Wisdom from Josh Wolfe, Venture Capital’s Most Passionate Skeptic

10 Wolfe-Isms to inspire and stimulate your mind. “I am hyper-optimistic and confident, even though I’m definitely a cynic.”

 
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was a turning point for a little-known startup called Kurion. Founded in 2008, the company was a contrarian bet on nuclear waste management by a young venture firm called Lux Capital. Kurion became instrumental in the clean-up of the Fukushima meltdown and in 2016 was acquired by Veolia, earning Lux a 34x return on its investment. It was a key win for the team at Lux which had raised its first institutional fund in 2007 after years of hard work building an integrated investment, research, and media platform.

“The Wasteland. It’s where we went seven years ago in search of new ideas and opportunity,” Lux co-founders Josh Wolfe and Peter Hebert wrote at the time. “What we found was an unmet, inevitable need with no solution in sight.”

“The thing with nuclear that sucked was, what do you do the waste? We started the company from scratch. Named it after Madam Curie called Kurion. In total I think $3 million went in. We sold that to Veolia for $400 million, with $140 million run rate, $40 million of EBITDA, doing nuclear waste cleanup.”

“A fluke low probability black swan in Japan that was negative for that country became a positive black swan for this little company and turned what would have been a phenomenal business into a spectacular one essentially overnight. We became the only US company on the ground in the clean-up, and they were responsible for removing 99% of the radioactive cesium and strontium from that disaster.” Josh Wolfe, Realvision 2016

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Πηγή: neckar.substack.com