Welcome back to the 3rd edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
One of our core motivations for working on Roundtable is to help people find more interesting content that leads to even better conversations. We’ve heard frustration with discovering podcast episodes in particular—given the time commitment for a 30, 60 or even 90+ minute podcast, you want to make sure you’re signing up for something worthwhile. We often talk about movies & books as parallels: a trailer, author, or star cast can capture your attention, but there’s no replacement for a recommendation from a friend with some context on why you might like it. Investing an incomprehensible 2.5 hours in Tenet because “Christopher Nolan” and “the trailer had people running in reverse” stings, and if you pretend you had any idea what was going on: I don’t believe you.
Starting this week we’ll try to provide more context on our podcast recs, as well as excerpts where helpful. Hope you enjoy, and have a great week!
🎧 Josh Wolfe - This is Who You Are Up Against
Invest Like The Best—February 2018 | 75 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
This episode is 3 years old now but it's my all-time favorite podcast interview. I find myself re-listening to this the same way people re-read books or re-watch movies. I always pick up something new. In addition to deconstructing Josh’s approach to investing and life, this episode goes into some fascinating stories about his investments, theses, and experiences.
Josh Wolfe is the founding and managing partner at Lux Capital, a NY-based VC firm focused on hard sciences, investing in everything from energy and materials to healthcare tech. The common theme is that anything they get involved with is technically complex with high barriers to entry.
Sometimes, Lux also directly founds new companies ("NewCos")—a partner will develop a thesis and construct the narrative, license the intellectual property, go find the entrepreneur, recruit the first 20 people and the board, and build the syndicate.
Below is just one of several interesting NewCo stories you'll hear in this episode:
Patrick [12:27]: So what was the last passion?
Josh: So the last one that we realized was a contrarian idea was when everybody was chasing clean tech and green tech… So we look at all this and we're like, no to solar, no to biofuels. And what's an area that nobody's looking at? And I become obsessed with nuclear, and I knew nothing about nuclear. But I spend the next year looking at every part of the fuel cycle.
We looked at uranium miners, mostly hucksters and fraudsters in New Mexico and Nevada, by the way. We looked in modular reactors, great for society, but too expensive to back. We looked at the service businesses and then we always point our turret and say, it's a very sophisticated two-word question to figure out where our next thing is: “what sucks?”. And the thing about nuclear, that sucked… what do you do with the waste? Because there were political issues and there were economic issues, but the waste thing was a real technological problem. And it turns out that there are 104 domestic reactors. There are 440 global reactors. There's a big market in commercial waste, but then there's this huge market that nobody knew about, which was in defense cleanup. Cleaning up nuclear bomb making materials from places like Hanford and Savannah River and Idaho National Labs that nobody ever knew about. And every year $6 billion, which was a quarter of the department of energy budget, was going towards people like Bechtel and Fluor, these giant engineering companies. So we said, there's got to be a better technological way to do this. And if you remember these things that I look for, really high scientific and technical complexity, and IP, and labor scarcity, we end up starting a company. We named it after Madam Curie, who discovered and would die from radiation, call it Kurion, locked up all the best technology, and set our turret on the idea of cleaning up nuclear waste. That was in 2010, a year later, 2011 - earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima disaster. We became the only company picked for the cleanup. And by the way, this thing was capitalized with less than $3 million. And that's the only money that this thing would ever raise. Total negative black Swan in Japan, total positive black Swan for this little company. And we went from $1 million to $40, $80, $120, $160 million of revenue, $40 million of EBITDA, sold it for 10x to Veolia. And it all started as just this crazy idea in a conference room.
Extra: If you enjoy this episode, here’s round 2 with Josh (Spotify or Apple Podcasts). You can also check him out on Twitter (@wolfejosh).
—Thomas
📙 The Great Online Game
Packy McCormick (@packyM)—May 10 | 17 min
For those of you who follow Not Boring, no need for an introduction. But for those of you who don’t, I’m afraid you’re missing out. Packy writes about a whole host of topics across business and investing as if “Ben Thompson and Bill Simmons had a baby”.
This recent post is a fun one where he makes the case for the internet being one giant video game. His ultimate point is that the internet enables uncapped upside if you’re willing to participate in it, with the financial and/or social rewards being exponential instead of linear. There are a ton of amazing examples of people putting themselves out there on the internet and parlaying it into massive career success, or people just playing the game for the friendships and opportunities that come with it.
One notable recent example is Miami Mayor Francis Suarez:
This simple tweet and Suarez’s ongoing recruiting efforts have further aided the trend of several high-growth companies and influential leaders moving to his city, planting the seeds for Miami to become a new tech hub.
The short of it: start playing.
Extra: This is a short build on Packy’s post from Dror Poleg (@drorpoleg), who writes his own a weekly newsletter on the future & history of work, cities, and finance. This to me is the key highlight:
…The game is no longer optional. Everyone must play. We have little to lose because we already lost everything: Stable jobs, affordable homes, education that lasts a lifetime, and worry-free retirement are no longer an option. Even money itself ain’t what it used to be. It loses value by simply sitting in the bank.
—Thomas
📺 Why you should define your fears instead of your goals | Tim Ferriss
TED—April 2017 | 13 min
Most of you probably know Tim Ferriss, the prolific host of the eponymous podcast. What you might not know about him is that he suffers from depression and almost committed suicide in his post-college days.
The tool that has helped him avoid self-destruction is also the same tool that’s helped him make some of his best decisions—Stoicism. Specifically, training himself to separate what he can control from what he cannot, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former.
In this TED talk, Tim details an exercise he created and does quarterly called ‘Fear Setting’. If you’re thinking through a tough decision, whether it’s something you’ve been putting off or are afraid to do, give it a try.
I particularly love this quote: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Extra: This is a great episode from the Tim Ferriss show with Katie Huan, a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz who focuses on crypto. She’s a former federal prosecutor who led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force (Spotify or Apple Podcasts).
—Thomas
🧵 Twitter Thread from Shaan Puri
Many of you likely saw this tweet thread from Shaan Puri back in March laying out the bear case for Clubhouse, but it’s worth a re-read given the evidence of a slowdown in the platform’s growth in the two months since. Like many people I’ve talked to, I have mixed views on Clubhouse’s future—on the one hand, I think many of Shaan’s insights have proven to be spot on and the platform’s early success was clearly aided by COVID forcing us all to become shut-ins. Plus, the relentless trumpeting of the platform by its early investors on Twitter was a little much.
On the other, the platform produces some incredible conversations and collections of people, and even as Twitter, Facebook and others launch live audio alternatives, there is real value in sitting apart from the reputational rollercoaster of Big Social. More alternatives are good for all of us, so I find myself cautiously rooting for Clubhouse.
Quick background on Shaan: His e-sports company was acquired by Twitch, where he now works on product, he’s a co-host of the My First Million podcast produced by The Hustle, and he writes his own newsletter on business. Check him out.
Extra: This is a recent piece from Noah Smith on how Clubhouse could still win. He addresses some of Shaan’s points directly.
—Mike
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See you next Sunday.