Lucidity Capital Mission

Our goal is to move the world forward, and do so by taking an old-school, patient, science-heavy approach to investing and company-building. 

Too many people try to rebuild Facebook. 

Silicon Valley’s habits today come from a few major 'success stories' from the 2000s: Facebook, Uber, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, and a handful of other similar stories. Many practices of venture capitalists (and of the entrepreneurs who want venture money) come from rules of thumb that evolved in a unique period of time when internet-native businesses had just become relatively mainstream. 

Facebook, Uber, Twitter, YouTube and the rest had broadly similar characteristics: massive margins, a strong winner-take-all network effect, and (with the exception of Uber) the promise of an advertising- or entertainment-centric monetization model.

That worked great. Nobody who invested in those companies regrets it at all (at least from a financial perspective). But my perspective—and why I decided to start Lucidity Capital—is that these patterns of success aren’t universal. They were excellent for those tech companies. And they were good models for a variety of similar businesses started since then to fill gaps in consumer demand. Some of these new companies will be important and impactful, and many will make (laudable!) incremental improvements to the way we live, work, and interact with each other. 

But now VCs are stuck in that old pattern: the one that works for internet-native network-effects businesses. They've been hijacked by the ease of investing in businesses with that model. 

At Lucidity we wonder: what if we want to build something truly difficult?

Moving forward, we need to ride a different wave to drive growth. Huge parts of the market—biotechnology, energy, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, transportation, just for example—look absolutely nothing like the internet companies of 2000-2009. The future will look different than the present, and the next generation of world-denting companies will look different than the last.

Our goal with Lucidity is to move the world forward, and do so by taking an old school, patient, science-heavy approach to investing and company-building. We aren’t here to build the next cash-guzzling CAC-heavy social network tech unicorn. We are here to build the companies that require pencil, protractors, and microscopes.