Airbus Ventures’ Partner in Tokyo, Lewis Pinault manages our activities in Asia Pacific while developing our Space-related portfolio across the globe. Trained as an engineer and planetary scientist, over the previous decade Lewis supported Airbus innovation projects connecting researchers, startups and sponsors. His prior BCG consulting career culminated in his Financial Institutions Partnership at Coopers & Lybrand. Concurrently a researcher at University College London’s Centre for Planetary Sciences, Lewis is an MIT graduate; he completed his London School of Economics MSc as a Fulbright Scholar, and a juris doctorate combining Planetary Geophysics and International Public Law at the University of Hawai‘i as a NASA Space Grant Fellow.
Q&A:
In a few short words, describe your personal ethos:
I aim to embrace complexity, and be an agent of stimulus in our ever-emergent planetary system, looking for the significant patterns that can lead us to new solutions and opportunities to better secure and discover our place in the cosmos. Complexity is not randomness; there is a hidden order in it, attractors and significant patterns that await our discovery if we sharpen our pattern recognition skills, draw on the collective resources of the best minds on our planet, and develop the sensors that our best entrepreneurs can offer. If there are enough active agents in any complex — but necessarily bounded — system, and if there is a sufficient diversity of agents in that system, things can and will suddenly crystallise — and a hidden order will be revealed. This isn’t a new-found religion or philosophy, just good complexity theory mathematics, evidenced in mineralogical, biological and even behavioral systems. It’s certainly mineralogy at its best: shake the phase state up with the right bounds of heat and pressure and add in a mix of active ingredients and boom! — you get crystal, the order that was always there in the goo. With our entrepreneurs I hope to refine not only good pattern recognition skills to understand the system; I want to foment the system and accelerate the emergence of its greatest attractors.
What led you to VC?
My paths to venture capital were long and multiple, but somehow all necessary and ultimately strongly convergent. I was deeply drawn to astrophysics and aero/astro engineering, but found myself working in a shipyard on a Japanese Antarctic icebreaker. I can’t resist the boundaries of exploration. I grew up with the thrill of the Gemini and Apollo missions, and found myself looking for other business and government models that might support long-term planning, when their momentum failed to realize the Moon base I planned to work at; hence my move to Japan straight out of MIT, to find another model. I piloted seabed mining projects - now in fact as much a threat as a boon to our planetary system - and went from there under a Fulbright to work on Sea-Use Law, the Antarctic Treaty, and their application to Outer Space development. Diverting in to the Boston Consulting Group for what was meant to be short prelude to further research in science and diplomacy almost unraveled my life: 2 years became a decade, High Tech M&A drifted into banking, and by the time I became a Financial Institutions Partner with Coopers & Lybrand in Hong Kong I was pretty sure I’d done something terribly wrong with my life. I saw a video of NASA’s cheap and cheerful Pathfinder rover on Mars, transmitted over the Internet no less, and I knew I had to pull the ejection handle. I left my partnership, moved to Hawaii, and, sponsored by NASA, undertook a joint programme in planetary geophysics and international public law. I became a meteoriticist, examining samples from the Moon and slicing up bits of asteroids to understand not only their formation and mineralogy, but thinking through the policy implications of their mining and exploitation. Satellite remote sensing for minerals was becoming practical, and, with some fellow researchers, I tried to sell some data analytics to interested large corporates – my first start-up experience. I quickly sank into the mire of IP, valuation, and insider / outsider tension that makes these kinds of interfaces hard. Airbus flipped this dynamic on me, and invited me to work the challenge from the inside, even as I continued my research in planetary sciences. Working with Thomas, now Airbus Ventures Managing Partner, we tried many variations of innovation centers and governance, and startup accelerators and incubators, and came to conclude that a pure VC under Airbus’ wing was the right answer to unlock the trust, stamina, and enthusiasm needed for deep tech start-up success. So, this is my life in VC: drawing on my macro-engineering passions for tackling planetary scale challenges, my once unloved financial skills for good deal structuring, and my research dreams helping me better empathize with the extraordinary innovators and entrepreneurs that enrich the life of Airbus Ventures.
You are…
An explorer in search of other explorers, on a quest whose purpose seems clear — cherishing the biological and civilizational wonders of life on this unique home planet and responsibly stewarding its amazing and fragile biosphere, so that one day we can celebrate the discovery of complex life and civilisations on other worlds.