Do Good Things
In the words ahead we ask and answer whether this moment is the most important in history, share how we are seizing on current market conditions, offer our optimistic and cautioned case for what may happen next — and end with our certainty for the very long-term.
The Hinge of History
Last quarter we noted how unprecedented was the widespread use of the word “unprecedented”. This quarter we query whether we are — as some say — at the most important and influential moment of all time: a “hinge of history.”
We pose the question not to be provocative but rather to be prescriptive, as the answer should inform with moral imperative how we ought to spend our most important asset: time. In preview, we hold the minority view that this moment in time is not — in the context of all that has ever happened and all yet to happen — uniquely special, even with all the evident chaos. Instead there are directional arrows of positive progress, technological inevitabilities, and ever more and new options created by the agency and ambition of the scientific and technical founders we fund. From any moment in the present, they are always setting up a perpetually more promising future.
But isn’t this time different? The phrase “historic moment” is used by journalists 100 times a month, on average three times daily. Authors and anchors assert this moment, right now, is the most critical moment in history, upon which the fate of a city, our country, an entire generation, our children and grandchildren, our humanity, the planet hinges on what happens next.
Yogi Berra said it’s hard to make predictions — especially about the future. But what about predictions about history? Specifically whether some present moment will in the future be “historic” — influential or important. It turns out what is memorable isn’t always meaningful and what is salient isn’t always significant. We know that we overestimate popular, proximate, recent things and overlook and underestimate other things that later prove to be far more consequential. It’s only in hindsight that historians ascribe meaning of import to things of the past. We say when investing that 100% of the information we have is based on the past and 100% of the value of the decisions we make is in the future, which is inherently probabilistic. Look back 110 years: in 1910, the most consequential thing wasn’t what made news of the day — two amateur baseball teams using 137,000 candle powered lights to play a night game at White Sox Park, the first test-flight of a twin-engine plane in France, an explosion at the LA Times that killed 21, the first city ordinance in Baltimore requiring black and white residential areas. Each of those things were dominant news headlines but the most important thing may have been what didn’t make news — an unknown 21-year-old Austrian boy named Adolf selling art out of a homeless shelter, whom the future would have preferred desperately to have remained in obscurity.
Most people experience the present by extrapolating retrospectively from the recent past, especially recent emotions felt. Fewer experience the present from yet-to-be-felt emotions from the future prospectively. Our memories of the recent past help to protect us from repetitive events, but those events that occur rarely risk fading without constant reminders. Part of the reason we say “never forget” is because we often do. Even the scarring moments of September 11th or the 2008 financial crisis risk fading from recent memory — especially in the younger minds unburdened with the visceral experience of either. It seems more than provocative to note that the pandemic will have killed more people in the U.S. than all military conflicts over the past 70 years. Do we believe in a decade it will have been the most defining and important moment in our history?
The case for any current or prior moment being the most influential and important — is that past people had more influence over smaller populations; that there is more path-dependence from locking-in cultural norms or behaviors; that our rapid pace of technological invention, the possibility space it creates; and the rapid adoption of it against a backdrop of global interconnectedness all on a singular planet we inhabit; and the compounding consequences of decisions made today that may be irreversible. The case against — is that past people (say ancestral hunter-gatherers) didn’t have the tools or technologies, let alone the knowledge or imagination of the combinatorial possibilities, to have the kind of influence we present or future people will have. It stands to reason that future people even in 2030 will have more options, technology, resources, and knowledge (both scientific and moral) from which to do more good than we did in 1920, 1820 or 1320. Warren Buffett effectively took this route, compounding capital to deliver more of it to Bill Gates later in his life, rather than spend less of it, less effectively, earlier. It’s also the route taken by scientists who spend a decade or more compounding knowledge in pursuit of discovery. It’s said that good things happen to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle. Patience versus urgency is what also sets (in theory without central bank decree) the time value of money. The hustlers, acting with the urgent impatience of now, need the waiters to provide the patient capital of later. Urgency most often comes from the young and the restless. Thus the truth is: the future lies mostly with those who rebel against tradition (and often their older predecessors) and seize the present over posterity — until yet younger yearn to do the very same. The drive of youth is why we are conditionally certain about the long-term. But first, let’s look back at now and then forward to the near-term.
Now, Near-Term + Long-Term
Perspective depends on distance. Now at Lux, we are uncomfortably optimistic, near-term comfortably cautious and long-term conditionally certain. Which is to say we see respectively: good odds of great success (for Lux), likely chaos (for some) and definite progress (for all).
Now: The Case for Being Uncomfortably Optimistic
In preview at present, uncomfortable optimism is the temperament of our team. The reason is thus: the less-than-usual things that Lux seek to fund now have more-than-usual demand. With respect to the founders we fund — we say that Lux believes before others understand. With respect to the contrarian or non-consensus theses we hold — we say that Lux wants others to agree with us, just later. At present, it has become ‘later’. And as measured by attraction of attention and capital, other investors are both understanding and believing. In Ben Graham’s allegory of Mr. Market, the fickle fellow whose mood can swing between optimism and pessimism exists to serve (as an emotional buyer or seller) not guide (as an unemotional analytical appraiser). If Lux companies were each a house in a neighborhood, then some have hints of Mr. Market peeking in, some have outright piqued Mr. Market’s demand, while others are answering the door to see Mr. Market accompanied by competitively eager missionary peers. There are endogenous and exogenous factors that make us uncomfortably optimistic and comfortably cautious.
The cause for our optimism is the endogenous — the inside, intrinsic performance of many Lux companies and the fundamentals that we can and have influenced: recruiting top talent from executives to engineers to board members, introducing cornerstone customers, constructing strong syndicates of strategic and follow-on growth investors, advising on key competitive positioning and strategic decisions. Several of Lux’s most valuable companies and key drivers of fund performance have had recent record quarters of sales and bookings growth. Many are executing extremely well. For example: Aeva, Anduril, Avail, Applied Intuition, Matterport, Latch, Recursion, Science 37 and Subspace have not only not skipped a beat, they’ve turned up the tempo.
The cause for our uncomfortable optimism is the exogenous — the outside mood and movement of markets independent of anything we may do or have done and over which we have little to no influence. In recent months, seizing on market conditions, we have guided Lux companies in closings of over 50 financings, nearly all at higher or significantly higher valuations led by other investors. The optimist opines that we’re in the best of all worlds — and the pessimist fears that it is true. The truth is this: we do not know if this current zeitgeist zigs, zags or zeroes out in two days, two weeks, two months or two years. We do know how to make a case for it lasting longer than it should — or ending earlier than it could.
The Case for Ending Earlier Than It Could
Let’s start with the latter. Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure. So let’s posit and dispense with the case for this optimism ending earlier than it could, or seeing reversal: a structural dislocation, a large surprise from a very large institutional investor, a sovereign dumping foreign-held debt, a belief that Fed signaling of lower for longer has created liftoff — any or all of which triggers an unexpected or more rapid rise in rates on the long end of the yield curve (in spite of central bank efforts to suppress it). That in turn might then hit valuation multiples, public comps of crowded tech darlings, equity fund inflows and a narrative shift away from growth and momentum toward more neglected value. More simply, what the wise may do at the start, fools will do in the end — and so what starts off attractive may become repulsive — as the mere abundance of rising supply of new issues with declining quality fundamentals may eventually create a stink. In this scenario, the prospects for a succession of successful exits would be slimmer, though the vast majority of Lux companies are very well capitalized to survive and navigate through.
The Case for Lasting Longer Than It Should
Now the case for things lasting longer than they should rests also on low rates, high expectations for equities and relative unattractiveness of fixed income, rising confidence and animal spirits, growing participation from individual investors, increased rate and amount of capital formation and funds formed to invest in new issues including direct issues, SPACs, and traditional IPOs, and the potential for an M&A frenzy correlated to the new-issue market.
The world has been socialized to $30 trillion of negative yielding debt — a historic first, turning fixed in-come into fixed out-go. The relative attractiveness of equities that have growth characteristics has pushed valuations in some segments to new highs. Retail participation is rising — now making up 20–25% of market participants, nearly double a decade ago. Record new accounts by the millions have been opened at online brokers since the pandemic began and sports stalled.
The new issue market left for dead has been not only revived, but record setting. As of this writing there are nearly 160 SPACs with nearly $60 billion of proceeds raised and nearly $100 billion of capital raised in total for IPOs, with over 235 companies surpassing even the 2000 tech bubble — (with 439 companies going public) most of it concentrated in tech and healthcare.
SPAC Attack
The most significant development has been not the structure of SPACs but the shift in the perception of them. In some ways the phenomena of these vehicles delivering capital to high-growth new issues rhyme with one of three decades ago. In the late 1980’s, Michael Milken at Drexel, through a combination of academic and portfolio theory, turned a backwater undesired asset, the “junk bond”, into a legitimized coveted capital tool of “high yield” to unlock entrepreneurial creativity, growth and create enormous wealth — until it, like many things, got taken to excess and overdone. SPACs, similarly once the backwater offerings of third tier banks (often parading out performers like Pitbull and Snoop Dogg at less than savory shindigs most avoided), have become legitimized with reputable sponsors, respected investors and desirable targets. With the pandemic already relegating if not relieving management from exhausting multi-city single-day roadshows to scalable video calls, the allure is amplified by the ability (in contrast to traditional IPOs) to give future plans and forward guidance to all (instead of an exclusive set of sell-side analysts). With rates at zero, investors are applying little discount to terminal values — a dollar in 2025 is given nearly full credit today — lending logic to valuations that would have otherwise seemed high by historical standards. In the past a bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush, but today, so yield-starved are investors that the mere possibility of three birds in the bush in the future is almost worth three birds today.
As a target seeking to go public in this environment, the benefit of being an early mover may encourage many more movers. It may not be zero-sum but the game theory will push more companies to seek the cash and stock currency — both of which create optionality for strategic maneuvering. A Lux company that goes public earlier than its competitors may be rewarded with a large warchest of cash and a stock currency from which it can afford tuck-in acquisitions to lock in talent, technology, product pipeline, customers and market share.
SPACs and The Paradox of Sturgeon’s Law: 90% is Crud
Of course the sheer volume of vehicles seeking targets and the risk of not finding a partner and turning into a pumpkin before the clock runs out will also create an abundance of low-quality acquisitions — companies that really shouldn’t be public. We have already seen companies get acquired on nothing more than a narrative and a video rendering, and at least one company already accused of fraud still trades at a nearly $7 billion market capitalization. In a 1957 publication of science fiction magazine Venture, sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon noted that 90% of all sci-fi was crud. Thus was born Sturgeon’s Law, which broadly applies the same probability distribution to everything: from music to management teams to companies to surely SPACs. The paradox is that the very existence of nine times as many bad companies as good, creates the incentive for more funds to form using the raison d’etre that they will purportedly help otherwise undiscriminating investors to pick the good companies. Yet further: since 90% of those funds are going to be crud, it will induce higher quality firms to say “if those guys were able to raise a fund, then we can raise one much larger and higher quality” all of which in aggregate may have the effect of even more funds, feeding back on itself — until it eventually stops.
We’ve previously noted how Sturgeon’s Law combines with Bayes’ Law to inform investment strategy:
Given that an investor with a 90% accuracy rate of discerning between good and bad has recommended an investment as “good”, what are the odds it is actually “good”, for a universe of 100 investments? Applying Sturgeon’s Law, if there are 90 truly “bad” companies, the investor will correctly pass on 81 of them, but will mistake 9 as good (90% x 90). Of the 10 truly “good”, they will correctly invest in 9 (90% x 10) but mistakenly pass on that last 1. Thus, the investor will put forth 18 “good” companies, but only 9 of them are actually good, implying no greater accuracy than flipping a coin. You can try to change two things: accuracy or universe; your fishing skill or the pond you’re fishing in. We argue increasing your accuracy rate beyond 90% is hard, if not futile, as 90% accuracy is exceptional and those who bat .300 in baseball get into the Hall of Fame. The other variable is the universe from which you select, the pond from which you fish. We believe it wiser to go where Sturgeon’s Law does not apply, where barriers to entry are higher, weeding out bad companies more quickly, lending to a richer overall quality of the target universe. It is here, at the intersection of hard science and technology, where we’ve fished for the past 20 years.
We expect Lux’s strategies of newco company creation and proprietary origination by co-founding opportunities (especially with repeat Lux founders) will navigate these two laws well.
The Case for A Boom in Consolidation and M&A
While M&A activity plummeted in the first half of 2020 with only 15 megadeals, about half that of the prior year, we see potential for all of this new-issue public market activity to tip over and catalyze an M&A frenzy with disciplined decision makers in acquiror boardrooms becoming less so. Here’s how: consider a lower-growth incumbent trading at 8x deciding to pass on acquiring a smaller company at a price of 10x. That smaller company instead goes public in a more-than-amenable market and enjoys a 16x multiple, along with momentum and cash exceeding what it needs to execute its core business plan. A new acquisition target in the industry comes along. The incumbent again scrutinizes with discipline and passes on the same price of 10x. The upstart uses its 16x multiple, acquires the target for 12x, finds it immediately accretive, gains a strategic advantage, the market loves it, while the incumbent feels frustrated and confused. The likelihood of laxening standards — increases the likelihood of M&A moves made, at first begrudgingly if not later despairingly. There is a good chance the incumbents find themselves competing with already public companies with higher multiples as well as SPACs seeking targets. If so, Lux family companies should benefit from the demand. We also expect there will be more than a few AOL/TimeWarner-like deals of upstart acquiring incumbent signaling and symbolizing less that they have arrived and more that the end of the party is nigh.
We’ve used an analogy of the slime-mold to market structure in the past: when resources are abundant you see dispersion and when they get scarce and competition increases you see a congealing and consolidation. This is happening in pharma and semiconductors right now. Nvidia’s $40 billion buyout of ARM, AMD’s $35 billion takeover of Xilinx, Analog Devices’ $20 billion acquisition of Maxim, SK Hynix’s $9 billion purchase of Intel’s memory business. Lux companies developing cutting edge chips like Mythic and Flex Logix are well positioned.
Near-Term: The Case for Being Comfortably Cautious
While all the above makes us optimistic, albeit uncomfortably — what follows are a few situations where we see intermediate-term chaos and are comfortable being very cautious. Then we’ll return to our conditional certainty.
We are reminded of Stockdale’s Paradox: when Admiral James Stockdale — captured and brutally confined as a prisoner during the Vietnam War — was later asked how he dealt with it, he said he never doubted that he’d prevail and get out or that it would be a defining experience of his life. But paradoxically the ones that didn’t make it out were the complacent optimists whose expectations of release were repeatedly dashed. Stockdale’s lesson was to never confuse the necessary belief that you’ll prevail in the end, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of current reality, whatever they may be.
That reality today is that the economy may be weaker than many expect. Inequality may worsen not because of a wage gap but a wealth gap between “owers” and “owners”, as the very poor become more indebted and the very rich become more invested and see asset appreciation. The common and ordinary (eating at a restaurant, seeing a movie, a play, a friend) has become extraordinary and rare. Division is deep across all dimensions — domestically, politically, economically, internationally. People are hurt and angry. They have lost loved ones, jobs and businesses, and trust in police and politicians. Henry Adams once said that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds. We’ve witnessed emotion, especially anger, weaponized to rally people. Endless hours are devoted to the timeless competition between deception and its detection, between what one actually believes to be true and what one is communicating — from politicians to CEOs. People do not trust police or politicians or each other.
A common enemy in COVID should have unified us but instead it has further polarized our populace. Basic science has become politicized and nearly half the population doesn’t trust experts on public health topics from mask-wearing to vaccinations. The bizarre irony: widespread intentional failure to cover one’s face — a refusal to erect a wall (a fabric border, a mask) to keep out foreign bodies of the microscopic viral variety — led to this administration’s accidental success — in the face of its own failure to erect an actual wall or uphold a racist travel ban — to keep out foreigners as all travel ceased. Had the virus been shut out from permeability of all borders and membranes — populist xenophobia might yet have had renewed fuel to fight with intention what biology brought and wrought without intention. Meanwhile high expectations of a vaccine suggest nothing particularly low of its probability but rather the heightened probability of disappointment.
The tribal trife and domestic distrust within countries is increasing between countries. Systems universally will trend to growing entropy, disorder and instability without an input of energy and order. As in physics so in geopolitics that the more disorder, the more possible states of things can exist. When a global hegemon retrenches from global affairs or retracts from relationships, it creates room for the reassertion and reemergence of revanchist rivals.
The pandemic could have created unprecedented global coordination and unity — but instead has a worrisome trend of beggar-thy-neighbor and zero-sum policies. Consider the drop in demand for energy that normally would have been met with supply cuts. Instead Russia and Saudi Arabia, unable or unwilling to bear revenue loss, maintained overproduction which has in turn hurt other, especially weaker oil producing countries. Other emerging market countries have seen both exports and tourism drop. A growing list of countries face domestic risks ranging from unrest and fomented strife to outright failed states. And failed states are fertile ground for infiltration and influence by criminal groups and non-state actors. In the financial crisis of 12 years ago, emerging markets had the buffering of a growing China, rising commodity prices and relatively low debt. The pandemic has been global, respects no borders and has created not just economic disruption but destruction, revealing vulnerable supply chains, local economies levered to singular industries that risk resulting in many corporate and sovereign defaults and a far longer road to recovery than may be expected. There is a divisive cold war in technology between the U.S. and China and a tailwind for technology to provide for national resilience — in manufacturing of medical supplies, life-saving drugs, semiconductors, communications equipment and defense. All of which is to say, the rest of the world is likely to become more unstable, shaken, conflicted, volatile — from Armenia and Azerbaijan to Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Egypt, India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran. Lux’s moral stance of funding ventures and advancing technologies that reduce human suffering has also seen great value created in valuably responding to low-probability negative events — from nuclear disaster at Fukushima (Kurion) to helping prevent tragic violence domestically (Evolv) to information and disinformation warfare (Primer) to identifying threats and supporting our brave men and women at the riskiest edge of defense formations (Anduril, Clarifai, Planet and Kymeta).
Asymmetry of Entropy + The Shape of Chaos
Research shows that conflicts obey a power law distribution in the same shape as forest fires, epidemics, earthquakes and avalanches — many small ones cause little damage while just a few cause it all. We now know from network theory that a spark (whether an actual spark of a fire, a spark of a neuron in a brain, the spark of an idea as in social contagion, the spark of a viral contagion or the spark of an act of violence) begins in small local clusters connected to other clusters allowing rapid spread (of fire, ideas, infections). We also know one way to reduce or avoid conflict is to have fractal design. Consider the work of Geoff West at Santa Fe Institute, who noted that part of the reason our circulatory system branches ever smaller is to minimize friction and turbulence as things flow past each other. When two or more people, companies, countries, cars, shoppers, athletes are fighting for the same space or the same thing — we get conflict.
Not all conflict is bad. Conflicting beliefs can help us reveal what people want and what is true — but not always at the same time. Markets help solve what people want (not always what is true). The persistence of companies, countries, contracts, currencies and much else — depends on the persistence of belief — which in turn depends on motivating and mercurial emotions, preferences and wants. The price of any company depends upon subjective belief in its fundamentals (what is) and its expectations (what may be). And expectations are a measure of the intersubjective (what other people think other people think) expectations of customers and their preferences and emotions and wants — and the same of other investors.
Science does not care about what people want — science cares about what is true. It is against the uncertainty and chaos that paralyzes so many others that scientific and technical founders thrive, fueled unyieldingly by their own ambitions — advancing new and better ideas and discoveries. Within both marketplaces and minds, good ideas based on truth will eventually win out against bad ideas based on mistakes or falsehoods. This is a timeless truth. Four centuries ago, a past surely less good than our present, John Milton said of truth: “Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?” He saw in people the capacity for reason that we celebrate in our best founders — not “Slow and dull, but of quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”
Markets measure beliefs and expectations — more often a voting machine. Science measures what may be true and what is falsifiable — more often a weighing machine. And the speed and persistence of both are very different. This is why the pandemic struck slowly, then all at once — and why the lockdown laid low small businesses so suddenly, and why the markets tanked then rocketed back in similar fashion. The time it takes for things to break is a fraction of what it took to build. True of toys and towers, bridges and buildings, tree branches and trust. When a material in a built structure loses “integrity” it can collapse, and quickly. So too for immaterial social structures: from the global international order to markets, economies and flowing commerce — all based upon coordination and common shared reality, shared expectations and relationships between people, partners, customers, competitors. These same social, emergent and invisible structures in marketplaces and democracies can lose “integrity”, lose trust, suffer from betrayals and collapse with a likelihood of reparability inversely proportional to intention. Material structures don’t have memory, but people do. An engineered building holds no grudges, doesn’t reason with game theory and seeks neither reciprocity nor retribution. It’s why the bonds that bind us make trust the most valuable currency — especially amid abundant conflict.
In contrast: physical reality is that which remains even if you stop believing in it. The molecular composition of a drug (Kallyope and Recursion), the transfer of electrons through patterned etching of silicon transistors (Mythic and Flex Logix), the photons illuminating cellular structure in a new microscope (Eikon), the laser beam bouncing off objects measuring speed and distance (Aeva) — all objectively exist whether anyone believes in it.
Long-term: The Case for Conditional Certainty
Our outlook is one of present uncomfortable optimism to near-term comfortable caution to long-term conditional certainty. The distrust of people and displeasure with the present implies a trust in the future. This is why we have conditional certainty of the future. How often do you hear people hastening for the end of 2020? People are financially long the future — and emotionally longing for a better future. One interpretation of low rates is that they signify high demand for the future, with almost no discount to it.
To advance truth and make positive progress, we must set sights higher and further than any present moment — beyond any news cycle or ephemeral beliefs that may seem so salient and consequential now — and rather direct our gaze towards “ingenious and piercing spirit” and imagination demanding to be crystallized. News is news because it is surprising — and almost always negatively so. Most news surprises are from the same human dramas, played on different stages with different characters replete with tragedy of betrayals, power plays, injustices — or with the comedy and celebrity of victory, vanquishes, triumphs and joys. Human drama forms from met or unmet expectations formed in belief in what may happen or disbelief in what just did. But real news is not just an update of unmet or exceeded expectations — real news is an advance in the reduction of our ignorance; science is real news.
Through every consequential moment the directional arrow of technology progress continues to point to the world getting better — in spite of our human chaos. It has become less physical and more digital and dematerialized — we consume less physical stuff. A can today has 13 grams of aluminum, in 1960 it was 85 grams; the quantity of physical resources consumed per person declined; the amount of water is down, land is down (nearly 65% compared with 50 years ago) and fertilizer (nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous) used per crop has gone down as total crop output has gone up. In forest products, like paper, U.S. total annual consumption is down from 20 years ago and in the last decade we have become the largest exporter. In the U.S. the aggregate amount of six key air pollutants (sulfur dioxide, lead, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide) fell nearly 80% and in the UK by even more — even though both produce more than 50 years ago. Much of it due to regulation and a correlation of ever increasing wealthy countries (from growth) demanding ever cleaner air and water (something happening in China now). Technology produced by ambitious scientists, technologists, founders, continues to allow us to do more with less, confounding critics who insist otherwise — a clear case for conditional certainty.
We end with the advice we gave one Lux company unsettled by all the uncertainty caused by the current news cycle — distracted and distraught with disbelief almost daily: “Stop hitting refresh on the news.” You know this: with so much to lose for so many in power, there is total certainty that there will be total chaos daily for weeks to come. You know this: that few, maybe none of those events are in your control. You know this: you can control only what is in your control: voting (unless or until you can’t) where you direct your attention and focus; how you choose to feel. Without investing intentional energy to counteract it, the chaos can pull you down a drain on an endless journey without escape. Your friends and family will keep you in it, as they commiserate and lament the chaos and distraction as their friends are doing the same. But don’t let them. Instead: lead and inspire them. Whatever their job, joy, or purpose, they must not let it get hijacked. Shake them from their head-shaking. Remind them to fight the entropy and enmity in the world by doing good things. By doing really good things. Whether that is producing art, serving others, treating patients, teaching students, promoting justice, accelerating technological progress, advancing cures and treatments, educating or entertaining people, empowering and inspiring others, reducing human suffering. Fiercely focus on that. Time and attention are the scarcest resource. Willingly paying it to others in an unscripted circus show — as a passive spectator, a captive audience member gasping and cheering — is an abdication of your own ambition and the good you must put out. Get up, get out, get at it, get away from the vortex, and most of all, go do good things — really good things.
