Riskgaming

Stanford University is at the beating heart of Silicon Valley and has become almost a rite of passage for generations of entrepreneurs. But how does each generation form, and what skills and mindsets should they be equipped with given our changing world? No one has thought more about how to shape that entrepreneurial spirit than Dr. Tina Seelig. Seelig is the Executive Director of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars program at Stanford among many other leadership roles, and she is also the author of Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World as well as What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. Joining Seelig is host Danny Crichton and Lux Capital partner Grace Isford. We talk about Seelig’s class “Inventing the Future” and how she guides students in considering the utopian and dystopian aspects of the future technologies that are shaping our everyday lives. We also talk about generational differences between students over the past two decades, from the 9/11 generation to the global financial crisis and Covid-19 generations and how global events influence the approach of budding entrepreneurs. Then we walk through how to teach leadership, how to increase luck, and why there is such an important correlation between optimism and agency.

Agricultural commodities is a bit like accounting: you only hear news stories about it when things go wrong. And unfortunately for the world in 2022, a lot is going wrong in agriculture. Russia’s war on Ukraine has devastated one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and global climate disruptions are wrecking havoc on food productivity. That’s led to soaring inflation and increasingly contentious politics, particularly in the developing world. Sadly, that’s not the only problem the industry faces. Commodities are still traded predominantly on antiquated systems, with the UN estimating that more than 275 million emails are exchanged annually to ship about 11,000 vessels of grain across the oceans. That’s one reason why Lux led the $7 million seed round for Vosbor earlier this summer to build the first digital agricultural commodities exchange. I wanted to understand more of this extraordinarily complex industry, and so I asked two former CEOs of the largest agriculture commodities companies in the world to weigh in. Joining me (@DannyCrichton) on “Securities” today is Chris Mahoney, former CEO of Glencore Agriculture and now known as Viterra, as well as Soren Schroder, former CEO of Bunge. We’ll talk about the cyclicality of agricultural markets, the cost disease of infrastructure upgrades, the geopolitical strategies of ag firms, the increasing focus on logistics capabilities, and what the future of digitalization and technology have in store for this critical industry.

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the latest newsletter issue, “Truth and reputations.” Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth. When people and organizations are rising, reputations obviously lag — the public has never heard of these new upstarts, and its opinion remains unformed. Reputations gallop to catch up, and for a brief moment perhaps, the true quality and the perceived quality intersect. Inevitably decline sets in, whether in an individual’s career or in an organization’s penchant for adding listless bureaucracy and complexity. The public reputation remains robust, but the underlying quality has etiolated. Perception has now overshot truth.Last week, we saw three stories that illuminate the dynamics of truth versus perception: Adam Neumann’s $350 million fundraise for Flow; SoftBank’s historic quarterly loss and Masayoshi Son’s investment acumen; and then, the CDC director’s call for a complete reform of her beleaguered agency. We talk about these three stories, plus a Lux Recommends article.

Humans have been bartering and trading for millennia, building extraordinarily complex mechanisms of exchange centered on fiat currencies, contracts, and trust. As cryptocurrencies have emerged this past decade, economists and incentive designers have been forced to consider how to construct new forms of currency without the social lubricant of trust. How can we prove that every market participant is incentive aligned with market goals? What contributions can game theory, theoretical computer science, cryptography and microeconomics make to this newly energized field?  That’s the subject of this episode of “Securities” with Christian Catalini, the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He and his colleagues fuse the fields of economics and computer science together with the goal of analyzing decentralized marketplaces and applications. It’s just the latest endeavor for Catalini, who is also a Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the co-creator of Diem (formerly known as Libra), and the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Lightspark. Joining host Danny Crichton is Lux’s own Grace Isford, who invests in web3 and crypto infrastructure and is based in New York City. We’ll talk about the growing community of crypto infrastructure analysts, the now-famous MIT Bitcoin Experiment, how academics are translating their work into crypto, and how to think about stablecoins in the aftermath of Luna’s collapse this year.

Recently in the Lux Capital office, my colleague Chris Gates, the producer of the "Securities” podcast, along with biotech investor Shaq Vayda were talking about the global macro environment and venture capital. Tech stocks hit their zenith in November 2021, and now a lot of VCs have slowed down their investments over the last couple of months. That's led to something among limited partners and asset allocators known as the “denominator effect”, where portfolio managers move money from one asset class to another as each asset class performs relatively differently. And so they talked about the denominator effect, they talked about a couple of other different patterns that they’re seeing in the venture world, and I figured that since it's summer, and it's July and we’ve already have talked about enough terrible news on the “Securities” podcast the last couple of weeks, I figured we could do something a little bit different, which is sort of a Venture 101 on the denominator effect, and talking about basically what we're seeing in the world today. So here's Shaq and Chris, take a listen. Suggested reading: WTF is the denominator effect? by  Danny Crichton

There has been a massive expansion in data emanating from bio labs, and that means next-generation AI algorithms and machine learning models finally have the grist to transform the future trajectories of biology and health therapies. Yet, there’s a key translation challenge: how do  you get computer scientists and biologists — two types of specialists with very different training — to collaborate with each other effectively? Two groups, Bits in Bio and Nucleate, have independently spearheaded new ways of bringing all people interested in tech and biology together to share best practices and think through patterns of startup inception and growth. Today, we bring the founders and early champions of those two groups together for the first time in person to talk about their work. Joining us first is Michael Retchin, a PhD student at Weill Cornell Medicine and one of the founders of Nucleate, a free and collaborative student-run organization that facilitates the formation of pioneering life science companies. Second, we have Nicholas Larus-Stone, the first software engineering hire at Octant.bio, a Lux-backed synthetic biology startup, as well as the founder of Bits in Bio. Finally, joining “Securities” host Danny Crichton is Lux biotech investor Shaq Vayda. We talk about where tech + bio (versus “biotech”) is coming from, how the two community leaders launched and grew their respective organizations, the coming challenges in biology, and our speculative dreams for the future of what biology could look like in the years ahead.

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the last two weeks of “Securities” newsletters. The first, from July 9th called “Dissonant Loops”, discussed the chaos and crises plaguing the world today and why our state capacity to respond to them is so limited. The second, from July 16th entitled “Scientific Sublime”, was a palette cleanser of sorts focused on the human achievement of the James Webb Space Telescope and how this accomplishment can be shared by everyone on Earth. We’ve got the lows and the highs, and then we talk about a few of the top Lux Recommends selections from the two issues, including: “Postcards from A World on Fire” from The New York Times last year showing the scale and diversity of climate devastation IEEE’s overview of the daunting data challenges that come from transmitting those gorgeous images to Earth CLIPasso, a Best Paper awardee at SIGGRAPH 2022, which uses machine learning to abstract complex photography into simpler sketches “Building an Open Representation for Biological Protocols” Daniel Oberhaus’s book Extraterrestrial Languages, which asks two provocative questions, “If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand?” Finally, Kit Wilson’s analysis in The New Atlantis on “Reading Ourselves to Death”

Welcome to “Securities” by Lux Capital, a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance and the human condition. I'm your host, Danny Crichton, and today we're talking about the post-Roe world. Tomorrow, it'll be 30 days since the Supreme Court announced in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that there is no constitutional basis for the right to abortion, overthrowing several decades of precedent. It's a decision with huge implications for tech startups, which will now operate across 50 sets of state laws, covering everything from privacy and data governance to who gets to decide which patients receive women's health and who won't. Now that we've had a few weeks to digest the decision, I asked my Lux partner Deena Shakir to bring together a panel of guests to talk more about how startups are responding to Dobbs. Guests: Dr. Neel Shah is an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and Chief Medical Officer of Maven Clinic. Halle Tecco is an entrepreneur and angel investor passionate about fixing our healthcare system. She is the founder of Natalist, which was acquired by Everly Health in October 2021, and she is also the host of The Heart of Healthcare podcast. Paxton Maeder-York is the CEO and founder at Alife Health.

Today we're talking about the future of American defense. And we have three of the leaders changing the trajectory of this important field with us is the leadership of Anduril Industries. First, Palmer Luckey Founder, also Brian Schimpf Co-Founder, and CEO, as well as Trae’ Stephens, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, along with us is Josh Wolf from Lux. I want to start out by painting the least rosy picture I can of the American defense industry over the last year and 2021. In Afghanistan, we saw a massive pull out of the American forces there. After more than two decades of war, we saw Russia invade Ukraine, in which Turkish drones some of the cheapest on offer in the market today have become the unlikely hero instead of American defense technologies. Meanwhile, America is not producing anywhere near the hardware, or even the software required to supply Ukraine with javelins and other core defense needs. On Capitol Hill, the defense budget process seems to get more chaotic and confusing every year. And we also found in the last year that China appears to be probably ahead of the United States, on hypersonic missiles. And so when I look at the defense industry today, it seems to me it's just negative after negative after negative news. - Danny Crichton Recommended reading:  Rebooting The Arsenal of Democracy The new apex of “Entropic Apex”

Here is my dilemma, I want custom art for the podcast. Ideally, I would have a new image for each episode. Up until recently, my choices were to use stock photography or work with an artist. I now have a third option, AI art generators. As of late, my Twitter feed has been filled with these AI-generated images and I have become obsessed with them. On one hand, I feel like a superpower of visual communication has been unlocked and on the other hand, I am an artist and creative who wants other artists and creatives to get paid, I am conflicted.  DALLE-mini  What Kind of Sorcery Is This? Why code is so often compared to magic. Hieronymous Bosch fusion reactor #dalle2 - Josh Wolfe DALL-E makes some fantastic World’s Fair posters - Sam Arbesman "Interplanetary Space Empire by Thomas Cole" via DALL-E - Sam Arbesman