Futureforming the World, with Shahin Farshchi (Lux Capital)

This week's episode of Pathfinder is brought to you by Spideroak. Spideroak's Orbit Secure software is designed for hybrid space operators struggling to manage the chaos of securing data flow and access to and from tens of thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit. Using a unique combination of end to end zero trust encryption and blockchain distributed ledger, Orbit Secure allows your mission to orchestrate and secure earth to orbit, orbit to Earth, transmission, communication and storage of sensitive data across even the most complex and unsecure hybrid space environments. To learn how Orbit Secure can bring zero trust, security and resiliency to your zero gravity environments, check out spideroak@www.sterpriseoak.com. hey everyone and welcome to Pathfinder, a podcast by Payload, the leading digital media company in the space industry. We're joined today by Shaheen Farshi, general partner at Lux Capital, a New York City based VC firm focused on deep tech and hard science. Today we chat Shaheen's story, Lux's background, and we break down the firm's recent investor letter around geopolitical shifts, thesis driven investing, LP appetite, negative media bias, space of course, and much, much more. So let's dive right in. Shaheen, thanks so much for being on the show.

It's a pleasure. Thanks. Mo.

I need to first and foremost congratulate you on Lux8, which as of right now, I believe is largest fund in the Lux arsenal.

Yes, it is. And we're super excited.

Yeah, that, that, that. Well, you tell me, like how, how was that fundraise process? I mean, we're looking at probably one of the most difficult fundraising environments in decades. And you know, you're closing a record fund, so a lot to be proud of, but I can't imagine that that was easy work.

Thank you. And I could take credit for it. We have an amazing IR team and this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. Our team has been engaged with the LP community for over 20 years and these are not people that we met, you know, six months ago and agreed to come into the fund. These were multi year relationships that were cultivated over the years and culminated in what we saw earlier this year. And again, I wish I could take credit for it, but all credit goes to our phenomenal IR team that work their magic to get that done super quickly without us on the investment team having to do much at all. So kudos to them.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, let's start off with you. Before we jump into Lux, tell us a little bit about your story and how you ended up working for one of the preeminent deep tech frontier tech investors out there.

So I'm a product of Silicon Valley, grew up on the other side of the tracks in the East Bay. My dad was a grad student engineering at Berkeley when I was born. So I grew up watching a lot of science fiction. I was a big fan of Star Trek and Knight Rider. So I grew up with a passion for cars and computers in space. I was first exposed to AI in the first grader watching Michael Knight talk to his car. And so I grew up with a desire to become a rocket scientist or a car designer. But having gone to college to Berkeley in the late 90s, greed drew me into doing computer science. So I did electrical engineering computer science double major during my undergrad and I saw my friends older siblings graduate a few years ahead of me and become worth millions of dollars on paper by being junior people@random.com era startups. And unfortunately I graduated in the collapse. And if anybody remembers Silicon Valley post.com bust, it was depressing. It was actually so depressing though that I decided to pursue greener pastures in Detroit. So I moved to Detroit and realized that the grass wasn't a whole lot greener. I realized that working for a big car company wasn't my cup of tea. So I came back to California, applied for graduate school, ended up at UCLA, did a PhD in electrical engineering. And like bright eyed and naive graduate students, I started a company around my research. I was doing brain machine interfaces and raised some government money for it so from the National Science foundation and ended up building some really cool gadgets to help researchers. And I learned the hard way that it's one thing to have a really cool technology, another to have a real business and have the former but not the latter. And when I was winding that down, I got a great piece of advice from a good friend who said you should get to know investors before you're out looking for money. And at that time I was postdocing to pay my bills and figure out what I wanted to do next and I reached out to A bunch of VCs, cold emailed, reached out to a bunch of VCs and I said, hey, if you're looking to invest in semiconductors, if you're interested in nanotech, which was a buzzword if you recall back in 2005, 2006 timeframe, I'd be happy to find deals for you and send them your way. And if there's a deal that you've seen that you like, happy to do diligence for you and ask them for anything. I just want to build a relationship. And I googled nanotechnology and venture capital and the first search result was Lux Capital. I'd never heard of Lux Capital before. And I saw that they're in New York and I wondered, who would set up a venture capital firm in New York. Do VCs even exist in New York? And so I emailed them, infoluxcapital.com, cold email, and I got a call back the same day from one of the founders who said, hey, we'd love for you to scout deals out in the West Coast. We're raising a fund right now. It was our first institutional fund and we'd love for you to help out with that. And I said, absolutely. So I did that for a year and a half. We built an amazing relationship. I was extremely impressed by these team of folks that were extremely ambitious and wanted to build a great institution. And when they closed the fund, they asked, hey, do you want to join us? This is a year and a half later, early 2007, and I thought it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. So I joined in 2007 to try this venture capital thing out. And here I am almost 13, 14 years later.

Closing the fund in early 2007 was lucky, I should say.

Good timing.

It was very good timing. So now let's talk Lux for a second. Lux wasn't always a venture firm. As it's set up today, it has slightly different beginnings than most other venture firms. Talk a little, maybe talk a little bit about how Lux started and how it got to where it is today.

So Lux was started based on the thesis that post.com bus if you recall, this is in 2001 time frame, great companies, and as a result, wealth creation will be rooted in the basic sciences or nanotechnology. If you recall, you had kind of the collapse of the dot com bubble and the kind of rise of nanotech. And some people would have dismissed it back in the time as glorified chemistry, but the reality is that there were new tools available, just like how new tools are available today for creating artificial intelligence. There were new tools available back in the late 90s that made it possible to build materials and manipulate materials in a way that weren't possible before and create these new compounds that had these new characteristics and capabilities, ranging from communications and electronics to building materials to clothing, to energy production. And so that was what inspired the founders of Lux. And they took this idea to one of the founders of the Carlyle Group, and he was very impressed. He was very impressed by the energy and the ambition of these two 25 year olds. And they basically were able to convince this gentleman, Bill Conway, to give them a million dollars and to go out and build a firm. And so they quickly realized that it's very difficult to differentiate yourself as a firm just by going out and waving a checkbook. And they made the decision to build an institution around three pillars. One around research, which is Lux Research, which you may have heard of, and was effectively the first Lux portfolio company. One around public policy, which was by creating the Nano Business alliance, which basically created awareness around nanotech on the hill to facilitate government funding for nanotech research. And then the third was around communications and media, which was through a partnership with Force. And you may have seen the Nanotech Report and the Emerging Technology Report newsletters that went out over the course of the following 10, 15 years. So that was the foundation of Lux. And since then we've hired a bunch of great people, we've raised all these funds and Lux Research was effectively a Lux one company. And Bill Conway put in more money into Lux after having been impressed by the foundation that the founders built. And they invested in a handful of companies with that money. And then when our pattern Seconded in 2006, they were starting to raise their first institutional fund from other investors as well. And Lux2 closed in 2007, which is now probably about what, 16 and a half years ago. And so really excited, what's the structure.

Of the firm today? How many members focused on investments, marketing, you know, all that. Like how are you, how are you structured today?

Yeah, we have about 30 people on the team right now. About a third of the team is focused exclusively on investments. About a third of the team does marketing and communications and operations. And then another third is focused on kind of finance and also kind of the ops, which is role as well. I haven't done the math, but roughly a third is focused exclusively on investments. And I also didn't count the IR team, which to the earlier comments I was making, did the phenomenal job of pulling the fund together.

So I hadn't told you this, Shaheen, but actually yesterday I was meeting, I was in your office in New York and I was meeting with some members of your marketing and comms team, just talking through like, you know, obviously payload, what we're doing and then the Lux strategy and Luxcom strategy. And I have to say I'm, I'm pretty impressed with what you guys have built there and the outward facing brand that you guys have created. And it was definitely didn't it didn't come by accident. Right. It was by design. So, you know, you've, you've, you've built a very good strategy there, I must say.

So.

And as it relates to that, actually.

We'Re very lucky, amazing people executing on that strategy.

Yeah, I know. It's a great team. Now, as it relates to that, I'm going to, I'm structuring this, this episode today slightly differently. So you guys put out a quarterly investor letter and you've put out a number of those quarterly investor letters publicly. So I got a hold of the Q3 letter and I wanted to pull out some quotes and help that, help that sort of guide and structure the con, the rest of the conversation today because there's a lot of great stuff in it and I think there's a lot of things worth discussing. So definitely, anyone who's listening to this, I would highly encourage you guys go and read the letter. It's quite cerebral to say the least in verbiage, but it's actually quite good. So I'm going to start with this quote.

Huge credit to Josh for putting that together.

Yeah. So I'm going to start with this quote, which is money now flows to the more probable, more pressing and more meaningful things we happen to focus on at Lux. What we've called inner space, outer space and latent space, respectively. Cutting edge biotech, aerospace and defense and AI. Now that's a lot, there's a lot there to talk about. But we are a space focused media business. So let's talk about how does the firm think about aerospace and defense as a category over the next decade.

So aerospace and defense is very important to us. The keen theme for us, we were doing aerospace and defense before it was a trend. We were very early investors in Anduril and even before that we invested in Cerrone, which had the US government as a very important customer. And before that we were investors in Sci Fi, which was an iRobot founder doing UAVs before drones became a thing. So ultimately we follow the talent and we follow the pressing challenges that we see globally. And what we're seeing right now is a disproportionate amount of talent that is focusing on capturing our attention and keeping us scrolling and optimizing ads. And we look at the challenges that we face in the global stage, ranging from climate, ranging from groups that are trying to suppress and take away our freedoms. And we are trying to create or fix that imbalance and facilitate the transfer of talent from those areas that may not be as important to the areas that are very important to us as a society and humanity in the long term. Anduril has very successfully taken that talent and put it towards solving the challenges that we, the United States face and our allies face towards, against those that are, that have, that are obviously working against freedom on the global stage. And obviously as it relates to space. You know, we as a species are curious. There's a lot to explore, we have learned a lot and we have achieved a lot as a species by venturing into space and building technology to help us do so. There's a lot that we benefit from daily as a result of the efforts that went into place to put people in space and on the moon. And so the plan is to continue that and we feel like as if the startup community is very well positioned to execute on that in a way that the US Government probably couldn't do before. And we're really excited to get behind the companies that are active in those areas.

So before we jump into the next category, I'm just curious, any companies in the current Lux portfolio within kind of space that you'd want to highlight that you're spending more of your personal time on or you think, and I know hard to choose between all your children, totally understand that, but if you had to pick one that you wanted to maybe highlight that you've been spending more time on lately.

Yeah, we're really excited to be invested in Impulse space. This is Tom Mueller. He was the one that delivered the propulsion technology to Elon after the Russians turned him down. He built an amazing team at SpaceX and he executed on the vision that Elon laid out. And so we're very proud and very fortunate to have been chosen as his partner to build InSpace, which is taking what SpaceX is doing a step further. SpaceX is our solution for taking us into orbit. And Impulse is doing in orbit logistics. So taking you from a drop off orbit to a desired orbit or the moon or Mars and beyond to do in space logistics, as in refueling, repositioning, moving into graveyard maneuvers, anything that needs to be done in orbit, post placement into orbit is what Impulse plans to do. And we think that's a giant, giant opportunity. And we're very excited and fortunate to have been chosen by Tom as his partner in this journey. We're very excited about Hadrian, which is building manufacturing technology that would accelerate all of these companies and their efforts towards achieving their milestones and goals. They are basically revolutionizing the kind of outsourced manufacturing or machine shop ecosystem that's been around for many decades and using modern technology to automate it and accelerate it so that time to market or mission times can be collapsed dramatically and cost can be reduced dramatically. So we do more in space.

I want to talk a bit about geopolitical shifts and as it relates to Lux's investing in this category. So the quote from the letter we observed that there are just a handful of countries who will realistically tip the global power balance. And you know, I think what you're. What you've. What you alluded to more broadly is right. There's structural realignments happening globally right now that are playing an increasingly critical role in shaping the new investment regime, I think for the coming decade and beyond. And that's going to have, you know, at least in my opinion, we've spent some time on this, like, idea of this kind of shifting world order. It's going to have significant implications for the dollar, for treasury markets, for energy, for commodities, really, for a lot of really key critical areas of the market and key technologies. In what way has this kind of affected Lux's investment focus? And where do you see sort of the world order moving to?

That is a question for Josh. I don't think as much about this as he does, and he probably can articulate it far better than I. But, you know, I feel like as if ultimately, you know, we, there are, there are cultures and governments that are kind of, you know, more aligned to where we need to be in terms of freedoms, in terms of how we treat our climate. And I feel like, as if, you know, it's very important that the assets or intellectual assets are also aligned towards that. I feel like, you know, the. One of the core reasons why we were able to win against fascism back during World War II was the United States and our allies ability to attract great talent from those other countries that were suppressed to work towards the effort. And so I can expect that to happen again in the future. There's always going to be enemies of democracy that pop up here and there, but I feel very optimistic. Maybe that's the half glass, full venture capitalist in me that expects the smartest people to be working towards the just causes. And it's our jobs as venture capitalists to just funnel that talent to the best company.

So let me ask then a related question that I think you may have some to say on, which is the concept of American dynamism, which is pervasive across. Which is now pretty pervasive across Silicon Valley. And in some significant circles it's been almost debased to mean invest solely in American progress at all costs. And I want to bring that up, and maybe this is a bit of a more controversial question, but if you look at the most valuable company fundamental to American dominance in space right now, it's SpaceX. And it's in fact a global business heavily focused on international sales and partnerships. And Elon himself alludes to this idea that if you know too much, domestic focus on America is not the approach he wants to take necessarily when building a company like SpaceX. What do you think of that general kind of mantra that's now very much across a lot of dual use investing and a lot of frontier tech investing in the market today?

So I have a different interpretation of American dynamism, and that is independence and having control over your own destiny. And that does not just relate to the United States as a country, but it's the United States, our allies and people globally that share our values. And so the way I interpret American dynamism and the way I would want to implement that is by assuring the independence as it relates to manufacturing, as it relates to access to raw materials, as it relates to access as to health care and other kind of basic services, the ability of these groups, again, not just quote, unquote, Americans, but the ability of groups that share our values to continue to be free and continue to be independent from those that do not share our values. And so I am not, to my knowledge, I don't think American dynamism intends to keep everything internal to the United States or kind of isolate others and kind of, you know, hoard within the United States. I just don't see it that way. And the expectation is that the best companies are the ones that are able to access not just the United States markets, but markets globally and achieve partnerships globally. Many of my companies work towards building these kinds of international relationships very early in their businesses towards that end goal.

Yeah, no, I actually, I happen to agree with you in terms of what I think it should mean or does mean. It's more. What I've noticed is like, you know, when you have oftentimes these big concepts, you have different interpretations of those concepts. Concepts. And people think about them differently. And then sometimes there are people who take certain parts of parts of it and then, I hate to say, maybe even bastardize it a little bit. Right. And like you have, you know, I've spoken to some, I've spoken to some investment firms that like, yeah, maybe the original con. Original thought wasn't to do that, but it has turned into a. Well, we Only invest in America. And you know, I think it's been an, it's a, it's an offshoot that I've noticed. I'm kind of, and I'm curious like how you think about it. But no, I, I think the way, way you're thinking about it makes, it makes a ton of sense. Let's talk about, let's talk about investing in general. So specifically, you know, if you, if you think about what we're, what we're talking about, a lot of it requires investing in critical technologies, a lot of which some of it is very new, Some of it is innovative business models, engineering practices that aren't at scale yet. Right. And it, and oftentimes it's fun falls into this area of, of deep tech. Right. People talk deep tech, frontier tech, whatever you want to call it. And when you talk about that as an investment category, it usually means the need for engine like engineering know how or scientists or at least some understanding of the science and the technical risk associated with it. Now I'm curious, as an investor now you clearly have that given your background, but do you think that you need a team of scientists to be a successful deep tech investor?

Absolutely not. I feel like what you need as an investor is the ability to ask the right questions and have the network to be able to access the people that can help you validate the answers. So for me, I have an electrical engineering background and even within electrical engineering, it is a very, very expansive field and my expertise are relatively narrow within that field. And so even in areas relating to semiconductors or communications that may seemingly be right up my alley, I still rely on people who are experts to help me ask the right questions from teams and also make sure that the answers that I'm getting are indeed looking at the problem the right way and indeed will de risk the business. And so if you look historically, some of the best venture investors had no scientific backgrounds. A lot of venture investors that were investing in the 90s into optical communications companies that were extremely technology heavy, didn't have technical backgrounds, but they were able to ask the right questions of the founding teams. They surrounded themselves with people that indeed were experts and were able to get their assistance on diligencing these companies and ultimately were partners to these companies and brought their kind of diverse skill sets and know how to help maximize the probability of success. And so I would absolutely not put too much emphasis on a quote unquote technical investor. In fact, it can go very much the other way mo where a super technical investor have their own views as to how things should be done or can be done. And the reality is in this business you're betting on people. You're not trying to find someone that's going to carry your vision forward, you're betting on people to carry their visions forward and it's your job to support them. And so in many instances, Mo I'll turn that around and say having too much technical, let's say background, too much of a technical background can be a liability and to steer you away from extremely intelligent people.

No, that's a great point. So with regards to that, my follow up question is are you a thesis driven investor and why or why not?

So I do have a thesis. That's right, I do have a thesis now kind of share the nuance with you. So my thesis is that the greatest companies, the greatest startup companies, have contrarian or non consensus hypotheses that they tend to carry forward. If a hypothesis is consensus or non contrarian and it likely will be executed at an existing large institution, if a business model makes a lot of sense or an approach for making networking chips makes a lot of sense, then it's far more likely that Broadcom Marvell is already are already doing that versus a couple folks in a garage. The reason why those people have decided to leave those companies is because what they're doing is non consensus. Their hypothesis is non consensus. And that relates to the type of market demand, like where the demand is going. That relates to how to go about building something because of new technologies that are now available that the consensus would say, oh that'll never work. So you should know that going in. And what I actually look for, Mo, when I meet these teams is what they believe that I do not believe. What do they believe that the quote unquote experts don't believe? How do they plan to do something that you ask an expert will say, oh, that'll never work. That's what I'm actually looking for. And that is my thesis. Mo My thesis is unless you can tease these elements out, how do they see the world the way the world doesn't see the world? What unique opportunities do they see in a market that doesn't exist today that they think will exist that you and I probably don't quite see, how are they going to leverage technologies that other people think would be impossible? That's my thesis as it relates to investing. And I can give you an example. I met Naveen RAO back in 2007 when I was a postdoc and he was starting graduate school after spending Some years in industry. And I was trying to recruit him into my lab at UCLA when I was transitioning on to Lux. And I told him that, hey, like, you know, I'm, I'm leaving this lab to join a venture capital firm, but I'd love for you to come take over my students and take over this project. And he ended up turning me down. He went to Brown to work for a superstar out there, but he got his PhD, he went to Qualcomm, and probably six, seven years later we reconnected. And he said he's starting a company that's doing chips to accelerate the training of convolutional neural networks. Now keep in mind that he did not use the word semis, which were a four letter word at the time. He did not use AI, which was not very, let's say, fashionable at the time. So I said, wait a minute. Okay, Nadine, so you're telling me you're making AI chips? Is that what you're saying? And he said yes. And I asked why on earth would someone need these? And he said that he expects training models and the data center environment to be a very large amount of compute workload in the future and there should be these chips that implement that. And I said, well, why not just use FPGAs? And he said, FPGAs can only do so much. The amount of compute power you need is far beyond that. He saw something that I didn't see. He was taking an approach to solve a problem that I, that didn't exactly make a lot of sense to me. And he was seeing a market that I didn't see and that checked all the boxes which led to our writing an early check into nirvana, which ultimately intel acquired in 2016. And then when he came back in 2019 and said, hey, you can do so much in hardware, but there's actually a lot more that you can do in software that people aren't doing right now. I said what do you mean? And he said that attention mechanisms or transformers are going to be likely the next kind of convolutional neural network. And we need a different type of framework for training those models algorithmically. And again, a non obvious market, a non obvious way to solve the problem. And I said fine. And we were excited to partner up as a seed investor in Mosaic and that was ultimately acquired by databricks earlier this year. So to answer your question directly, that is my thesis. Those are the things that I'm looking for. But otherwise I think looking for founders that will create A world that an investor has articulated or wants to create, I think just leads to bad investments. Like it is the founder's job to create that future and create a path to realize that future. Not, not an investor. And it's the investor's job to find that founder, to convince that founder to share their thesis with them and convince that founder to take their money. That's the investor's job not to come up with the answers.

This is a, this is a great lead in to my next question which is around LP appetite. So I want to go back to the investor letter. So LPs experienced indigestion, indigestion from too many GPs forming funds, rapidly deploying capital and quickly returning to fundraise. So from your vantage point, I know you mentioned that you're not, you know, boots on the ground, you know, necessarily like raising funds for, for, for Lux on a day to day basis and there's a team that does that. But in general, like what do you think LPs and what, what do you think LPs are looking for from GPS? And like how should emerging managers and we, and, and, and I know for a fact that we have a, a number of emerging managers that listen listen to the show regularly. So like what, what, what, what advice would you have for emerging managers trying to position themselves in such a difficult fundraising market right now given what you're saying about, you know, differentiation and, and, and, and how you should think about thesis and all the, all those points you.

Managers or emerging managers would be to recalibrate. And it's a challenge to do that because the environment that we were in previously, say from 2012 post Facebook IPO to 2022, that 10 year period was a very abnormal period in venture investing where the majority of companies that were seeded were able to raise Series A's and continue on to raise Series B's and continue on to raise growth capital. With the influx of capital coming from the public market and crossover investors, what you're seeing today is that that entire later stage source of capital has completely vacated the market and we're seeing these early stage companies struggle and raising their follow on financings. And let me tell you something though, that's normal. That's the way it should be. You should expect many seed stage companies to be unable to raise Series A's and many Series A companies to be unable to raise Series Bs. That's normal, that's natural, that's healthy for this market. Unfortunately, a lot of seed investors and emerging managers who started investing during that period became accustomed to all of their companies getting markups and then going back to the, well, the LPs to raise their next funds. And that strategy is no longer going to work moving forward. So we are exiting a regime of capital deployment to capital investment. We are no longer looking for reasons to deploy capital because Again, back in 2012-2022, simply deploying capital led to results. And what investors were looking for in that previous phase was, okay, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Ivy League school. Check. Co founders have, you know, experience working for brand name companies. Check. You know, large, sexy market opportunity. Check. All right, here's, here's a C check. And there's a good chance that you're going to raise a Series A. And you know, my seed dollars are going to be marked up and I'll go back to the LPs and say that, you know, my, you know, 2014 fund is now sitting at a 3x and you know, now I'm going to raise my 2016 fund. And that strategy is not going to work moving forward. And emerging managers really have to go back to making investments, to underwriting. And that requires more rigor. And there needs to be the expectation that a lot of these companies won't raise Series A. So you have to make sure that you are underwriting to a company that will be able to get a great group of investors that come in at a great price with the expectation that this can be a, a world changing once in a generation company, as opposed to just cutting checks and buying lottery tickets, which is the way it was before.

So in that case, let's talk dry. Let's talk dry. Dry powder. So, quote, today we have over 1 billion and a half dollars of dry powder with the vast majority of our companies and crucially, the most important contributors to fund value, extremely well capital capitalized. So given what you're saying, what area of focus do you see the most capital contribution from luxury over the next five to 10 years? I should, I should reframe that and say, what, where, where do you see Lux? What areas do you see Lux making the most significant capital investment over the next five to 10 years?

You know, Mo, I can, I can tell you one thing that I do know for a fact, and that is that I have no idea. If, if you would have asked me back in 2015 if I would invest in a rocket company, I would have said absolutely not. But guess what? I did. Relativity Space. If you would have asked me at the same time would I invest in an automotive sensor company, I would have said absolutely not. But I helped put Ava together. And so I can tell you right now with certainty that I have no clue what my next investment is going to be, what area is going to be. But I can tell you with certainty that it's going to be solving a problem that's not obvious. It's going to be doing it in a way that I could have never even thought of. And they're going to attract amazing, amazing people that I do know for sure. And so we'll just have to wait and see.

Shaheen, that was a trap door question that you, that you did so well on. So you know, that checks out. That checks out completely with what you said earlier about your thesis, thesis and how you think about investing. So had you answered it any other way, it wouldn't have made sense.

So you, you, you, you.

Well done is what I should say.

You should have called me out on it. Yeah.

So I want to, as we sort of wrap up here, I want to talk about, I want to talk about the media. And the quote from the letter is the counter strategy is to step away from social media and never ending news alerts, all of which are designed, designed to prey upon your attention by enraging you so as to monetize you and your time. And I think it's interesting because you, the, you guys are effectively from my, from my perspective, what you're saying is you're criticizing the role of social media and, and sensationalist news in, in what's in, in shaping public perception, oftentimes distorting reality and then also focusing on like negative aspects of all of our achievements. And the one thing that sticks out to me like I was as I was reading that I was literally thinking Starship. And I was thinking about when Starship made their second launch, how all over and I had posted this on Twitter, all over mainstream media, Starship failure. Starship, you know, Elon does not succeed in next launch. All, you know, all these things saying that like clearly pointing and I mean, you know, part of it I think is, is just, you know, trying to, trying to hurt Elon's perception, public perception. But, but there's a part of it that's also like a misunderstanding from what is going on. And it's actually part of the reason why I fundamentally believe companies like Payload need to exist. Why we started this business to be able to actually shed light and be insightful about oftentimes hard, technical, complex topics. But I'm just kind of curious like what do you think about the role of media in terms of like what we are all trying to achieve and what Lux is trying to achieve, which is investing in very hard, complex, oftentimes misunderstood ideas from, from day one. Yeah, I know that's a big and broad question, but curious, you know, why, why it's even in the letter.

So I agree with all the comments that you made earlier about the, the media's approach. I mean, their end goal is to capture attention. And the way you capture attention and generate engagement is by polarizing, by creating the good and the bad. And that has been the case since the beginning of human communication. And the reality is that the universe is not binary. We live in a very analog world. And so there are those media outlets that are pursuing eyeballs and engagement at all costs because they have to in order to meet their, the expectations of their shareholders. And they will continue to create this kind of polarization and try to monetize on that. Now, there is certainly a role for folks like yourselves that are playing the analog game. Hey, we're going to shed some light on what's actually going on. We're going to offer the nuanced perspectives and not try to engage an audience by polarizing them and putting them in the good and bad camp, the black and red camp, but by informing them. And so I think that's a very exciting opportunity and I'm glad that you'd be pursuing them.

Yeah. All right, well, just a couple, couple last questions that are actually more predictions. And I know how much you love to make predictions, Shane. So my first one is a relatively easy one, which is what do you think the outcome of the next starship launches? What do you think they're going to try to do? What do you think they're going to try? What do you think they'll achieve?

So, Mo, I have learned over the.

Past.

17, 18 years not to bet against Elon and the people he's able to attract. And I expect the next launch to be successful.

Okay, so meaning now to be clear, meaning they achieve what they are trying to achieve on that launch.

That's right.

Okay, that's right. All right. And then my second, my second and last question or prediction question I should say is, and I, and I, and I know, I almost know exactly how you're going to answer it, but I'm kind of begging and pleading and asking for a favor to see if you can at least come up with a name for me, is what do you think in 10 years will be the most valuable company, Space company, after SpaceX?

It's going to be in the Lux portfolio. But jokes aside, jokes aside, you know, if you look at the. There was an article talking about the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 and how there isn't a single company on that list that was on that list 20 years ago. Going back to the earlier comments that we were making about investment strategies and investment theses, and what I was trying to say was that I have no idea what the next investment is going to look like. I feel like it is extremely naive for someone to look at the next best company using the universe of existing companies that are known or that have kind of like risen from the noise as your sample set. Because I expect those great companies to come out of nowhere and it is my hope and expectation that they're in the Luxe portfolio.

Yeah, I think that's a. I'll accept that. I think that's a very. That's a very fair point because you are correct. If you looked at that list 10, 20 years ago and look at it today, it is dramatically different and it will look dramatically different in another 10 to 20 years. So I don't disagree. Shaheen, thanks so much for being on the show. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for being such a great supporter of Payload and excited to have you back on the show sometime soon.

Really excited for you guys. Love what you're doing and I look forward to being your partner.

Thank you, Jane. See you soon.