Investing in Deep Tech Q2 2025
My public equities portfolio
You don’t have to be a VC or an angel investor to invest in deep tech.
You do have to be an accredited investor to invest in early-stage deep tech, but there’s no reason retail investors can’t invest in publicly traded firms who do business in deep tech sectors.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean retail investors should invest in public firms in deep tech.
Furthermore, none of what I am about to say is investment advice. Please do not make investment decisions based on the content of this Substack.
We are now more than half way through 2025; Q2 concluded on Monday. Towards the end of the quarter, Marc Andreessen made an interesting claim on X:
"Only 2% of [public] companies [over the last century] were responsible for more than 90% of the aggregate net wealth creation." Long term public market investing = venture capital investing, whether you like it or not! HT @mjmauboussin
He thinks public markets investing outcomes, like VC outcomes, occur according to a power law; a small percentage of the investment universe create the majority of outcomes.
Dan Gray disagreed via subtweet and interpreted the paper differently. He thinks it considers a holding period that’s not useful for venture capitalists. VCs plan for a 10-year fund lifetime, though sometimes generational companies take longer to mature. In no case are VCs seriously contemplating a 90-year holding period. Moreover, he thinks the high growth that VCs look for isn’t sustainable over a long duration — not in VC, and not in the public markets.
This conversation caused me to reflect on how I’ve approached investing in the public markets, and how I’ve allocated my capital outside of index funds (which are the vast majority of my investments).
What I Hold
I own five stocks — Rocket Lab, AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, Amazon, and Oklo.
Between the first four, I cover the markets within the space sector that I see as mature enough for public investment:
Launch Service Providers (Rocket Lab)
Telecommunications Satellites (AST SpaceMobile)
Earth Observation Satellites (Planet Labs)
Ground Stations (Amazon)
Oklo is a reflection of my views on the importance of nuclear fission as an energy source of the future.
The stocks have three things in common:
A founder is the CEO. This gives me more experience evaluating founder managers as an investor without control.
The firm’s value proposition ties in to emerging technology that I think the public markets undervalue. This is what makes them deep tech, and therefore interesting to me.
I could invest in competitors through the public markets. This helps validate the business is sufficiently mature for retail investment.
Rocket Lab
I first purchased the stock on July 6, 2021.
I think it’s interesting because launch is enabling infrastructure for the whole space sector, and I like Peter Beck’s vision for the firm. Having staked a claim to the small-lift launch market through Electron, he is now pursuing both the medium-lift launch market through Neutron (key components of which are currently in testing), and manufacturing satellites. These two things have me convinced there’s a lot of growth potential in the stock over the next few years.
Alternatives to the stock at the level of my total investment in it include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman (though all their exposure to launch is through joint ventures). At the time of my initial purchase, alternatives also included Astra.
AST SpaceMobile
I first purchased the stock on May 7, 2021.
I think it’s interesting because telecommunications services are one of the largest parts of the commercial and civil space sectors. AST SpaceMobile is building a smaller constellation of larger spacecraft to connect directly with unmodified cell phones. The spacecraft are different from the competition because they operate in a lower orbit than is typical, and have more phased array antennas. The firm also has access to an interesting portion of the RF spectrum in the US through agreements with AT&T and Verizon.
Alternatives to the stock at the level of my total investment in it include Viasat, Iridium, and Globalstar.
If you invest in startups, like my writing, and want to chat about possible career opportunities, don’t hesitate to be in touch. The best way to get ahold of me is via email:
Planet Labs
I first purchased the stock on July 8, 2021.
I think it’s interesting because the approach of “we’re going to image every inch of the planet every day” isn’t what the competition seems to be doing. I think it’ll create a differentiated data moat for the firm which I expect it to monetize.
Alternatives to the stock at the level of my total investment in it include BlackSky and Satellogic.
Amazon
I first purchased the stock on December 22, 2023.
I think it’s interesting because the firm has a product offering for spacecraft ground stations as a service. Amazon is also one of only a few companies that’s certified to hold classified data on its cloud servers. I think there’s some really interesting synergies there. As a conglomerate, Amazon is additionally launching a space telecommunications constellation. Amazon also does all sorts of other things not relating to aerospace (which are likely more substantial to the firm’s valuation), and is on the bleeding edge of robot deployments. The rationale for my investment initially was the growth potential I see in the AWS Ground Station product and Project Kuiper. This, as well as the robot exposure, are why I continue to hold it.
Alternatives to the stock as a ground station provider at the level of my total investment in it include Kongsberg Gruppen (traded in Norway). At the time of my initial purchase, alternatives also included Microsoft (which has since sold its ground stations).
Oklo
I first purchased the stock on March 25, 2025.
I think this stock is interesting because energy needs are increasing as AI becomes more popular. In this sense, the connection with Sam Altman (who has since stepped back) was a positive signal. The firm’s technical approach seems compelling to me because a liquid metal-cooled reactor sounds safer than water-cooled technology. Nuclear power is also a space with massive regulatory moats, and Oklo’s made a lot of progress towards its design’s approval.
Alternatives to the stock at the level of my total investment in it include Constellation, NuScale Power, and Talen Energy.
Performance to Date
My goal is to capture outsized growth in emerging technology companies over the medium term based on my view of the technologies that are core to the business. Given my planned holding period, I believe that two numbers are critical when I invest in individual companies — the buying price, and the selling price.
However, I am not looking for outcomes on any specific timeframe, and I’m certainly not a day trader. Even as a patient investor, Internal Rate of Return can be a useful way of thinking about relative investment performance — so the purchase and selling dates are also important numbers when I look at how my stock picks are performing.
With all of that in mind, I could share stock price charts for the firms I’ve invested in, but I don’t think they’re nearly as interesting as the Internal Rate of Return and Multiple On Invested Capital.
So here’s a pair of charts I put together which show the performance of my current holdings from when they were purchased to the end of Q2 2025. They show the stocks in my portfolio, my portfolio overall, and two benchmark indexes:12
VOO is Vanguard’s S&P 500 index ETF. If I wasn’t holding these stocks, I’d have likely just invested more in VOO.
VBK is Vanguard’s small-cap growth index ETF. It represents the ETF product I’d use to index this portion of the market.
In this chart, as with the one that follows, the left portion looks at individual stocks within the portfolio, and the right portion compares my portfolio to benchmarks. The center of the circle represents the metric in the title, and the size of the circle is a function of how valuable the equity was at the end of the quarter.
If I had sold all my holdings at the closing price on Monday, I’d have outperformed both benchmark funds by more than 3x. Most of this is due to Rocket Lab’s performance over my holding period.
In terms of IRR, Rocket Lab and Planet Labs have comparable performance — though I’ve invested much more heavily in Rocket Lab. Oklo is the big winner here, by about an order of magnitude. I only bought Oklo this year, which highlights the sensitivity of IRR to the holding period.
As expected, Amazon performs the worst stock by both metrics because it is the most mature company, though it performs better than VOO as an index in both cases as well.
One of the reasons I think I’m outperforming VBK so much is that the best small-cap stocks become medium-cap stocks, which Vanguard tracks in a different ETF (VOT). In this sense, VOO is probably a better benchmark because its great successes remain in the index.
Looking Forward
One challenge I encountered as I started investing in individual stocks was understanding how the investing public thinks about emerging technology firms. I’ve got my views, but alignment with the markets is important to get a return on public equities because if the markets don’t like the firm, the price will drop.
This was fascinating, because on the VC side, I don’t view myself as all that skilled at picking startups where great outcomes are dependent on consumer sentiment.
But in the public markets, the money-making opportunity isn’t where I think the technology is interesting as much as where that view intersects with the market’s perspective on the firm’s potential.
This is critical because it drives my other key issue looking forward: knowing when to sell.
Some research I came across earlier this year makes it sound like that’s a totally different skill set. It’s not one I’ve had all that much practice with.
While I’m emotionally happy with my portfolio as it currently stands, I’m probably overcommitted to Rocket Lab. I am very excited for the firm’s future, and I don’t have something I’m more excited about. As a result, I’m continuing to hold it. However, from a portfolio construction perspective it looks…more like a VC portfolio than it probably should, according to how Dan thinks about stocks (though Marc might say this is normal).
Apropos diversification, deep tech sectors where I’m considering making investments in the public markets include:
quantum technology
robot design or manufacturing
maritime technology
All ETF price data came from Yahoo Finance, and is the closing price of the day. All stock price data came from Vanguard, and is either the price paid or the closing price reported on June 30, 2025.
To simplify the math, I assume there were no dividends at all over the holding periods.