Lee Hower

Co-founder & Partner NextView Ventures, previously LinkedIn co-founder and foot soldier in PayPal Mafia. Obsessed with the big picture.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@lpolovets Pretty sure it’s closer to Elon than avg CEO

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Awesome to watch the CoRL keynote by Walden Robotics co-founder/CEO Russ Tedrake. It's an exciting time in robotics and exciting to see this team at the forefront of both deployment and model research.
@RussTedrake @WaldenRobotics @NextViewVC

[Walden Robotics @WaldenRobotics]

At CoRL, @RussTedrake shared the work behind LBM 2.0: Sage and what we’re learning from deploying robots in factories.

Watch the keynote: https://t.co/yVsU77AbkH

More technical detail in the blog: https://t.co/N2chfxAx8Z

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@elonmusk @grok what are these renderings?

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@devahaz @pitdesi 💪

[Lee Hower @leehower]

I agree that durable company building (growth, margins, competitive advantage, etc) are things the VC/startup ecosystem has to do better to earn the trust of public market investors. This is why the SPAC boom of 2020-2021 was long run detrimental to the IPO path for private cos (despite feeling fun during the sugar rush).

But I disagree that $1B EV companies with $200M revenue can go public today. FWIW that’s roughly what we looked like at PayPal when we IPO’d in Feb 2002. But at that point in time there were:

A) much broader ecosystem of actively managed public market funds buying & holding new IPO issues
B) analyst research coverage of small emerging cos
C) lower costs and regulatory burden to be public co

There is obviously a universe of micro cap public tech cos. But most of these are fallen stars or companies that went public decades ago and have just existed. That’s different than being able to take a new issue out, find a cohort of long term buyers for your shares, and transition to public market life at this comparatively small scale.

[Sampriti Bhattacharyya @sampritibh]

We have been working heads down building the most formidable platform for the sea. At UpSummit at @NASAKennedy, attendees got a first look at our unmanned Quanta-D.

More info on live demonstrations/ official product launch, mission announcements coming soon!

[Lee Hower @leehower]

I first saw a very early iteration of a @Seneca_Systems UAV doing field testing more than a year ago. Incredibly exciting to see how far things have progressed and to see the company start deploying these systems to customers across the US.

[Stuart Landesberg @Stu_Land]

On Tuesday, November 3rd, @Seneca_Systems flew the world’s first seven-aircraft coordinated multi-mission demonstration. It was an honor to do it in front of the world’s foremost fire leaders at Jump the Fence Test Range in Northern California, as a part of the @RedSkySummit.

The following day, we ran the world’s first remotely-controlled live night operations. Extremely proud of the @Seneca_Systems team and more motivated every day.

It’s humbling to build in alongside public servants who’ve dedicated their lives to protecting our communities. Thank you to @billclerico and the @RedSkySummit team for supporting the fire community -- we’re lucky to be a part of it.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Today is definitely a top 5 ever meme day for tech twitter

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@ikirigin Well ironically SpaceX combination wouldn't really concentrate semiconductor mkt share (unlike AMD, Broadcom, Intel - all of whom have capable CEOs).

SpaceX is also building a pretty big fab... just saying

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Crazy hypothetical that popped into my head this morning :

1) Jensen pushed out

2) US govt decides NVIDIA is too systemically important for uncertain leadership succession

3) Govt intervenes and engineers a merger of NVIDIA & SpaceXAI

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@heysamir_ Well SpaceX and xAI are now combined (as of Feb 2026), so technically that's one fewer slot compared to 2025. So I mean the guy has some extra bandwidth clearly...

[Sam Pasupalak @spisallyouneed]

Introducing Steve: the World’s first AI CEO for fully Autonomous companies.

Powered by World Models, Recursive Self Learning, a Policy Engine and a team of specialist AI agents, it runs your business end-to-end 🔥.

Proof? Steve currently runs 3 businesses we acquired and they are all crushing it (numbers in thread 🧵)

We’re now launching the Steve Startups Program of $2M to acquire 5 additional startups for Steve to automate.

Join us in the Autonomous Enterprise revolution 🚀.

[Chris Savage @csavage]

I keep thinking about this graph.

After AlphaGo came out, professional Go players started getting a lot better.

This is about to happen for everything.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

And again the biggest difference is access / sourcing. Even the best VCs only see or have access to a portion of the total universe of private companies whereas every public market investor from the sharpest hedge fund to the average retail investor can each but any stock.

Also passive investing (in addition to active) is a thing on public side. It is not a thing (or at least not today) on the private side. And private markets are long only.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

We think of VC investing in private tech startups as being dramatically different than public markets. Maybe that's wrong.

VC is a power law where most startup investments lose money and a tiny handful generate the vast majority of positive return. The public stock market on the other hand generates a lower but more consistent "beta" return.

But that's not really been true in the last couple years, and it turns out that's not really been true for the last century. In the last 3-5 yrs, a handful of public companies account for a large portion of the gain of the broader market indices.

And if you look back a century this pattern holds (see paper below). Buying and holding a particular stock was a money losing investment ~60% of the time. Roughly ~4% of stocks generate produce all of the net gains of the market. Sound like a familiar pattern?

I have some thoughts on why this may be. Will try to write in more depth soon.

https://t.co/9LEJWcyOHL

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Indeed. Though historically risk management literally has been impossible in venture. Selling (aka exits) happened to venture investors, there was no locus of control when an acquisition or IPO happened. The liquidity isn’t that broad or deep yet but growth of secondary markets for private companies has started to change that in recent years.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@credistick Indeed the survivorship and compounding go hand in hand obviously.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

@milesgr_ Indeed they’re two different investment realms. Biggest difference is access / sourcing IMO, every investor can buy any (or all via index) public stock. Private investors only see or have access to a portion of the universe of private startup investments.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

Thoughtful post exploring how the West’s labor cost disadvantage relative to China (factory assembly & robot programmers) may drive faster automation in the robotics industry (eg robots building robots).