In this conversation I talk to Luke Constable about the complicated tapestry of finance, funding projects, incentives, organizational and legal structures, social technologies, and more.
Luke is the founder of the hedge fund Lampa Capital and publishes a widely-read newsletter full of fascinating deep dives. He’s also trained as a lawyer and historian so he looks at the world with a fairly unique set of lenses.
Disclaimer: nothing Luke says is an offer to buy or sell a security or to make an investment
Links
- Luke on Twitter
- Lampa Capital
- Theory of Investment Value (John Burr Williams)
- 1,000 True Fans (Kevin Kelly)
- Quantum Country Patreon
- Lampa Capital’s Open Questions
- The Empire of Value (André Orléan)
- Who Gets What and Why (Alvin Roth)
- The Mystery of Capital (Hernando de Soto)
- I, Pencil (Leonard Read)
- The Crime of Reason (Robert Laughlin)
- Andrew Lo’s papers
Transcript
0:01:05 BR: So if technology creates a lot of wealth, why does it feel like most people in finance are hesitant to invest in technology?
0:01:19 Luke Constable: So that's an interesting place to start. I think you have to understand, no one invests in technology. If you think about investors, investors invest in businesses that use technology, and so that's probably the first frame I would use. Investors aren't hesitant to invest in technology, investors never invest in technology. What investors do is they invest in these products that are going to generate cash flow streams, and so that's sort of the first thing. And then the second thing is, a lot of the technologies that you and I think about, they seem obvious at a macro scale, where you take a high level view and you say, "Well, it would be so much better if we had a blank sheet of paper," and I said, "We should do X."
0:02:10 LC: For instance, you could make an argument about housing technology in San Francisco, and you could say, “All of these houses built in SF, they're old Victorians, they don't really ha
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