Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476)

The long tail of funds that are subscale, I have predicted that you would see a 50% involuntary exit or extinction rate. They're under reserve. They've overinvested. They have too many portfolio companies. Those companies are gonna have to come back to the well and raise money, and they're not gonna be able to find investors. There's gonna be a lot of down rounds, broken fund raises, broken syndicates, and those guys are gonna go out of business. And that large LP looked at me and laughed and said, Josh, that's ridiculous. It's not gonna be 50%. It's gonna be 90%. I'm Ted Saides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guests on today's show are Josh Wolf and Brett McGurk, partners at Lux Capital, a $5,000,000,000 venture capital firm that specializes in emerging science and technology companies that turn sci fi into sci fact. Josh co founded Luxe and is a repeat past guest on the show. His first appearance from 2018 discusses his story, including phrases, chips and shoulders put chips in pockets, failure comes from a failure to imagine failure, and directional arrows of progress. Brett joined Lux last year following a twenty year career in public service, where he advised four US presidents and helped shape national security strategy across The Middle East. Our conversation kicks off with Josh's state of the venture industry and Lux's positioning within it. Brett then describes his background, sovereign ambitions, and geopolitical risks. We discuss directional arrows of progress across AI, CapEx maintenance, biology, defense systems, and space. Before we get going, you might be wondering why we've added these humorous little anecdotes to encourage you to spread the word about capital allocators. Our first thought was that each of Hank and Morgan on my team and my wife on the home team find that I can be be quite funny, which doesn't really come out during the interviews. I could try harder by amping up the energy of my questions like asking, hey, what's your investment strategy? Or maybe not. Now, keep in mind, their sentiment about my sense of humor is not universal. Each of my three teenagers, my stepson and my stepdaughter question the quality of my humor from time to time, or in the case of my kids, most of the time. So these clips give you a little window into my sense of humor, for better or for worse. Thanks so much for spreading the word. Capital Allocators is brought to you by my friends at WCM Investment Management. WCM has the courage to back future histories not evident today, informed by their unrelenting focus on mode trajectory and elevated by insights on corporate culture. WCM's deep roots in public markets set the foundation for its approach to private investing. They didn't just want to enter the private markets, they wanted to improve the investing model itself. Build something better aligned, more thoughtful, and truly long term. As a firm owned by its people and grounded …