It’s been another crazy week of financial news, but how do all these trends add up? This week, Danny Crichton and Josh Wolfe talk about South Korea’s burgeoning desire for nuclear weapons, some themes from the latest Lux quarterly letter and how a 1980s experimental film inspired its theme of “entropic apex,” how Gen Z and others will respond to actions […]

Tony Fadell is the consummate Silicon Valley builder, having conceived, designed and executed such iconic products as the Apple iPod and iPhone as well as the Nest thermostat. He’s now looking to give back to the community that has given him so much with his new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth […]

We’ve reached an apex of risk, individually, economically, as a society. Stability has been rent asunder, and the resilience of our support systems from healthcare to supply chains has been all but demolished. Just in this frenzied week of crises, there’s now a nationwide shortage of infant formula thanks to a bacterial infection at a […]

When it comes to turning sci-fi into sci-fact, few areas of computer science have had as complete a transition as machine learning. Once the bastion of 1960s speculative fiction novels, developers are now ubiquitously adding ML and artificial intelligence features to their apps and platforms. We search the web using information retrieval algorithms, find new […]

The latest edition of our newsletter is now out! If you didn’t sign up for it before, check out the online edition here. Among the topics we cover: Nuclear power / LP strategies / Solar panel chaos / Abortion / Telehealth medicine / Lux Recommends

University endowments are one of the key nexuses by which finance influences the future of science, tech, and the human condition, and what happens at endowments and other limited partners (LPs) matters deeply both for their clients but also the wider VC asset class. Washington University in St. Louis Chief Investment Officer Scott Wilson, who […]

We take for granted just how effortlessly consistent our daily life is. Our stoves burn with the swoosh of a knob, our stop signs (at least in the U.S.) are a stable hue of red, our wall outlets haven’t changed prongs in decades. The stairs, the shower head, the garage door — hardware devices that […]

While a huge amount of attention is being directed at crypto and media these days, one of the most important wild card investment trends of the 2020s is the coming expansion of biotech. Democratized science tools, improved research networking, and lab automation will revolutionize the practice of biotech, and that means there are huge opportunities […]

I’m traveling the next few weeks in Seoul, South Korea, and it’s always a delight to return here and see the technological ambition of this Asian Tiger’s entrepreneurs. South Korea has transformed into a major crypto innovation hub (arguably second only to the United States), a vanguard in climate tech and increasingly a content powerhouse […]

There’s a huge expansion in demand for compute power going on, with AI models, cryptocurrencies, autonomous vehicles and our social media algorithms all guzzling more chip cycles than ever before. But we’re also in the midst of a climate emergency, and chips are a major cause of energy demand. How do we reconcile the two? […]

“Redlines” in war are meant to be objective and unambiguous tests for a country to respond to another nation’s action. If one country uses chemical weapons in a conflict, that might violate the redline of another country and therefore force it to conduct military operations in response to reenforce the international laws and norms against […]

While the annals of history are rightly littered with the names of the inventors of wondrous technologies and breakthrough products, the true value of these innovations is only fully realized when they become widely accessible. Electricity, computers, genetic sequencing and thousands of other major advancements have only had their extensive effect on society after they […]

The dynamics of “watchwords” in the sweeping narratives of nation-states are peculiar and complex. “Democracy” and “equality” have a certain valence to Americans that’s unique, even to other democratic and equal places. This is to be expected after all: each community spins its own story, and thus the same political phrases can have radically different […]

In his new book, “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future,” Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Sebastian Mallaby brings his erudite attention from the hedge fund world to venture capital, interviewing the industry’s leading players over the last 50 years to discover what is unique about this industry that “manufactures […]