Wouldn’t you like to live in a world that has these technologies?
We’ve invested in these companies, and we’re just getting started.
KLIR Sky
When you see a smokestack, you are seeing life sustaining forces at work. Power plants that heat homes in winter; mills making materials to build those homes; factories making the refrigerators inside them to keep food from spoiling. Yet this is not what comes to mind. Rather, we see toxic fumes, smog, pollution, sickness & damage. Both of these stories are true and for modern humans, reconciling them has been elusive. We’ve admonished generations of children to reduce consumption, but they are no more successful at it than we are. We’ve vilified the leaders of these companies, while continuing…
More…Applied Physics
[About a quarter of our investments are things that we don’t want to talk about in their early stages. Still, we’d like to keep our LPs appraised of what we’re doing. If you ever want to know more about one of the companies we are invested in, just reach out and we can have a deeper discussion.] Today we completed an investment in Applied Physics. This unique group of physicists has invented a staggering variety of breakthroughs based on unique insights. They have a broad portfolio of patents in various industries and technologies, including aerospace, radar & surveillance, data enhancement, superconductors,…
More…Marvel Labs
Automated Manufacturing with Unprecedented Reductions in Cost, Carbon Emissions & Labor. Until the 1980s most of our stuff was “Made in America.” Then, we got drunk on the low cost labor in Asia and started having everything made halfway around the world. If you live anywhere else, the story is probably similar Unethical labor practices, supply chain fragility, long product cycles, extraordinary carbon emissions from shipping, I won’t drag you through all the problems, but they are huge and growing. Deglobalization, geopolitical tension, general pandemonium are all pushing us to reshore manufacturing to the United States and elsewhere, but…
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Lace Lithography
Hyperbole fails me when trying to describe the importance of computer chips to the world today. Everything made possible by computers relies on chips. Chips rely on transistors. Transistors rely on silicon. Silicon relies on Lithography. Lithography the process of putting an image onto the surface of the silicon. Pretty much like the way a silkscreen puts “Team Building Exercise 1999” on a T-shirt. Except that this image has to be the highest resolution, with the smallest microscopic features, of anything humans produce. “Moore’s Law” usually refers to increasing transistor density. Basically, how can we make transistors half as…
More…DMAT
How did the Romans build the Pantheon? Made of non-reinforced concrete – it remains standing after 2000 years, in a seismic zone – while our concrete with steel rebar struggles to last a century. No one has been able to figure it out for two millennia, but this team at MIT just solved the mystery and recently published about it in Science. The implications are staggering. They can make stronger, self healing concrete. It can be lower cost and is a very easy change to existing production operations, this is not true for any other significant advancement we’ve seen in cement. Even…
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