A letter from LPPFusion President and Chief Scientist Eric Lerner to our investors, donors and supporters:
Hi fusion fan!
In the midst of a new financial panic, we’ve received questions from many of you as to its effects on LPPFusion, and we thank you for your concerns. Please be assured that LPPFusion has no financial connections with any institutions involved in the crisis so far, that our bank accounts are fully insured, and that we do not have any external debt at all, nor are we seeking any credit.
However, we do share the concern that the extreme uncertainty that goes with a crisis, added to the already great economic uncertainty existing previously, will cause investors to pull back from all “high-risk” investments, including LPPFusion. We noted last year that total crowdfunding in the US dropped by half last year, and our own crowdfunding reflected that drop. If you and others lump LPPFusion in one big “high risk” basket and don’t invest in our fusion future, that could deprive us of the funds that we need to get to fusion energy.
But such a pull-back would be an emotional, not a rational, response to the crisis. The most hard-headed, realistic thing to do with money available for medium-to-long-term investment is to invest in LPPFusion now. Let me explain why.
A financial panic is a sharp reminder that “money” in all its forms consist of symbols of value that people use with each other—symbols, like words or numbers. Money, after all, is not actual real things of value, like food or energy. And since money consists of symbols, with meaning ascribed to them by people, the actual amount of value symbolized by any piece of money—bank account or stock or bond –is a product of what people THINK its value is and how they act on those thoughts. Today, millions of people can collectively change their minds in minutes or hours, so in a panic, the value of almost all “money” becomes rapidly variable and the risk of almost all financial investments sky-high.
Investment in LPPFusion is completely different from all this, especially right now. There are no short-term risks attached to our shares, because they don’t trade on any exchange. The biggest long-term risk is that we are NOT on the fastest route to fusion energy, and that risk has just dropped a lot with the publication of our new paper March 9 in the Journal of Fusion Energy.
That paper states clearly that we are, right now, in the lead in scientific results that show how close we are to practical fusion energy—that we ARE now on the fastest route to fusion, both in progress per year, and by an even wider lead in terms of progress per money spent. The large significance of the publication is that these statements are now not just ours, but were carefully reviewed and passed by our scientific peers—who are researchers with our fusion company competitors. We are now the acknowledged leader in the race among all private fusion firms. (We know the media hasn’t reported this yet, but we’re working on this!)
This validation of our approach is not based on opinion but on reality: scientific results in the lab, that don’t change with the click of a mouse. Just like you know the power is on if the light goes on, we– and now our peers– know we are currently the fastest to fusion.
Of course, we’re not going as fast as we thought we would and we know that many of you who’ve been supporting us are deeply frustrated by that. So are we! But, as we’ve written before, it is clear that the critical limitation on our rate of progress is the lack of financial resources required to hire the people we need for even for such a small device. If we had had two full-time researchers in our lab instead of one, our progress would have been much faster.
That problem links to the second long-term risk LPPFusion faces—that we won’t get the financial resources needed to keep us on the fastest route to fusion. But that is a risk that investors can self-protect from—by investing in LPPFusion in a way that maximizes the chances that others will as well. You can, right now, help protect us against lack of resources, and speed us towards fusion by investing now.
If you are an accredited investor, with $5,000 or more available for medium-to long term investment, I’m asking you to invest this month to help us reach our March goal of $100,000. Reaching that goal will speed us toward fusion in two ways. First, it will mean that I stop pending time fundraising and can get back to the lab to help Dr. Syed Hassan finish assembling our switching system for new experiments. (That’s going well, but needs care and time to be done right.) Second, the “vote of confidence” from existing investors will help jump start the crowdfunding campaign we intend to start this month on Wefunder and then, in May on StartEngine. Crowd funding is based in part on following a crowd and this $100,000 can be the “spark” for a much larger flow of funds from Wefunder. It also will help with larger investors who are talking to us.
If you want to invest, please send an email to us at invest@lppfusion.com and we’ll send you the subscription agreement and wire info.
If you are not an accredited investor—everybody else!—please join our crowdfunding campaign as soon as it starts—it will be a short one. You can invest there as little as $200. You’ll be notified as soon as we start.
To sum up—no short-term risks, reduced long-term risk, confirmed as the fastest route to fusion—based on real peer-reviewed results. And, of course, when you invest in LPPFusion your return will not be just in share price if we succeed. You and all of us will also get a future with clean, safe, decentralized, unlimited fusion energy, far cheaper than any existing energy source. That’s a future worth investing in.
Yours for fusion,
Eric Lerner