual actions you need to take to go from say, being a graduate student who just published a paper on a promising battery technology to an improved battery in a car. That's that's a great place to start. let me try and answer that from a few different dimensions. I'll, I'll start by answering it, just from an anecdote about my personal experience, which I've shared in other places, but, you know, I basically. Went into my PhD program because I felt like the field I was studying material scientists, material science could, be the biggest way to make a big impact on climate change by basically taking new science and turning it into the next generation of all the technologies. We need to have a sustainable economy. And, I was working in nanotechnology, joined. Kind of the world, the best research group in the world that that was working on how nano materials could improve solar cells. and this is before the, the enormous solar market that exists today exists. There was a sense at the time that, you know, we needed a completely new generation of technology to make solar ubiquitous and cost effective. And so, you know, we had this great mantra around how we were going to print solar cells like newspapers, using these small colloidal nano, semiconductors. and the research was phenomenal. we were driven by the fact that what I like to say is, you know, we wrote a science paper where the first paragraph, like any, talked about how the research was going to change the world. And it wasn't until I randomly got connected with some business school folks at Berkeley, where I was doing my PhD. and they actually. It didn't take long. they put me through just a few cycles of digging one level deeper into, how solar cells were actually made, how they were sold, what determined their, their costs and the cost of energy they produce. and I ended up, you know, over the course of a few weeks with a spreadsheet that I still have somewhere, which told me that. If we hit all of our targets and our research in terms of what we thought could change the world. we would end up with a solar cell where even if you gave it away for free, it couldn't compete with the existing state of the art Silicon solar cells at the time. and it was a really. Simple idea, which was, we were making dirt cheap solar cells, but they probably wouldn't last very long. And we didn't think that was such a big deal. You just print some more. and yet, certainly at the time, and it's still true. It's such a, such a predominant amount of the cost of solar energy came from the balance of systems and installations. And I bring up the story because, for me, it was a tipping point. We had so much excitement about our research. It was even published in Forbes, you know, so a business magazine, and. It just showed how it showed, how easy it was to think you were doing something productive and successful. I it's not that I, I, I was in academia, but the reason I was there was to try and get something productive that could turn into a product. Right. And I had missed the boat so much, even with that intention. and so that was a shock to me. And so. That was kind of the first lesson around how, you know, institutions matter and incentives matter. but what I ended up doing was then leaving academia and jumping into an early stage startup, which was an amazing vehicle to think about how this transition happens and, you know, basically the learning there, and, This is what we now, you know, this is a lot of what we now indoctrinate and try and help people understand in the fellowship we run, was that, you know, the depth and multitude of elements that determine whether a technology can actually make it from the research stage to a product in the market. You know, first of all, you know, the idea is like, you know, the easy part in some regard. but yeah. You know, the number of levels deeper, you have to go to understand, okay, how is it going to be, how is it actually going to be valuable? Who's going to buy it. Why are they going to buy it? You know, how does, how does the whole system get built to make it, it's it's a month multi-dimensional problem where everything needs to line up between finance and the team you have in the market yet. And it's technology. and. You know, for me, I think, you know, this we've talked before, one of the biggest things that I've come to realize is we've got, you know, we've got hundreds of billions of dollars that government spends to do the idea and ideation. We've got hundreds of billions of dollars that the private sector spends to basically take the early prototypes and the idea of a product and scale it. and we've got really very little, that goes into how you do all the really hard stuff of translating one to the other. Yeah. So, so let's like what I'm going to actually continue to poke at. Like, what is that actual stuff? So the, the start that you joined did w what, what sort of was the origin of the technology that you were working on? I assume it came out of a lab somewhere. I, yeah, I was involved in two startups. One was after that epiphany moment in my PhD work, I basically threw out the work we were doing, and shifted gears and ended up developing the technology. That was the basis for, for actually a solar startup thinking about sort of thin-film, nanocrystal based, solar cells, Basically realizing that the, that the lifetime was so important, we just threw out all of the organics that we were working on and focused on. Like, you basically just need a new manufacturing approach to make something that looks like a traditional solar. So, that was a company that I kind of helped establish, but then ultimately didn't go. I was, I was meant to be sort of the founding, you know, grad student turn CTO. and then, for a number of reasons, didn't end up jumping into that as a startup and instead, through. Just some of the serendipity of being in the Bay area and Silicon Valley ended up, on the founding team of a battery startup that came out of another research lab at Berkeley. and this was funded by, Samira and Vanessa who, when, when coastal ventures was just going to start it. yeah, so, so like let's so. W when we say coming out of a lab, I think it's actually worth almost disecting what that means. Cause I suspect that it means different things to different people. and so, so someone in the lab. Did some research, figure it out. Okay. We think we can extend it was, it was a lifetime, et cetera, extended battery lifetimes, or, this was about making or energy batteries, higher energy density, batteries that were still safe and stable. using basically solid electrolytes. so, so they like publish her paper, like, like I assume that there's like, like they do some experiments. They come up with like the core. sort of process improvement. It's like, okay, we, we make batteries this, this old way, and now we need to make batteries at different way that will eventually make the battery into something useful. then what did, like, what did they need to do? What do you, what did you all do? Yeah, the origin story of CEO is I think a great one. So ingredients in this case and, and some, and there are some universal, I think things that you can pull out of this, you had a couple of graduate students and a professor at Berkeley, Natasha Bulsara, doing research, basically a polymer expert who starts doing research in terms of how polymers can be applied to batteries. the, the business as usual or the incentive structures within universities generally, you know, would say for Natasha to be successful in his career, he needs to make some new discoveries. He needs to write some great papers. he needs to advance, you know, as an academic, right. And he was doing that. and. In this case, it took this moment where, you know, Natasha was a dreamer and had, you know, just had a sense of, well, wait a second, I want this to be useful. I think this can be useful. He kind of had a zero with order idea that there's this problem in batteries, where, you know, you can, if you try and use high energy density, electrodes, like lithium metal, they can short across and lithium metals, flammable and combustible. And so, you know, There's this idea that you could make a high energy density battery. Unfortunately, it starts to look more like a bomb than a battery. and he, you know, to zero with order, the polymers that he's making could solve that problem, right. It could be robust and strong mechanically and still be highly conductive, for ions and. Tasha to his credit is audacious enough to say, Oh, and this is a time to, we have to recognize when venture capitalists are interested in funding these things at the early stages. Right? So it takes Natasha being audacious enough to say, I think we can, we can start something. And then it takes someone in this case, like the node who is as audacious as it comes in saying, well, I think batteries are going to be a big deal. I think this is a really smart team and they'll figure it out. And so like, let's start a company here. it turns out and, you know, I don't really, I don't know if anyone will be upset at this point to say this. Right. Like I joined the company, not being a battery expert. I kind of was the entrepreneurial scientist who jumped in to kind of help start it. You know, I had a meeting with severe, he said like, all right, buy a cell phone. And like, you'll be employee number one, like just, just go and let's start. So there's a whole nother story about that, but, It wasn't until I was in the, you know, and coastal ventures decided to fund it. and then I actually saw the diligence, the early diligence that coastal ventures had done on the idea. And it was like battery expert. I won't say who world-renowned battery expert, who I now highly respect. Basically said, this is total BS. You know, like there is no way this, this idea and this technology could solve this problem for these 10 reasons. and what I love about the node, and what allows him to really catalyze new things, things is, he just said he just ignored it. He said like, all right, the experts don't think it's possible. Fine. you know, and invested in any way, a couple of million dollars to go, you know, to go start this company. And so. You know, you have me as a scientist, who's motivated to be entrepreneurial, but has no experience. And you have a, like really incredible, you know, genius academic professor out of Berkeley and two of his students that are really entirely scientific in their thinking at the time. and now all of a sudden, like we're in a startup and we're meant to go develop a product. And so this question of like, well, what does that actually take? Like, you know, we just got thrown into the deep end, about that. but you know, the first thing is some people to just be audacious and say, there could be value created here. Let's take these individuals. And this was one of the reasons why I found it cyclotron road and now created activate like the origin story was let's take these individuals and get them into a different mode of how they're thinking about their R and D. And there was just an, there was an entire phase transformation that happened where all of a sudden, you know, Natasha and Mohit and Hani, and I, are now in a startup and. Our only reason for existence is figuring out how you make a product that could be impactful and get out to the market. And jeez, like, you know, I mentioned zero with order before, because like at the first order, all of the assumptions around why that technology could have been valuable in batteries were not all of them, but most of them were wrong. and, and yet now there was no choice. We were all, I mean, Antosz was still a professor, but the rest of the team is basically now in a mode. We're like, okay, we got to figure out how to make something valuable for batteries. You know, ideally starting with the technology that we have. and you know, it's funny, you're I think your audience, a lot of your audience is sort of scientific and technical. So what I like to say now is like, if you want to move science to products, you need to live for some time and a superposition of those States. before you can kind of collapse the wave function and understand like, where, like, what is it that you have. And for me, like what was so lucky was because of the node was there to be able to put that speculative money in those first 18 months of co, like we weren't a research project anymore, but we certainly weren't a company. and we had to figure out like, Okay. Which parts of this are just still interesting research that Natasha can keep doing this lab, which he did. And he benefited from, and which of these might actually turn into something that could be valuable to the market and a product. I'm not actually sure. I'm answering your question. I think you are. I think we're, we're getting to it. I'm going to like, sort of tease it out. Cause I think it's actually really like, I, I love this because it, I think that it is probably different for every situation, but then there are these similarities where it, so actually, so like during that, that 18 months, what did you spend your time on? So I assumed there was some amount of like going and talking to battery companies and like trying to figure out their end and then some amount of like, It's like, like you were still doing experiments, like, Well, first of all, it's worth noting. You know, there's so much value in taking some smart folks and putting them in a different mode of working. But the idea that the way to do that aggressive applied research was to be in a startup. There's a, there's a bunch of activation barriers there that we have to cross. So luckily even node and the financing, wasn't one of them, he made that easy. but then it's like, Oh shit, like where are we going to do this work? and it's like, we can't meet up at a Starbucks and open our laptops and start prototyping. So like, my job as employee, number one, as unsexy as it was, was like buy a cell phone and like figure out like, Where are you guys going to work? You know, like, Oh, we got to find space. We gotta, you know, I gotta go call em Bron and negotiate, you know, glove glovebox order. and see whether I can find some way, because frankly for them to build us a custom blood box is going to take three to five months. And like, I want it in six weeks, you know, like, how are we going to do that? so that's, you know, like that's number one that was kind of just table stakes, you know, then. And I think this is the tough part, in this transition, especially when you start with venture capital, which is, you know, the team has certain assumptions, those zeros or assumptions around. Here's how we think it was valuable. So obviously like the node wasn't going to fund without at least like, Some plan around like, okay, we're going to take your money. And here are the experiments or the development we were going to do. Right. So the development was like, okay, we've got a polymer that can do X, Y, and Z. And we need a polymer that could do a, B and C. And so the first part of this effort is going to be to, you know, we're gonna. Take the synthesis. We're going to make these better polymers. We're going to show that we can get the properties you need for it to be valuable. we're going to show that we can develop a process where this can actually be a scalable polymer to produce because otherwise it's going to be way too expensive. Yeah. And then we're actually going to figure out, like, how do you make a battery so that we can show that you can put this into a battery. And what's interesting is you look at all three of those things. If we were to go back and look at the early plans and experiments that we had on those. Like they were totally, you know, they're pointed in the wrong direction because we didn't understand what the real problems or, and so you then set out on, you set out on building the, the lab infrastructure and the experiments to go do that. I mean, all you can do is March in the direction that you is your current assumption. Right. and so that's what we did. we found. We were, I remember like the node was blown away just in terms of the rate at which we were able to make progress. and then alongside that, you know, my job as the kind of person to start thinking about how the technology met the market within the team, you know, like I started going to industry conferences and shadowing people. On the technical side that I knew just walking around with them and asking questions. And I started to realize, Oh, you know, we, in our, in our thinking, we said that X innovation was going to make the battery five times better. Like once you actually understand how the battery gets made and what the convention is and the different, like, it turns out that five times better as closer to like 1.2 times, it's better. Like, you know, the differences were that big. Yeah. and so, So then this really hairy and stressful process of, okay, w we want to make progress against the dimension, but here we are learning things where that suggested like that vector, you know, our assumptions were wrong and maybe it's not actually as important as we thought. And now you've got to figure out, okay, well, how do we change our experiments to actually work in a direction that matters with a lot of limited information and. You know, that's, it's an insane process. it's an insane and hairy process from so many elements because it's, you know, imperfect information. you know, sometimes you don't, it's, it's a lot of unknown unknowns where like, you're not, you're not totally even missing the thing that's going to kill you. meanwhile, you have different people on the team, who all are at different levels of, of their own understanding and perception around, you know, Maybe difference in the, in the spectrum of like a dreamer of like, yeah, people are telling us it won't be as good, but like radically can be, you know, and it's like, yes, theoretically, it can be, I'll give you an example from, from the CEO days, which is. You know, theoretically lithium metal as a, as an anode and a battery can give you enormous energy densities. cause rather than sticking the lithium ions and holding them within some other material. Right? So in the battery, normally Lithium's, intercalated into some other compounds. So you have to carry the weight and volume of that compound around in your battery. Even though it's not playing an active role, lithium lamp metals, pure lithium. So you don't have to carry any of that baggage around. And so you can have a really lightweight small battery. You know, one of the big epiphanies for us was like, yes. if you can essentially have a two micron thick. Piece of lithium in your battery. and the way we were thinking about making the batteries, it was like you take a piece of lithium foil that would make it so easy and you'd have lithium foil, the, one of the electrodes that you've turned into the battery, you know, so one of the aha moments as stupid as it was, was like, all right, let's go source a five micron thick foil of lithium, right? No, like, that's not like no one makes that. because guess what? Like, you know, lithium at those, you can't even handle with them at that thickness. Cause we've just burst into flame, you know? well, no, cause it was just too, you know, Lithium's not very robust mechanically. Okay. So like you can buy a hundred microns, thick foil of lithium and handle it nicely and easily. And you can buy that really cheap. You start talking to people about like, can I source 10 microns of lithium? And, you know, and they say, yeah, you can, there's one person, there's one group in the world that can do that for you. And it's going to cost a thousand, 10,000 times more than a hundred microns. Now, all of a sudden, like the entire, the entire proposition goes away. and then you're stuck saying like, okay, does this kill the idea? Or actually it probably means we got to figure out a different way to get two to five micron thick lithium. Which is like an entirely new development path and expense that we just never thought about, you know? And is it gonna work? Is it gonna be possible? So this is like, you know, this is that there's this multi Plex, you know, divergent and crazy, you know, optimization that has to happen in terms of like, okay, what do we do next? And, and at the. End of it where you actually building batteries or were you like ha ha like, what is the, like, once you figure out the, like, once you've sort of like gone through that optimization, you actually even have a process to make batteries better. Like, how does that process end up in a device that's using a battery, Yeah. great question. So in that multi sort of, multi-dimensional. Development that we had to be doing. You know, one of the questions basically was like, okay, let's imagine we can make this phenomenal electrolyte, which could enable this phenomenal battery, like a, how are we going to actually prove that the battery is better? You know? you could imagine partnering with battery companies to do that existing battery companies, but like they have no idea how to handle our stuff. Yeah. And they don't have the equipment. So like, no, we can't do that. Like we got to figure out how to make batteries ourselves. So now, like all of a sudden, like you've got an innovation, which is a materials innovation for a component of the battery that you can think Naval and stuff anymore. And all of a sudden, like we have to figure out how to make batteries okay. And produce them. and then we need to think about, are we just going to produce them as at the pilot stage? And then we'll teach a partner how to produce them, or are we going to actually have to build in our little startup, like the entire battery manufacturing capability for this entirely new batteries. And this is where that multidimensional optimization and what we like to tell our fellows now is like, You know, everything has to align in terms of the way you're going to go build this. So for instance, you can have, and I like to think about this in thermodynamics and kinetics. Like the thermodynamics can be great. Oh, we actually do have a magic material that could build a magic battery and we think it's possible. Like we know it's possible. And then the kinetics could kill you. Meaning for us as a small company to actually build out and figure out how to manufacture these at scale, it might take $200 million of capital to do the development, to figure that out. if at that moment in time, the venture capital community doesn't have the appetite to put $200 billion into a battery manufacturing company, then that's not going to happen. And that's going to be the reason why that entire vector doesn't make sense. so this is, you know, like the idea that to navigate how something is going to get to a product into the market. There's a lot of strategy, but there's a lot of dynamic optimization that needs to happen as you learn more and you understand your context. And one of the things you and I have talked about this a little bit, but one of the things that's that for me is the biggest challenge in this, especially for hard technologies that take infrastructure and capital and manufacturing is. There's in theory, there's a really broad, in terms of ways, you can take an idea from research and get it out to market. And what I mean by that is you can, from the university lab, Natasha could have licensed the technology to a big company, right? he could start a company which he did and that company could raise venture capital money to go try and become the biggest battery manufacturer in the world. and raise a lot of money or it could spend some time working and developing technology and then it could license it to a big company where it can be acquired by a big company. Yeah. Interestingly w the lesson learned for me was one, the only way we were able to get that group of people into the mode where we were working aggressively in the supplied R and D way was because of a node gave us a couple million dollars. Yeah. But now the entire organization of the startup was founded on the nodes venture capital money. And the node is notorious in the best possible way of being an amazing venture capitalist. In the sense that his view is if I'm going to invest in you as a VC, my goal is to make you the next multi-billion dollar company. That is the industry leader in this space. And my incentive is to make my bets count. Yeah. And so I would rather do everything. I would rather do everything we can to get it, to beat that you you've learned and adapted this so that it can be the biggest battery company in the world or fail Trump. and there are no other sort of off routes. And what I mean by that is, you know, we recognized, we recognize probably two years in a CEO that. The idea that we could line up all those stars and create a battery. You know, I, I remember learning, you know, the battery manufacturing industry, you looked at the most successful battery manufacturers like Panasonic's battery manufacturing business unit had like 5%, margins in terms of like income net income, or operating margins. And. You basically said, like, I don't know how to justify a big, massive multi-billion dollar business. That sucks. It's a shitty business. Right? Like, so, so we started, then we started thinking like, and we even have a chance at that. Like we gotta go figure out how to we had enough money to go figure out how to manufacture an entirely new battery chemistry. Like I w how are we going to do that? And so it started to realize like, And we had developed, we had some really amazing ideas. We had a really amazing kind of early development and validation, and we had people from big corporates coming to us with a lot of interest, including one that ultimately came through an intermediary. We got the sentence. Well, maybe there's an acquisition here that someone would want to do. And this was early in the company. and you know, the VC board that we had basically said, like, okay, we know we put, we put $5 million in, you could get acquired for $30 million. The technology could end up in a company that actually has the ability to manufacture and the distribution channels. and their view was no, that's not good. That's not, I mean, you know, basically if you think about it, if I'm a venture capitalist and I funded you out of a $500 billion fund, right. what I need you to do is. Build a company that's big enough that returns to me and to my investors. You know, something on the order of hundred, a billion dollars, right? If you returned to me $30 million after three years, it's an amazing return on investment from a, from a pure kind of, we gave you X, you turned it into Y, but in absolute terms, I've spent three years with you. And all you're giving me back for my fund is, you know, 30 million bucks, which doesn't move the needle. You basically proven to me that I just wasted the last three years from you, because you're not the thing that's going to make the fund successful. Yeah, it's a really long-winded story. But the point of the story is to suggest that, even though there are a lot in theory, there are a lot of different ways to get the technology out to market and to get it to scale. Capital sources and institutional structures and incentives. They all act as band pass filters. and they cut you down where all of a sudden, like your only option to be successful is in some narrow range. and. That's. Yeah, it's just an interesting thing too, to think about relative to how we encourage more of this. Yeah. Oh, well, I really appreciate you going down into the nitty gritties because I think it's, one just valuable to sort of have out there. Like, I feel like people don't go into that and what it does is it then sort of frames the work that you're doing both at activate and that you did do at RPE, because I feel like both of those, like that sort of your whole. career has now been trying like the hypothesis of my life. Yes. Yeah, exactly. It's like, so it's like, how do we play with those constraints? actually one question I have about this idea of the phase change, and sort of let's, let's look at the phase change, the, the super position. Do you feel like the idea of, of kind of. Burning the boats in a way of like taking that VC money, that then sort of really focused you on, on the product. Do you think that that is. Essential or like, because like, I, I actually, I've sort of like mixed, like I have very mixed feelings because as you pointed out, like it both focused you, but at the same time, it, it put those constraints on you that you sort of like needed to go big and go home or go home. and so sort of like left. Didn't leave a lot of room for playing. So, so where, where do you, where do you come down on this sort of, like going all in or like, is there, is there like a point in time when it's correct to do that? We got to think about a few they're few different pieces. So I think what you're asking, you know, One is, is it essential to get into a different institutional mindset or structure or incentive structure to do this translational work? The other is, is it essential that you're all in, so to speak, right? That that's your entire life? I think with, with very few exceptions, the first is essential. and the second is important. and. But, but maybe, you know, but, but maybe not essential. I mean, the, you know, the, this is the, I mean, this is the reason why we created activate, and this is the reason why, you know, we started cyclotron road as, as kind of the precursor experiment, which was, The first thing we have to recognize is like, we've lost big picture, at least in the U S but I think this is true globally. Like we've lost a really critical modality of how we do research, with which is a place with amazing people who understand science and engineering at the earliest stages of technology development and who are incentivized to create a product to create something practical. And, you know, I think you, you know this, right? Like, you know, this story, but the best research in the world used to happen in companies. and, and you know, whether it was the companies themselves funding it, you know, think about bell labs, whether it was the companies themselves funding it. Whether it was funding that was really government funding through a monopoly that allowed them to fund it, or whether the government funded it directly, which the government used to fund a lot of research within companies, because guess what that's where the best research in the world happened. you know, we had, we had people who were thinking about who understood cutting edge science, and yet we're in an organizational structure that cared about products. and now we have, frankly, startups are one of the only places that we really have that in an intense way. Yeah. Oh, and I was going to, and that startups, you, you don't have as much of sort of that continued institutional knowledge, right? Like you have, a bunch of people, like a bunch of people who, as you said, like, are sort of new to that phase and that, that way of thinking, And I guess so, so we could almost sort of think of, of activate as allowing people to be in that super position longer. Would that be an accurate way of describing it? I mean, that's exactly it, which is why we take right. Our fellowship takes people who have the motivation to go figure out how the research gets out of the lab. It basically simulates for them what the first couple of years. Would look like in a, the node funded early stage startup. but without the constraints of that funding, meaning they have all of a sudden, it's like, Oh shit, they've got two years. Their entire life and success in their life at that moment is can I figure out how my research turns into something valuable and yet there's not the supposition that they already have something valuable, right. That would be putting the cart before the horse. Right. They're really allowed to explore that and figure out, Oh, you know what. You know, we've got a fellow who spent time in the program and then said, actually, no, like this isn't for me. And he's now a professor at Oxford, you know, we've got other fellows in the program who have said, actually this isn't for me and now they're running groups at Apple. and, and then we have a lot that spend that time and they say, Oh, you know what? This is a start. This is the majority of them. Like, and the startup is the right vehicle to move this forward. But then we get this additional classification that comes in, where some of them are saying, you know what? And this is, and I want to go build a VC, go big, go home startup. And I'm going to go raise money from Linode or someone like him. But we have others who have taken the time and that superposition to say, there's something valuable there. We built here, but the traditional venture capital funding model, you know, the time counts, it's not going to work well for me at this stage. So now I'm going to try and build something in a different way, you know, partnering with corporations and selling early things to them. If you think about, you know, we focus at activate on, you know, hard. Physical natural science technologies and with really focused on industrial markets. And what I like to say is, if you think about the biggest industrial companies in the world, it's hard to find many that have their origin stories in a financial VC funding landscape, right? Yeah. most of them have had to build, you know, what I like to say is in industrial markets, it would harder technology. The incubation period between proof of concept or sorry between proof of interest in the marketplace and proof of value is very high, meaning, it can take a long time for something that could be valuable. To actually be accepted by the industry as we actually believe this is valuable because we've, de-risked the technology enough, it's been in the field for, you know, a hundred thousand hours or whatever else. And so those, what you find is that to get technologies that can go into those markets and companies that can have the reputation of being able to deliver with the reliability, et cetera, that you need. Oftentimes it's the slower growth companies that just took a lot more time to incubate. We don't have right now capital. We don't have capital structures that allow people to build those kinds of companies. I'll stop. No, send me like riled up in different dimensions and this, this is so good. so the extreme version of that argument would be that just the, the timescale and the return expectation of. The venture cap, venture capital as a, as a institutional structure, just doesn't align with the, sort of the necessities of a lot of hard technology like that. That's, that's the extreme version of, and you're, you're welcome to push back on that, but. That's that that's the hypothesis. In other words, often align, it only aligns in these magic convergent moments where, you know, the market is, you know, way out of equilibrium and wants to move on, you know, a hundred times faster. And, and there, there are great counterpoints to all of this. Right. you know, the counter points are, you know, like if, if the market is not, Let me think about what the counterpoint yeah. Look at. Look at the automotive market, right? it wasn't until the automotive market basically. Realized like, Oh, like internal combustion vehicles may be dead. Like our entire business and capabilities may be dead. That all of a sudden they're willing to make big investments in acquisitions and take things on. and you know, I think from the financial lens, the argument would be, okay, well, don't just push the technology. Don't, don't push on a rope, meaning like to innovate in the electric vehicles before anyone actually has any appetite, but. As you know, it's not like then the world will never change, you know, like I never push it. the story I love on this is, You know, Dick's, Watson's at our board at SunPower. Dick was the founder of a company called SunPower. that was one of the first kind of biggest solar companies in the world when the solar market took off, it still is, Dick left his job as a tenured professor at Stanford in the mid to late seventies, mid seventies to go start a solar energy company, the world expert in the field. and he basically. It felt like university wasn't the right mode for him. and at the time, the idea of like building a solar company that put solar cells on your roof, like, you know, th the cost of solar energy with the Silicon solar cell would probably, you know, it was like, I don't know, somewhere between 50 and a hundred X, what would make economic sense? And this is in the mid seventies, you know, Dick founded like. Against all odds built a small team with government grants with early investors was able to spend 15 to 20 years building a, like a suite of technology around solar, getting the data points around validation and everything else. And I think a lot of people, I imagine a lot of VCs and others who interacted with them at the time, just thought, you know, This guy's nuts. Like he's going to be spending his whole life just kind of building and tinkering and it's, this is not a real business, you know? And then in the mid nineties, all of a sudden, you know, Japan and Germany decided let's make solar real and they put some real incentives and subsidies in place. And all of a sudden there was this market and it just so happened that Dick and his company and the way he says it is like he was at the time he got to the point where he understood how to. You understood how to make the cells work, how to make them cheap, how to manufacture. what he didn't understand was how to make them, like, you know, how to make a million cells a day, a million wafers a day. and it just so happened that at, at that moment, you know, the market was starting to turn on. He bought TJ Rogers is running Cypress semiconductor who says like, Oh, well we know how to manufacture things at scale. we don't do a million wafers a day, but, but that's an interesting challenge. and now all of a sudden, there's an opportunity to take everything Dick's done and create a massive business and a massive new industry. Yeah. and so, you know, like, Is there a way to encourage people to be as like ridiculously, you know, naively, you know, whatever, like whatever it was that you would call J Dick in the, in the first part of that journey. Tenacious. I don't know. But what I know is there are a lot of people and we've now seen this in the fellowship program. Like, and you've probably seen this, like, there are a lot of scientists, engineers who are willing to commit to decades of their life to go develop a field, to develop something that can make that impact. And. what I know is if Dick would have decided to commit those two decades at Stanford, he would have learned 0.0, zero 1% of the things he needed to learn, to figure out how that technology was going to be productive and valuable. No, no. Dig on Stanford. Just again, it's like that's, that's how academia doesn't incentivize like actually going out and like building the same thing over and over again. So I've spent a lot of time thought thinking about this, and frankly, where I end up is you can't, you can't blame VC or wall street, right? Like, you know, frankly, the earliest investors in Dick's company, a company that might take, you know, Edison talked about like you can't beat compound interest. Like those investors are not going to make their money, no matter how successful it happens. If the success starts 20 years later. and so. The only way to encourage that type of work at that stage is to start to think about Dick's company in the early stages, as a research lab, as a really interesting applied research lab and what I'm hoping and what I've been really working toward is how do we get to government to realize that like startups, a network of startups, you know, a constellation of starting, however you want to think about it, like. Like that should be the most powerful way to do applied research, I think in today's world. Yeah. there are a lot of problems with how you do that. There are a lot of challenges in how you think about government funding, startups as research labs, but, but I think that's, I think that's a really compelling, you know, direction, from a policy person. w what do you think some of the biggest challenges are. I'm trying to think of who, who pointed this out for me? I think it was Nathan Coons, who, I don't know if you've met Nathan, but he, He started a company called Kymeta, out of intellectual ventures, which interestingly enough, if you argue, there are not enough modalities around how to do applied research in the world or in this country, you know, intellectual ventures is one of those strange modalities and experiments. but I think he's the one who pointed out to me initially. what has all this stuck in my head as the biggest challenge, which is. When you fund research, you know, as you know, science technology can be easily used irresponsibly, in research funding, let's put it this way. R and D funding could be used irresponsibly either because you're going to go develop an evil technology, or because you're going to go squander the money by like, you know, buying yourself a Ferrari on the side. Right. Yeah. When the governor buying expensive equipment, when it's not even when it's not necessary. Right. Like, I think that's the most insidious one where it's like, not even clearly fraud, but just like, do you really need like a million dollar fem, right. yes. and I think Nate, when Nathan pointed out, you know, when government funds things, you know, if the government sends a check to Virginia tech to do research. there are a lot of guardrails and bounds, that would make it very hard for that money to be spent in a really irresponsible way. or to, for that project to be ethically misled. It happens. Yeah. you know, one of the benefits of startups is there they're much less tightly bound and they have a lot more dynamicism in terms of how they get led. The incentives are different, but it also means you now have less control mechanisms. And that's one, that's kind of stuck with me as, as a challenge, right? not that it's not, yeah, I think about it as like, it's one that's worth thinking about how to manage or you think about it as like, well, you know, there's a risk reward to everything you do. one of the interesting things, I don't know if we, you and I have talked about it. One of the interesting things I've found is that when we think about science, whether it's. Frankly, whether it's government, any of the actors who fund science and engineering and research, you're willing to take insane amounts of technical risk and scientific risk. there's very little willingness to take kind of institutional risk, or, or modality risk. you know, I, I, I had an interaction with, you know, a large private foundation that funds a lot of research. and I, you know, basically noticed most, if not all of their programs, you need to be, you need to be a large university to apply. and when I sort of asked them about like, well, why is that? You've got now a lot of interesting research that could even the applied stuff, even in their applied programs. And part of it is like, well, you know, no one ever lost their job funding. You know, stamp a Stanford professor or Stanford to do research. Whereas like, I don't know, like God forbid I accidentally fund Theranose to do research, that that's, you know, that's death. So that's another one that we got to figure out how to get around. I call that asymmetric career risk where nobody nobody ever gets fired for, Funding the safe thing, right? Like the, the sort of like mean results. But when we're talking, like the things that we're talking about are we're, we're counting on the outlier results. And the problem with outlier results is that they can be outliers on the good side, or they can be outliers on the bad side. And so if you. Fund a outlier result on the good side, then, then you're the hero. Yes. But then if you fund an outlier on the bad side, then you get fired. And so the sort of like expected career value for, for a funder, if the government or large, large. Yeah, exactly. And it's like ed, unlike a VC who gets to participate in the outside's upside of a positive outlier, Someone in the government or a, another large funding organization, like sure. They'll, they'll like, people be like, yeah, you funded it. But then they won't get that much, participation in the upside if it, if it really pays off. And so, so that's. What? Yeah, but I think the sweats really well thing, but let's think about like, you know, and again, all day long, that makes sense. If you look at it through the downside risks, but let's think about all the upside opportunity that we're giving up. And I'll give you the example here, which is Saul and other lab, you know, like I was a good friend. I like, I think he's one of the most brilliant people on the planet in science and technology and engineering. You could do good. other lab. You know, the amount of upstream swimming, Saul has had to do for other labs to exist. And the idea that like, you know, you have to be a one in 1,000,000,001 in a hundred million type of person to be able to end up doing something like other lab, which is essentially a different modality for doing R D you know, in a very different way than activate. It sits somewhere between a startup and a research lab. and you know, I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is like, you know, how do we allow? Not just like, how, how do we make it possible so that not just Saul could go run another lab. Right? But that the hundred or thousand top scientists and engineers who have the same motivations assault, Could think about that as a career path for themselves and something successful to do, you know, salt takes a lot of risks. Other, you know, like other lab is in some ways an insane proposition, and yet it allows them to do the work that he does. And it's like, frankly, it's, it's gotta be, you know, one of the most productive research labs in terms of applied research in the world on a per dollar basis. So, so, so, so big that I would propose. Which is like, this is going to be like a deeply unsatisfying thing, but I'd love to get your take on it is that the missing ingredient is trust. And I realize that sounds very sort of like Woohoo, but I mean, it, in a very, like if you look at, if you just sort of like, look at history and you look at the people who do these crazy things, like what ends up happening is like, it comes down to like one person trust another person they're like, look. I trust you to go spend this money responsibly. And then they sort of like take the guard rails off. And, I was, I was talking to Donald Raven the other week, and he ran, this, this program called venture research for BP in the eighties where they funded. Crazy scientific research. So it's like less on the applied side, but more on the, like, like, like literally scientific research that couldn't get funded. And the thing that struck me was that he spent sometimes up to a year getting to know the scientist who was applying for funding. And so, and I think that what happened there is eventually it got to the point where I just trusted them as a person. And so I was wondering like, well, think about, think about Bob Taylor at DARPA ARPA. Right. Like, you know, his whole mode was, let me find the smartest people, let me spend enough time with them where I can understand which of them, you know, does the best job of calling bullshit on the rest of them, you know? And then let me go give them money. Yeah. And yeah. Right. I think that's, I think, I think you're, You know, I think one of the, one of the challenges with the, with the trust and with some of those modes is, you know, I think right now, one of the really important questions in science and research is, you know, how do you think more inclusively? and how do you make sure that you're not. Just super, you know, reinforcing biases in terms of what it means to be good and excellent, that, you know, like that's, that's one of the things that you, you really need to then struggle with, which is, you know, trust is a very efficient mode. but, you know, people build trust quickly based on their biases. So. I just point that out because it's worth, you know, absolutely being part of, part of it, thinking it's like something that's sort of like really grappling with hard. Yeah. now that said, yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think that prevents you from. You know, th the two things that I think for us is special about activate one is, we're, we're, we're supporting people outside of the normal incentive structures. Right. and two is we, we fund people, who have great ideas and who have the right motivations, you know, but the whole reason back to the superposition, like the whole reason we exist. Is to give someone a chance to go through that first 18 months where they realize all their assumptions are wrong. So we don't pick them based on our, their assumptions. Right. We pick them based on other attributes, and. You know, I'd say in the last five years, we're learning a lot about how improve processes to do that with less bias. and you know, one thing we can't control is unfortunately, one of the limitations of an entrepreneurial though, is you're dependent on. You know, you're not that you're to be successful at gaining resources to support your project. You're not dependent on a really clear pipeline, you know, within your university or whatever else. You're dependent on pulling resources from a bunch of parts of the world and the ecosystem, and those places all have biases. So yeah. You know, if I think of our women fellows, our fellows of color, you know, I would say if. You know, blind tests, their strength is individuals and ideas at the beginning of the fellowship. And how much progress do they make in two years? No question. There's a deficit there. and you know, I think the work we need to do is we need to do a better job at, you know, Not being biased and picking those people and instead, right. Because you've worried they're going to fail or whatever it is. Right. But instead, like we need to be working really aggressively to make sure that we counter all the other biases. I feel like it's starting to happen. Yeah. and, and sort of, so I got on the, on the note of the sort of, the 18 months of the fellowship, do you feel like. And this is, this would be, it's very hard to do counterfactual. So it's just based on your feeling, like, do you feel like on the margin, like that is sort of the correct length and amount and the amount of money that you give them? Or like what, what, what is, what is the marginal value of say keeping people in that superposition longer or, giving them more resources while they're in it? Yeah, that's a great question. it's super tricky. when we sort of penciled out the model, that's now, you know, activate and synchrotron road, on a napkin, There was a question of like, all right, well, as you know, my initial model for this was very different. and the model we have was really bound by some of the constraints in terms of how much funding we have. And so we looked at the amount of funding we had and we said, Oh, we could probably support people for two years. And I walked around and talked to folks and. Well, it was interesting is anyone I talked to who was on the entrepreneurial kind of VC side of the spectrum was like two years way too cushy. Like that's ridiculous. You're just going to get people into a really relaxed state. The anyone I talked to on the more science, academic research side that realized like the only way you're going to get funding for this is through a grant or something, you know, like. Funding cycles happen on the order of years. Yeah, they were all like, so, so the entrepreneurs said like, Oh, you should make it one year. The academics all said, like, it has to be at least three years. and so we landed on two. the I've actually found it to be pretty appropriate. we do is really unique in the sense that we believe that there's value in. The science and engineering expert inventor actually understanding the connection point to how what they're doing could be valuable. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. And so what that means, because they can then be a mobile, the dimensional player, and they can start to connect the dots and innovative ways that they wouldn't otherwise in the applied research perspective. You know, the other mode is you take the inventor scientist and you just hybridize. You pair them with someone who, is thinking more about the practical market and you find a way to make that work. But at least for us, there's this sense of like, we can be creating these rare breed of like, You know, super, super scientists who are thinking applied and are still cutting edge experts. There are many people who have that capacity, but if you create one and we've seen this kind of time and time, again, like those people can be really powerful drivers. Okay. So for us, a big part of the two years is we found that. There's so much nuance in debt. Like the things that we've been talking about here to really understand, like, how did the capital markets work w w VCs fund things a certain way. how does manufacturing work? How do you think about techno economics? Like, Oh, wait a sec. Yeah, just like that, that mental transition. It takes time. You know, what we find is we tell people things in the two year fellowship, and every year we bring in a new group in the beginning of the fellowship and basically the way the fellowship works is there are a lot of ways it works, but one way is every week we get the cohort together and we're exposing them to ideas for founders and others, founder stories. Here's how venture capital works, et cetera. And we do that for them in the first year. And then we often are repeating some of that stuff for the new cohort that comes in next year. And the second year fellows will sit in on a session and be like, Oh shit. Like you told me all this stuff before, but I didn't, I just wasn't even a place where I could even understand where to which bucket to put that into my brain. But like, now that I've been now that I've been hit with this stuff so many times, like I'm starting to understand it. so that's one and then the other is. You know, I wish we were a program that could find the talent that we have. And then once they're in the program, if they're doing well, six months in, I give them a two or $5 million grant to keep working on it, but we don't have that luxury. I don't control the purse strings. So our fellows will, all we're giving them is sort of the institutional, you know, Umbrella and the support and the runway. So the other reason that two years ends up being important is given how speculative, what they're working on is, you know, the amount of time it takes to get a grant proposal together into a funding agency, get it funded. So you have cash in the bank to do the work or on the venture side or the corporate side to have an engagement with a corporation, that's going to get you funded or to develop a pitch. That's strong enough that BC's like. Like those things, any of those things happen on a time constant of roughly a year. Yeah. and so the idea that in the first year of our, of our fellowship, you know, fellows are basically shifting their mindset and. Like building the foundation for where that those funding and resources are going to come from. So that in the second year of the fellowship, they're actually able to hit the ground running, in the best cases, you know, in some cases that first year, it doesn't, you know, like what, what they're working on doesn't resonate or they miss the window on the grant, like whatever it is, it seems to work and this is sort of like, something that I. Struggle with, and I, and you know, much more about it than me. this idea of a sort of push versus pull on the people coming to the program. And what I mean by that is, There's there's one school of thought that says that people need to be like intensely, intrinsically motivated. They need to like, be like banging down your door to join the program. And then there's another school of thought that, there are people who like don't even know that they should be banging down your door and that you need to go out there and sort of like forcefully opened their eyes and then they will be amazing. Where do you, where do you sort of fall on that spectrum? When you're thinking about where the best fellows come from, this is a really, this is a really hard, it's a really good question. and there are a few different things that come to mind for me. One is what's, what's the risk of like, what's the risk of a program like ours? You know, one could argue that. Being an entrepreneur is not something you should just fall into. Like you will not succeed as an entrepreneur unless you woke up and said, Oh, like, there is no other thing I could imagine doing then this startup, you know, and it's right. and, and argument that has been made that I think is, is reasonable, which is to say, you know, if you give people a nice path, To start thinking about themselves as an entrepreneur. Like you're basically setting them up for failure because those people probably shouldn't be doing it. Like the Darwinian selection that occurs in terms of what there's, someone actually is willing in the middle of their piece deprogram to say, you know what? I'm just gonna put everything aside. I'm gonna figure out how to go raise venture capital money and find the person who's going to help me do that. Like, that's an important selection because the other people just shouldn't be entrepreneurs. It's one thing that keeps me up at night, which is, you know, what we found is actually quite the opposite. you know, because it's so hard, like it's almost stupid for someone who's got a PhD, in science to take that, right? Like, let's just think about a few pieces of this. Traditional entrepreneurial story in the software space. like what's the, what's the, what's the calculus you're doing here. First of all, like, you might be 20 years old and decided to basically go to do, do this. Right? Meaning you don't have a family, you know, you haven't already, you're not in your mid thirties, right? Like where you have to actually figure out like what your life has looked like. So it's a different calculus already from the get-go then it's like, well, what does it take to go get learning cycles? Okay. Like, I'm going to stop going to class and I'm going to meet up with some friends and I'm going to start prototyping. but like I could argue that I'll probably get some really, I'll probably get some really satisfying learning cycles, like on the order of months. Right. Yeah. So that's number two. and then number three, and by the way, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna find other people to do it with, they're going to be my co-founders. Like, I don't have a lot of like vested interest in these ideas. Like they're brand new, I'm just in the, in the early creative. So if you now contrast that with someone who. Let's just say they've spent the last, you know, five to 10 years becoming a cutting edge expert in material science. they've developed an idea that they've been working on as a research program for probably five years. That is now the basis of something that they think could be valuable. Okay. So now what's their calculus. okay. Let's see. I want to just go be an entrepreneur, first of all. I'm later in life, we already covered that. Yeah. so my, my analysis is different. And the other people I need to do this with me are probably all still later along life, they're more expensive. They have other constraints. So that makes it harder. Second of all, if I decide to step away, I stopped going to my grad school classes and do this. well, how am I going to start doing it? Like, where am I getting my learning cycles to do it? I need to raise enough money to get a. Venture capitalists to fund me. Then I got to go negotiate with Ember on an order of glove boxes and wait the six months for the like potentially it's like a year of my life before I'm actually in a startup. Yeah. Which is a big deal and a big opportunity cost. and then, you know, and then thirdly, like I have a watch a different amount of vested interest in what are like, I've already spent five years on this idea. so. The thought that we should imagine that people are just going to jump into these things at the same rates or paces, as in other areas of entrepreneurship, I think is sort of ridiculous. And frankly, even if I think about, so you say like, Oh, you're giving them a fellowship. That's really cushy. Like, I look at it like the people who are cutting into our fellowship are people who could get professor jobs at any university in the country. A lot of them. Like, so for me, it's not like cushy, like they're basically deciding to do something that on the face of it is totally stupid, which is like walk away from that path and like go into this fellowship where like, who knows what's next. and my read is like, if we have, if we have amazing individuals who w who are willing to take that step, like. The least we could do is provide that about a cushion. I've I've totally forgotten the question here. I think, I think we we're, we're really attacking it, which is this idea of like, do the best. Do you need to. Filter people by the ones that are willing to bang down your door or do you need to go out and find the best people and open their eyes to what they should be doing? yeah, from our experience, the ones that bang down our door are in fact, the most entrepreneurial of our fellows and they are the ones that make the most progress, and, and have sort of the highest likelihood to succeed. what's interesting for me is the other ones, the folks who come into our program, who didn't bang down our door, who basically looked at it and said like, yeah, I've always wondered. You know, maybe I don't know, I want to be a professor. and the example that I would give is Raymond White at camp who came out of Bob Grubbs, his lab, Nobel Laureate at Caltech. You know, Raymond, it wasn't until after he got into our first cohort where he basically said, you know what, this is kind of a hedge for me. I figured because you're connected to the national lab. I'll keep publishing. And like, I'll kind of probe this. but I can, I can still go be a professor. And what we found in that case was like, what he found in that case was he had no idea what the other. World would look like, and he found himself like so excited and motivated by, you know, by a more entrepreneurial path. and my take is like, okay, you know, Ray the way I talk about this, you know, Ray was working on, he had stumbled in a way in his PhD to take olefin metathesis chemistry. We can make, which can make some of the strongest polymers in the world. And most corrosion resistant toughest. He found a way to make those polymers light, the synthesis light activated so that you could turn that into a 3d printing technique. and I think he would agree, had he not come and done the fellowship. Like those ideas would still be in the world of publications, you know, instead, you know, he's proven those as 3d, you know, he's selling products as 3d printed resins in the world. And more importantly for me, like Raven would have been a professor somewhere, still with kind of not having been exposed to this other mindset. And now I think the fact that he still has that, you know, he could still go back and be a professor. I think about folks like, You know, like a number of actually folks from the great industrial, you know, from, from bell labs or IBM research that are now in universities, right? Like they, they can pop back if they want to, but they
Essa semana, no Intech: Next, banco digital do Bradesco, se junta à Disney para uma conta digital gratuita para crianças , o nextJoy. Apple se juntou ao Itaú criando o “iPhone para sempre”, um sistema similar ao de aluguéis. iFood comprou a startup eComanda, uma startup que desenvolvia automação de pedidos de restaurantes. MURAL, startup que criou uma ferramenta de colaboração - um quadro branco digital -, captou BRL650MM. Kymeta captando BRL480MM em uma rodada liderada pelo Bill Gates. O Intech, podcast da Labenu, é um trechinho da aula semanal que estudantes da Labenu têm para se atualizar em notícias de tecnologias e negócios que surgiram na semana. Formamos devs em uma experiência de 1000h em desenvolvimento de software, em um modelo que reduz as barreiras de acesso ao mercado de tecnologia . Indique para os amigos! @labenu_ no Instagram ou www.labenu.com.br
Today in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was the fourth in the Great Observatory program. The infrared telescope studied objects ranging from Near Earth Asteroids to the most distant known galaxies Headlines- 1) Kymeta raises $85.2 million in Bill Gates-backed round a. (https://spacenews.com/kymeta-raises-85-2-million-in-bill-gates-backed-round/) 2) Chinese space launch firm iSpace raises $173 million in series B funding a. (https://spacenews.com/chinese-space-launch-firm-ispace-raises-173-million-in-series-b-funding/) 3) NASA engineers checking InSight's weather sensors a.(https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_engineers_checking_InSights_weather_sensors_999.html) Law and policy- ** WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SPACE POLICY AUGUST 23-29, 2020 a. (https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/whats-happening-in-space-policy-august-23-29-2020/) Events in August- 1) August 2020 Space Calendar of Events a.(http://spaceref.com/calendar/) 2) Upcoming launches a.(https://www.space.com/32286-space-calendar.html) 3) Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess: Three launches in a week has not been done in Florida since 2001 a. (https://spacenews.com/45th-space-wing-to-attempt-three-launches-in-three-days-on-pace-for-39-in-2020/) Fun 1. What do astronauts eat in space? NASA offers menu of 200 food items a. (https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/lifestyle/what-astronauts-eat-space-nasa-22575341) Sponsor- (https://www.futureshredding.com) Contact- Twitter- @bluehelmco Instagram - @bluehelmco bluehelmco@gmail.com
With Kymeta's recent acquisition of Lepton to expand their offerings, Microwave Journal editor, Pat Hindle, talked with Doug Hutcheson, Executive Chairman of Kymeta, about their acquisition, technology progress and future SATCOM market trends.
60 years ago today, the CORONA satellite Discoverer 14 took the first U.S. photograph of a Soviet airfield from space. Headlines- 1) Arabsat orders all-electric Airbus satellite a. (https://spacenews.com/arabsat-orders-all-electric-airbus-satellite/) 2) Kymeta acquires satellite services firm Lepton Global Solutions a.(https://spacenews.com/kymeta-acquires-lepton/) 3) Skylo forms partnership with Sony Semiconductor Israel a. (https://spacenews.com/skylo-partnership-with-sony-semiconductors-israel/) Law and policy- Opportunities and Benefits in Space Resources Utilization a.(https://swfound.org/events/2020/opportunities-and-benefits-in-space-resources-utilization) ** WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SPACE POLICY AUGUST 16-22, 2020 a. (https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/whats-happening-in-space-policy-august-16-22-2020/) Events in August- 1) August 2020 Space Calendar of Events a.(http://spaceref.com/calendar/) 2) Upcoming launches a.(https://www.space.com/32286-space-calendar.html) Sponsor- www.Futureshredding.com Contact- Twitter- @bluehelmco Instagram - @bluehelmco bluehelmco@gmail.com
Podcast Notes Key Takeaways “Venture capital is all about investing in people who are inventing the future. The people who are inventing the future tend to be technologists, engineers, and scientists – you have to be able to speak their language.”In venture investing, 1-2 investments usually return the whole fundAbout a third of the investments will be total dudsAdvice for recent college grads interested in being an entrepreneur:“Build your brand, be differentiated, be indispensable, stay close to the money, find where the capital is flowing, and stay close to it.”Also read A LOT – “And be voracious in your reading. I think you have to be exposed to so many things. This allows you to develop your passion and then from your passion develop an expertise and be able to stand out.”Be good to people – you never know when you might need someoneThe single best trait of an entrepreneur is somebody that can tell a story“They are the people that recruit talent. They are the people that can raise money. They are the people that garner attention and win deals and that is what makes the venture capital business.” Josh’s biggest failures are the things that have the permanence of regret“Choices I made, or relationships that I under-invested in, or people that I didn’t spend enough time with who passed… those to me are the biggest failures”You can lose money in an investment and make it right back in another, but you won’t always get that second chance if you lose a friendship/relationshipRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgBloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital and a director at Shapeways, Strateos, Lux Research, Kallyope, CTRL-labs and Variant. He is also a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates at Kymeta, which makes cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. A Westinghouse semi-finalist and a published scientist, Wolfe previously worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and in capital markets at Merrill Lynch.
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital and a director at Shapeways, Strateos, Lux Research, Kallyope, CTRL-labs and Variant. He is also a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates at Kymeta, which makes cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. A Westinghouse semi-finalist and a published scientist, Wolfe previously worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and in capital markets at Merrill Lynch.
Constellations, a New Space and Satellite Innovation Podcast
From connected cars, planes and boats there is an ever increasing need for “always-on” seamless broadband connectivity while on the move. There are still obstacles to overcome in order to reach uninhibited, global connectivity. Bill Marks, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Kymeta explains how flat-panel satellite antenna systems address these challenges and is making the vision of always-on mobile and global broadband connectivity a reality. He shares insights into flat-panel antenna trials and evaluations on yachts, buses and SUVs and the feedback from customers that has helped advance the technology. Bill also talks about the challenges in making the technology work and deploying it on a mass scale and what makes their offering unique in the market. The application of the technology for mission critical efforts such as disaster recovery and military communications-on-the move is also discussed. Finally, find how Bill thinks the mobile communications market will evolve and change in the next five years as flat panel technology becomes even more mature and widely deployed.
In Episode 37 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital. Lux Capital is a venture firm that specializes in the hard sciences, supporting scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time. Josh is also a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, which makes cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. He is a Westinghouse semi-finalist and published scientist who previously worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and in capital markets at Merrill Lynch. In 2008, Josh Wolfe co-founded and funded Kurion, a contrarian bet in the unlikely business of using advanced robotics and state-of-the-art engineering and chemistry to clean up nuclear waste. He is a columnist with Forbes who has lectured at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, NYU and been invited to The White House and Capitol Hill to advise on nanotechnology and emerging technologies. The fields of science, technology, and investing are not new territory for Hidden Forces listeners. These are subjects that we have covered at length with previous guests, including Geoffrey West, Ray Monk, Robert Johnson, Christopher Cole, and Tim O'Reilly. Rarely, though, do we find ourselves in conversation with someone like Josh Wolfe, who has made a multi-billion dollar business of investing in and around ground-breaking technologies and innovations in the hard sciences. Some of these breakthroughs include artificial intelligence, advancements in medicine and biotechnology, gene editing, energy technology, and much, much more. In an effort to help us understand how he capitalizes on these breakthroughs, Josh Wolfe shares his unique perspective on investing with us, as well as his methodology for learning about the forces shaping our unknown future. What role does art play in informing our understanding of the world? How do we gain direction for our work from the insights provided to us by our passions? What information can we glean from the substance of our curiosities? How important are the presence of internal strife and discontentment in propelling us towards success? Can we learn to nurture our contrarian impulses in the face of our instinct to follow the herd? In a philosophical discussion that ranges from the material to the immaterial, Josh Wolfe inspires us to reckon with the paradox of our own humanity. Are we simply animals born in an indeterminate world whose mysteries we are helpless to uncover? Or, are life's greatest mysteries - the nature of reality and the hard problem of consciousness - open to same types of empirical analyses and reasoning that have propelled our species forward since the earliest days of human enlightenment? Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
We've all heard of the horrible devastation still affecting Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Nearly a month after the storm, water and electricity are in scarce supply. Cellphone service ranges from spotty to nonexistent, landline telephones are out, banks and many businesses are shuttered, cars are damaged and roads blocked. For many, work and school still have not resumed and there's been no outside communication with friends and family Helping out is he Erwin Hymer Group of North America and their special mobile research lab equipped with a Kymeta satellite antenna for the Internet, part of a humanitarian effort sponsored by Liberty Cablevision, the islands cable TV and broadband provider. We caught up with Joe Raetano, the director of advanced research and Development for the Hymer Group, who explains how valuable the Internet Satellite system on his Roadtrek advanced mobile Lab is in helping island residents reconnect. We interviewed Joe over a satellite phone connection made possible by that Kymeta antenna on his RV That's coming up in the interview of the week segment in just a few minutes. But also in this episode, your questions and comments, RV tips and news and much more… but first, my lifelong traveling companion and my bride…Jennifer. Click the player below to Listen Now or scroll down through the show note details. When you see a time code hyperlink, you can click it to jump directly to that segment of the podcast. [spp-player] Show Notes for Episode #163 October 25, 2017 of Roadtreking - The RV Podcast: WHAT MIKE AND JENNIFER ARE UP TO THIS WEEK [spp-timestamp time="3:16"] We had a great spontaneous meet-up this past weekend with many of our listeners along Florida's Emerald Coast in Navarre Beach. We will try and do this sort of thing again as we visit other parts of the country. Here's a call we got from Gary, who was among those who showed up. As we begin the last week of October, we're starting to see the first signs of the great snowbird migration as tens of thousands of folks from northern states are starting to make their way south for the winter. For those who stay put during the winter, it's time to winterize their RVs, cleaning it out and putting it in storage for the next several months. Jennifer and I are spending a few more days in Florida but we'll soon be heading north to Michigan. We, too, will have to winterize while we're up north, but we are among the growing number of RVers who camp all year round. We love winter camping in the snow but we also plan to head back to Florida shortly after the first of the year. If you ever wonder where we are, there's a live map on the lower right had column of our roadtreking.com blog that shows where we are. There's one big camping weekend left! Most campgrounds are sold out this coming weekend for Halloween, with costume contests, trick or treating and decorated RVs. In fact, the whole month is busy as RVers try to squeeze as many outings as possible before the cold weather arrives. But that cold weather is not to be ignored. Out west, they are starting to close roads in some of our national parks....because of snow! This portion of the Podcast is brought to you by Campers Inn, the RVer's trusted resource for over 50 years, the nation's largest family-operated RV dealership with 16 locations and growing JENNIFER'S TIP OF THE WEEK [spp-timestamp time="10:29"] Here's a tip on what to do with your RV AFTER you return from a trip, after you've emptied your clothes and other items and after you've emptied the refrigerator and are ready to leave it for a long period of time, be it a week or a few months. And it has to do with the refrigerator. Specifically, how to avoid the sour smell that often happens when an RV is shut up tight when it's not being used or is in storage. One, after the freezer had thawed, wipe it and the main compartment out. You want to put it away dry. Secondly, we put an open box of baking soda in one of the...
Probably the top question motorhome owners are asked is “what do you get for mileage?” Although gas prices are dropping again, the big spike they had after the hurricanes this summer reminds all of us that one of the biggest expenses our RV lifestyle has to deal with is fuel prices. So, how can we lower those costs and get the best mileage possible? To help us with that our interview of the week features our friend Mark Polk of RVEducation101 who will share some very practical tips that are all but guaranteed to increase your mileage and save you money. Also this week, lots of your email questions, RV news, tips and an off the beaten path report. Click the player below to Listen Now or scroll down through the show note details. When you see a time code hyperlink, you can click it to jump directly to that segment of the podcast. [spp-player] Show Notes for Episode #160 Oct 3, 2017 of Roadtreking - The RV Podcast: WHAT MIKE AND JENNIFER ARE UP TO THIS WEEK [spp-timestamp time="2:47"] Mike and Jennifer on the Vanderbilt House roof This episode is recorded from our camping spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina after a great four days attending the Overland East Expo held on the grounds of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. We shared what we learned there, explaining what overlanding is and how it relates to boondocking. We also share the results of our first real world test of the Kymeta satellite Internet system we are testing out. Mike photographing a gargoyle We also talked about our tours of the Biltmore Estate and the Vanderbilt house, including a rooftop tour to look at the gargoyles. And we talk about what a great month October is for RVers. This portion of the Podcast is brought to you by Campers Inn, the RVer's trusted resource for over 50 years, the nation's largest family-operated RV dealership with 16 locations and growing JENNIFER'S TIP OF THE WEEK [spp-timestamp time="14:19"] One of the things many of us do when we're stopped for the night is spin the front passenger's seat around so that instead of facing forward, it faces the back part of the coach, making for a way to relax, to create a conversation area or to use the front table if we decide to set that up. Pam Bowen with her feet on the yoga block But for some of us, the way that seat is angled makes sitting there a bit uncomfortable. At the Overland East gathering this past weekend, we met Pam Bowen. Pam knew we would be there was on the alert to share her tip about dealing with the seat. It is so simple. What Pam does is use a Yoga Block – one of those foam square shaped little blocks that you find yoga practitioners use – as a foot rest. Presto! Instant comfort. You can find the Yoga blocks everywhere. Pam got hers at Walmart. You can also find it in on the master list of products and handy services that we talk about on the podcast at roadtreking.com/gear Since we just added it, you'll need to scroll down to the end of the list to find it. Meanwhile, be sure to send me your tips and suggestions for the RV lifestyle. You can use the “Leave Voicemail” link at Roadtreking.com. Just click it and then use the built-in microphone on your computer or mobile devise to record a message to me. You can do it over as many times as you want, until you are satisfied. And then you just click a button and it comes right to my email inbox. I love hearing from you! Jennifer's tip of the week is brought to you by RadPower Bikes ,an electric bike manufacturer offering direct to consumer pricing on powerful premium electric bikes. Now with free shipping LISTENER QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK [spp-timestamp time="18:46"] We just bought a Roadtrek Zion SRT. Its small with very little counter space in the bathroom & kitchen. What do you use for hand wash & dispensers & how do you store them when you're rolling? Leslie What is the name of the reflective bubble wrap you talked about? Terry
Location Independence is a phrase you hear a lot about these days in the RV industry as more and more people take to a life on the road in their RV and do their work from anywhere, as long as they have a connection to the Internet. That connection is now a whole lot more reliable thanks to a company called Kymeta that has come up with a revolutionary satellite solution that provides broadband-speed Internet where it's never been before. And this week in our interview section coming up, you'll learn how this works and what it can mean to you. And I'm also excited to tell you that I am testing that solution right now in my RV. [spp-player] Show Notes for Episode #158 Sept. 20, 2017 of Roadtreking - The RV Podcast: WHAT MIKE AND JENNIFER ARE UP TO THIS WEEK We're back from Canada and the opening of the Erwin Hymer Group of North America's brand new 250,000 square foot manufacturing facility – see https://youtu.be/CyLm5_3LrA8 We're testing out that new Kymeta system we'll be talking about in our interview section but we've also added the WiFi Ranger system to the RV, plus our Wilson WeBoost cell phone booster and a new VHF/UHF amateur radio transceiver that utilizes some cool new technology. We also have tested a new cargo box for the RV. We did a review on it and you can see why we won't be recommending it for others by watching the video review we did. We'll link to it in the shownotes for this episode at roadtreking,com/158 Our YouTube RV Lifestyle Channel is rockin and rollin! One of our videos, a tour of our 2017 Roadtrek CS Adventurous XL RV, just reached a very huge milestone! It has been watched over 1 million times! We love doing RV videos and have been putting out two and sometimes three a week. You can subscribe by going to rvlifestylechannel.com and clicking the little red subscribe button. There's also an option to be notified of when new videos go online. After subscribing, just click that little bell icon you at the top right of the channel page. This portion of the Podcast is brought to you by Campers Inn, the RVer's trusted resource for over 50 years, the nation's largest family-operated RV dealership with 16 locations and growing JENNIFER'S TIP OF THE WEEK With fall now upon us, the nights are getting colder and for those with forced air heaters, the air inside your RV can get mighty dry. We met fellow RVer Jan Mathews at a campground a while back and she had this suggestion for us. Get a small portable humidifier/moisturizer. Janet's Fresh Aire moisturizer Jan says these little humidifiers are available everywhere. We found them on Amazon. In fact, we found a whole page of them, some of them even offering aroma therapy as well. We even found one that works off the USB connectors in your RV. Here's a link to the Amazon offerings - http://amzn.to/2w5jCHY And be sure to send me your tips and suggestions for the RV lifestyle. You can use the “Leave Voicemail” link at Roadtreking.com. Just click it and then use the built-in microphone on your computer or mobile devise to record a message to me. You can do it over as many times as you want, until you are satisfied. And then you just click a button and it comes right to my email inbox. I love hearing from you! Jennifer's tip of the week is brought to you by RadPower Bikes ,an electric bike manufacturer offering direct to consumer pricing on powerful premium electric bikes. Now with free shipping For a complete list of all the products, gear and apps mentioned by Mike and Jennifer on their podcast, YouTube RV Lifestyle Channel and here on the blog, go to https://rvlifestyle.com/gear LISTENER QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK Lynn is from Florida and recently lost power at her home as a result of Hurricane Irma. She wonders about the generator in her 17 year old Roadtrek Popular 200 RV is strong enough to power her house refrigerator of it happens again. The generators that Roadtrek uses are made by Cummins/Onan and the gas generator model that is installed w...
Listen Here: Overcast | iTunes Josh Wolfe is the co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, which invests in the intersection of science and technology at the outermost edge of what is possible. He partners with innovators challenging the status quo and even the laws of nature. The more ambitious, the better. Josh is a published scientist himself. He's a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, a company that makes cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. And before Lux Capital, Josh worked in investment banking and capital markets. Afterwards, Josh co-founded Kurion, which used advanced robotics, engineering, and chemistry to clean up nuclear waste. In 2016, the company was bought for $400 million. In this episode, we talk about it all: Biology, randomness, finance, consciousness, space, Brooklyn, investing, art, risk, and basketball. We start with what he learned growing up in Coney Island, a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Josh then shares his investment philosophy and why he likes investing in industries like lots of intellectual property, high barriers to entry and a limited talent pool. And finally, we talk about biology and the history of it— from single-celled organisms to the nature of consciousness — and Josh draws from his experience as a board member at the Santa Fe Institute. I hope you enjoy this wide-ranging conversation as much as I did. Show Notes: 0:00 - 1:45: Growing up on Coney Island. Science, finance, and The Cyclone 1:45 - 3:15: Josh Wolfe's research background, the importance of persistence, introduction to capital markets 3:15 - 6:45: Learning new ideas. Identifying and avoiding BS. Risk and the value spectrum. Killing failure to find paths to success. 6:45 - 9:10: Science fiction novels and the pursuit of truth. Gap between science fiction and actual science is closing. 9:10 - 12:30: Competitive edge is paranoia and a competitive desire to have an information edge. 100-0-100 investing philosophy. Importance of humility and ambition. 12:30 - 17:00: College and early career epiphanies. Embracing randomness and optionality. Avoid boring people. Dinner with Jim Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA. Appreciation for scrappy underdogs. 17:00 - 20:00: A lot of fictional influences including TV, movies, and comic books. Avid consumer of information and any and all information. Curiosity born from information anxiety and overall competitiveness. 20:15 - 21:45: The relationship between art & science 21:45 - 25:05: Mentors are a portfolio of the best ideas and role models such as Richard Feynman. 25:05 - 29:10: Founding story of Lux. Henry Truman Quote: "There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know." Competitive edges in investing. Intellectual honesty at Lux Capital. 29:10 - 32:40: In history, there is no linear starting point. Red Queen effect and information consumption. Intellectual honesty, non-obvious ideas, and vigor. 32:40 - 36:50: Consciousness, complexity. Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris debates. Bayesian updating. 36:50 - 40:00: Complexity is chaotic phenomena with universal emergent principles. Lots of parallels with Entropy and the rest of the world. Links: Josh Wolfe on Twitter Lux Capital Santa Fe Institute Coney Island Cyclone Rollercoaster Bill Conway Jeff Hawkins Sam Harris - Daniel Dennett Debate Books: Poor Charlie's Almanack, Peter D. Kaufman Malicious Resplendence, Robert Williams How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman The Minds I - Dennett, Hofstadter Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson Connect with David: Twitter Thanks to Conor Witt for producing this episode.
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Josh Wolfe is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner @ Lux Capital, the fund that supports scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter-conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the project, the better. Josh is a founding investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, making cutting-edge antennas for high-speed global satellite and space communications. In 2008 Josh co-founded and funded Kurion, the company was among the first responders to the Fukushima disaster. In February 2016, Veolia acquired Kurion for nearly $400 million—more than 40 times Lux’s total investment. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Josh make his way into VC from the science lab? What was it about venture that got Josh hooked? 2.) How does Josh view the rise of thematic investing? Why does Josh believe there are a lot of tourist VCs who are going to lose a lot of money? 3.) Investing in such frontier technologies, how does Josh view market creation? How does Josh look to build a thesis and a methodology when investing in a company without an existing market? 4.) What is the inflection point for Josh for when heavy science and R&D becomes investable? What is that tipping point where science becomes commercialized? 5.) Does Josh get concerned that with such heavy IP and corporations not investing in R&D that this is a market for acquihires? What are the pros and cons of this shortened liquidity cycles? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Josh’s Fave Book: Sapiens Josh’s Fave Blog: Media Redefined Josh’s Most Recent Investment: Recursion Pharmaceuticals As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Josh on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eight is a sleep innovation company. With their latest product, the Eight Smart Mattress, being a bed that literally tells you how well you slept last night, paired with an intelligent sensor cover that measures the quality of your sleep and delivers a daily sleep report. In order to bring you the best product, Eight used anonymized sleep data and feedback from over 10,000 people, to understand which materials and types of mattresses give customers the best sleep resulting in their unique blend of four responsive and high-density foam layers plus one layer of proprietary technology that helps people track and improve their sleep. You can check it out on Eightsleep.com – and if you use the code 20VC you will get a whopping 20% discount! FullContact provides the ability to organize your contacts, gain rich insights into them and therefore build deep relationships. With features like automatically identifying and merging duplicate contacts to the ability to snap a photo of a business card and FullContact will transcribe them for you, so no more lost and loose business cards at events. It is with these features just being the tip of the iceberg, FullContact really is the best all in one solution for contact management and you can check them out on fullcontact.com.
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