YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Wolfe

lines on the record: 143
first: 2019-08-16
most recent: 2019-08-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And the biggest virtue of it is you have less probability of proliferation because one of the outputs of traditional nuclear is plutonium.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you a probability and a timeframe. There's a 50% chance that we see something in the next 50 years and a 10% chance that you see something in the next 10 years. And if you do, over 70% chance it comes from China. Really? The Motorola family has been backers of an effort on the East Coast, I think it was called Thorium Power. We looked at a bunch of efforts. The problem is it is very long, very expensive, regulatory fraud. It's just going to take too long. The virtues of thorium are great. It's cheap, cheaper, lower probabilities.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're telling me this is now old gone. Look, people that are listening here know Voltron, they know Caddy Shack, you know, younger people, maybe not.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first principles approach that you would want to take to this is well, how do you reach those people? And the old school thinking is let's put it into the curriculum of the schools and every time that you've tried that, you know, it's typically failed. And so, you know, go where these people are. So if you've got young kids, it's on Roblox, gamify this so that young people can be on Roblox and playing decision-making games and looking at things, maybe even starting to learn to think in probabilities or slightly older generation. It's podcast or it's a web episode or this is.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I actually think at least one of the ideas was as they were thinking about how do you get more broad distribution about decision making for young people.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still be on, and they actually sold to Veolia, which was a French giant. We sold for $400 million. We owned a third of the business. We made an excess of 40 times our early money, returned the entirety of that fund. And it was gratifying because we like to sound, say, as sanctimonious as it sounds, that we like to invest in matter that matters. And it was meaningful because you actually did something to reduce all the radiation from this disaster site. And we got to make our investors a lot of money.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We stake these guys, they go off to work, and the first year they did about a million in revenue. Second year, Black Swan. You had a negative event, which was the seismic event that led to the earthquake, that led to the tsunami, that led to the Fukushima disaster. And lo and behold, the only company picked in the US for this cleanup was this little company Kirion. So we went from a million dollars in revenue to 40, then 80, then $120, $160 million.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we ended up starting a company. We named it Curion after Madame Curie, and in part because with a K to be cute. And in part because I'd read the article about the Department of Energy and it said that there's billions and billions of Curies, which is the measure of radiation. And that was the inspiration. So we started the company. And with very little money, and I had two of our LPs who were prominent hedge fund managers in Austin, we put a total of $3 million into it. And I put a million and a half in from our fund at the time. And we own 35% of the business.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was silicate as glass, but you're heating at about 1700 degrees. It turns into this molten form. It can't leak or leach into the environment.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody was in the space. And I got to tell you, going around for a year to nuclear waste conferences, I was certainly the only person under 50 years old. And I was certainly the only venture capitalist there. So we go and we find the best technologists that we can. And we find the best people that were under the age of 60 because they weren't that entrepreneurial in this space. And to be honest, we found people that were like 58 or 59. And we end up locking up the best technologies, which were a combination of material science and chemistry and physics, materials that could grab the worst radioactive elements like cesium and strontium, technesium, uranium, plutonium. And then we had a second technology called vitrification, which in layman's terms is glassmaking. Take the stuff, lock it up into a glass matrix.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a complex dedicated to nuclear waste cleanup. Now, the people that are making all the money, and when I tell you they make money, it's billions of dollars a year, basically shoveling waste from one side to the other, and this will be going on for decades, it's URS. It's CH2M Hill, it's floor, it's the big engineering primes. So we looked at this and said, not only do you have this in the US, but you have this in the UK with a site called Sellafield. You have this in France with Lahog. Is there an opportunity for a high-tech solution that could win contracts by doing this faster and cheaper? We looked around. We couldn't find anything.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is an entire city in Hanford, Washington, in the state of Washington. You fly in there, there's an airport dedicated to this. There's one bar. It's called the Three Eyed Fish Bar, like out of the Simpsons, and the entire thing is a community.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, that book was written well after this. So, this is 2009, 2010. Hanford, Savannah River, Idaho National Lab. Savannah River.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Water is a natural neutron observer. But there's all this low level waste that is sitting there. So everything from worker dose radiation to parts. And there's a big market for that. But the bigger market, and this was the thing that really got us, if you actually sit, and I promise you this is not scintillating reading, but it was insightful because nobody was looking at it. If you read the DOE budget, $25 billion a year, $6 billion of it is spent on nuclear waste cleanup.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the innovation. Now, what happens is these rods inside the reactor, you know, they go through a nuclear chain reaction, they heat the water, the water turns the turbines. That's how you have nuclear power. Then when you're cooling them, they sit in a pool of water for five years, and then they're pulled out and they put into these little caskets.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you've got this whole push for yucca mountain, which would be a geological repository. We have spent tens of billions of dollars on Yucca Mountain. Do you know how much waste has gone in? Year. So we looked at that and said, okay, that's sort of interesting. Now, what about the way that you store nuclear waste on site? And it turns out that there are basically two companies, one that makes a vertical cask, like almost like a casket to put the rods in, one that makes a horizontal one. So you can make a vertical one or you can make a horizontal one, but that was basically.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and built incrementally. So instead of building a billion dollar gigawatt power plant to serve a million people, you would build an array of, say, 30, 30 megawatt plants. And each one maybe cost you $100 million and you build it over time. Now, the problem with that is really for the domain of very long tenure investors, maybe sovereigns, billionaires, people that could wait 20, 25 years, not for the technology to develop, but because the regulatory. So we said no to that. But then you look around and you say, geez, the biggest unsolved problem with nuclear is not the political, it's what do you do with the waste?”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Exactly. So that was the same thing, right? And by the way, uranium mining So we said no to uranium miners. Then you looked at modular reactors. This is a good idea”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at every part of the fuel cycle, we started with the uranium miners. Maybe there's something there. Turns out they're all hucksters and fraudsters in New Mexico and Nevada. So the Coney Island in me said, you know what, stay away.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you listen to, and they were very smart guys and very successful older venture capitalists, but John Doure and Vinod Kosler, they were the legends, and they were writing the op-eds and they were crying on Ted stages and they were really promoting the idea with Al Gore and others that the most important thing you could find were solar, wind, biofuels, ethanol, battery electric cars. The problem was everybody agreed with that. And the number one thing that is predictive of returns is not whether there's a hockey stick growth curve that Gartner tells you this is going to be a big industry, but how much money is going into the industry. More money that floods in, the higher the price of the assets, it'll be great for consumers, lower returns. So we said, where is nobody looking? And that's the thing that I love to do. I love to understand where is the consensus and where is the varying perception. What's the thing that nobody else is looking at? Nobody was talking about nuclear. You watched Al Gore's movie back then Inconvenient Truth. It doesn't even mention the word nuclear because it was taboo. It was politically taboo. So we looked at nuclear. We spent a year and a half.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how much is locked up in that? If you can free that by instead of having the inventories and just uploading that as a CAD file and printing it and shipping it on demand, it will unlock capital. Anytime you unlock capital, I think you create value.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the no brainer is going to come when it's economics. So we have another company here in New York and have the operations are here in New York, half are in Einhoven in the Netherlands, they have made 12 million unique parts over a million users and customers, 130 countries. They'll print 2 million parts this year, unique parts, individual unique things. If you are a small business and you have a room that's not dissimilar from the room that we're sitting in, you know, I don't know, a few hundred square feet or whatever it is, that's filled with inventory and you think about the cash conversion cycle. Sure.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting debate 3D printing It's not the organs, but it is the parts inside the body. It is the parts inside the aircraft. It is the parts inside the ship or the, and it's really interesting because you change the economics of manufacturing. It has geopolitical implications. If you are just shipping a CAD file instead of having spare parts in inventory sitting in a port of which there are trillions of dollars sitting in ports.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the ascendancy of Global Crossing and these other things going back to that prior, the ascendancy of these things tells you that there's something there. And I do think that”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the market is saying something right now. Maybe you've got algos, and maybe you've got momentum investors, and maybe you've got people, but there's demand and interest in this. And if you believe that markets tell you something, right? Markets are there to serve you, not to tell you. But if you believe that there's something in the ascendancy of Beyond Meat, a signal, in the same way.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, and you are seeing both as evidenced, if you look back in the arc of history. I think that what we're seeing with Beyond Mead, you will see this Till Ray-like phenomenon. I think this is a company that ends up dropping value 80 or 90%. After it ran.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks. I think that if you can appeal to the default morality of are you reducing suffering, then you have an entire camp of people that increasingly. And this is observable. It's not speculative that more and more people are embracing animal rights and saying, you know what? It's sentient, it's suffering. Look, there's nothing more I love. Actually, this is not fully true. Nothing more I love than bacon. The only thing I love more than bacon is peanut butter and bacon, which I know sounds disgusting, but it's delicious. It does sound.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we're going to grow them inside of animals. Now, there's going to be ethics about that, but today, if you wanted to know ethics.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100 years, I think it's possible. Okay. I would say high probability in 100 years. I think it's more likely rather than printing it, we're probably going to harvest them.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe in a lab, but today, like being honest as an investor, we are far, far away from being able to introduce structure into that.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Print me one. They can't do kidney, but the best that they've done is a bladder because it's basically just structural, right? It's whole fluid.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A metal or a plastic. Almost all of this stuff is still structural when you start thinking about the other component, which is function, you're really far off. There's a guy, I think Wake Forest, Tony Atalo, who's doing 3D printing of organs.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Now, maybe it's not four hours, maybe it's a day and a half, but The installation phase where you had a bunch of these printers that were doing plastic, there's no way that an industrial company was going to be able to use that. Now when you have these sophisticated laser sintering metal 3D printers, it's real. It's real pieces. It's real technology for real applications. So that's one. And you're seeing this in jet engines, in automotive. You are seeing it. If you get a knee implant, If you get a hearing aid. It is a good chance over 70% that that is 3D printed product.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, desktop metal is working with, I think, seven different automotive companies for exactly this. The small bespoke parts, a water impeller, Something is part of a motor where it does not make sense to spend the fixed cost to tool and dye a part where you're not going to make $10,000 or $100,000 or a million of them. You just need one or two of these parts. So I think that that is going to be a big trend. And particularly if you look at a company like Desktop Metal, this is a Boston-based company. It has grown very significantly. You got BMW and GE and Saudi AMCO and a whole slew of strategics that are investors alongside us. The other piece of this is a.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10x over 10 years. Now, why? If you look at most of the economics of manufacturing, it is spent on tooling. But the vast majority of the value are in end-use parts and the spare parts. If you can change the economics of how you make this stuff, historically you ship them and you ship it three ways, sea, air, or land. But there's a fourth way to ship apart. Digital. So”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but it's still modest. It isn't the boom that we've all been looking for in 3D printing. Now, I do think that over the past three or four years, we've been entering this deployment phase. So you go from installation, which is 20 years, to now deployment We invested in a company called Desktop Metal. And when we invested, it was about three and a half years ago. The industry for spare parts and use parts was maybe $5 billion. Today, it's nine. So, rapid growth in the industry is probably going to 90 over the next decade. 10 extra.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Near a generational long thing. Maybe it's three quarters of a generation, but between 20 and 25 years. So for the past 20 years, you've had the installation phase where people are getting lots of different 3D printers. You have desktop ones that do cost a few thousand dollars, but they really don't do very much. They print plastics and it's good for schools and universities and tinkers and this kind of stuff. But then you've had the domain of prototyping. And so that's also been another early. That's a big.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I wasn't expecting it. It has been an overhyped bus, but this is predictive. If you know your history of technology, which you do, you look at Carlotta Perez and the diffusion of technologies through history. You go through an installation phase where everybody gets the thing and people are tinkering. For the past 20 years, and those are typically...”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back almost a decade in venture capital, the same thing was happening with solar, an alternative energy. Everybody was funding solar, and you didn't have to be a genius to predict this, you just had to know a little bit of history going back 10 or 15 years, which was optical networking was the end to be if history doesn't repeat at rhymes, it was going to be the same thing as solar. And so, in solar, we said, sit out the ride, don't invest, you're going to have massive hype. It's going to lower the cost of capital. People are going to do uneconomic things. And the winner will be the third world that gets connected. Now, my anticipation of the time was that the private equity guys would come in and scoop up these assets for cents on the dollars, and I was wrong.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“JDS Uniface and all these guys. Okay. So, but you're right. Gary Winnick and Global Crossing. Now, hype got high, cost of capital got low, like you said, hundreds of miles of dark fiber optic got laid in lid, and the winner from all of that was the third world who got connected to the internet for free. The losers were the growth investors, the public investors. The winners were the distressed equity guys who came and picked up all the assets for cents on the dollar.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. But you had that Gilder effect, right? Where he would come out, and because everybody else was looking at it, it was a big, bold letter, whatever the public company, the thing would be up 50 to 80%.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you hit it, you hit on, I think, two really important things, and 100% right, right? Late 90s, you had a narrative promulgated by George Gilder, who happens to be a friend. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, God.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's Uber rides. The public is always the beneficiary in the end, even during bubbles, right? I mean, of course, pensioners and retirees lose money, but the reality is we continue progress. Jim Surwicki had a great quote many years ago in the New Yorker which said, in greed and avarice lies the hope of progress And it's true because that's what happens, right? Everybody funds something, they overdo it in the short term, they underestimate it in the long term, but in that greed and avarice, lots of stuff gets laid down.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To find capital. And that has an important footnote. Beneficiary of that over the past few years has been WeWork because everything I thought”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In venture capital, first of all, the timeframe to know if somebody has made money is so long, but you haven't had that kind of institutional complex because the time that it takes to find out if somebody is right or wrong, the pay schemes, all this, it's very complicated. But you do have this bifurcation in many, many investors that are making small bets, and that is good for the angel investor, the person that's starting up. It is easier than ever if you want to start a business.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually very interesting because on the hedge fund side, you know, between Citadel and Millennium and Ballyazni and SEC, you've seen that phenomenon, right, where they say, okay.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. I mean, there's no risk there that you have total collapse. So I think that this is. For venture capital, systemic risk, and one of the poster children of illiquidity. I think that the narrative about singularity in the future, all of that is great for society because it funds all kinds of experiments. But for the soft bank and softbank investors, I would be very, very nervous.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that they are doing this to be able to create paper assets and increases in paper valuations that can serve as collateral against indebtedness that is north of 140, 150 billion dollars. So, by being able to invest in we work at $10 billion and then pricing it up to $20, you just showed that you had 100% gain in your billion dollar or $2 billion investment. And if you look at their earnings over the past one or two or three quarters, a significant portion of the profits that they're reported is from these paper gains illiquid. And then when one of these companies actually exits and you have liquidity like an Uber or a garden, they take those proceeds instead of distributing to the investors. They say, you know what, we're going to borrow against this. We're going to issue debt and sell it to retail. So I think the entire complex, which is really run by a bunch of Deutsch Bank X credit structured credit guys.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is a complex beast, and I would call it Godzilla, and it has completely changed the undulating landscape. Why? Because, again, in public markets, you have relative efficiency at times. Of course, you know, you have massive inefficiencies at times, but there is no market more inefficient than venture capital, where in the private markets a single price setter can come and just decide what the price of something is. They create the market clearing price. There is no short selling. There's no counter offers. There's very little liquidity. So SoftBank has come and created all of these unicorns and deca corns. And what's crazy is the money that they're putting to work, in some cases they are pricing up their own investments. Now, put on the tinfoil hat for a moment. I have a more slightly nefarious view that a reason that SoftBank is doing this, understanding the motive.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundreds and hundreds of minnows. Now, the way that we look at that as a firm is these people are our friends, they're a source of deal flow. We can be a source of capital to them. Some of them are going to turn into great franchises, nearly impossible to predict which ones. At the other extreme, you have the megas. The megas are the people that are raising billions of dollars. Now, the 800-pound gorilla, or Godzilla, depending on your view, is SoftBank.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source