Josh Wolfe

“So Josh, co-founder and managing partner at Lux, which has done, basically did the contrarian thing, which has now become consensus around defense and deep tech and hard tech, and is kind of one of the men of the moment for things, calling things like Andrel, …”

“I think that still going back to the first point about habituation, the vast majority of people are just going to continue to use closed labs and trust it more.”

“So far with OpenAI, valuation has gone from, like, you know, sub hundred million to trillion and plus, and you've had six diaspora companies that have all achieved, you know, tens of billions of dollars that have spun off of it.”

“I think that Europe is fucked, and there are bright lights of amazing entrepreneurs that are doing the very thing that Europe has historically not done, which is risk taking. The floor for Europe is higher than the US, so people do not fall through that, but t…”

“And I do believe that the Sahel in Africa and the Maghreb, which is, you know, Mali, Sudan, Niger, Burkina Faso, you are one terror event away projected into Europe that that entire region becomes the west next to Afghanistan, all of which culminates in my con…”

“We do everything at Lux from about a third in biotech and robotic surgery and med devices and another third in aerospace and defense and industrial. The other third on core technology, which is everything from non-invasive brain machine interfaces to everythin…”

“Anduril has raised several billion dollars now. There are a few companies that are competing with them. There's a long tail of wannabe next gen defense tech companies, but Anduril is the 800 pound gorilla next prime.”

“The smart employees at those funds know that they will likely never see a dollar of carry. The larger the fund you raise, the harder it is to return in venture.”

“Fund size increasing is the enemy of returns. The incentives for the founders who want to have great investors that can be early stage investors that can scale with them over time, that's harder to do when you have a much bigger fund.”

“On the capital market side, you see hundreds of billions of dollars destroyed of people that play the same game that you did back in 2000 with fiber optic cables.”

“The next wave that I'm bullish about is going from two-dimensional AI in this current wave, which is pretty much saturated. That is everything from voice, video, images, text, code, anything that's popping off a screen, to thinking about the next wave of three…”

“There's a company called Physical Intelligence, known as Pi, that is the leader doing that.”

“The pendulum is going to shift. Maintenance is going to be in high demand. That means that there's an opportunity for new technologies to help maintain existing assets.”

“Today, if you're a scientist, you have to go to a scientific lab, a wet bench, a white lab coat. You're working with pipettes and beakers, centrifuges, shaking tables. All of that is going to be done by robots. Completely automated labs operated in the cloud w…”

“There's a myth that the best entrepreneurs are risk takers. When in reality, the best entrepreneurs are risk killers and they're trimming away failure paths. And Thing is when you trim away a failure path, your odds of success go up.”

“There's another adjacent theme, which I think is also really interesting, which is AI portends the death of APIs. So APIs allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with Uber and, you know, Spotify through the backend, through softwar…”

“I think that their ability with that market capitalization and that cash and the margin that they have, they can reinvent and buy a lot of things. So I think Jensen is a thoughtful capital allocator. I think he's benefited and caught lightning in a bottle over…”

“Today, I take my medical records as soon as I get them from top doctors, and I still put them into LLMs to see what did they miss, and sometimes it unearths some interesting correlations.”

“I would suspect that maybe you lose 10 to 30% of the people that you normally would have hired, but the people that are there are still like these 10 X coders, and now they have a machine that's helping them be like 20 to a hundred X.”

“So I'm absolutely convinced. Like, high certitude. I don't know exactly which company will do it. We've invested in some. They haven't worked. We'll invest in more. Hopefully they will. But this directional arrow of progress of the idea, by analogy, of machine…”

“And so, for me with Tesla, I think that they got away with accounting fraud. On warranty reserves and a whole bunch of other things. I think there was a lot of prestidigitation and magic of look over here while we're doing this. And today it doesn't matter bec…”

“Now, that said, SpaceX, I have no issue with. I think SpaceX is an extraordinary company. I think it's an incredibly important American company. I think without it, we would be at a massive disadvantage. I think it is truly a national treasure run by Gwen Shot…”

“You know, you've got similarly, the best entrepreneurs, when short sellers are like, you know, saying something, they don't want to ban short selling. They don't want short sellers to be arrested. They just prove them wrong.”

“I do think that we will see a return to Active managers that are able to discriminate true fundamentals, in part because I think that the cost of capital is just gonna rise and all the funny money of the past 10 years is, is gonna wash out.”

“So informational advantage, hard, analytical advantage, brilliant people combined with brilliant technology, really hard, and then it goes into this last one, which is the behavioral, and that, to me, Is the persistent thing.”

“And the great human feeling is commiserating about the thing that we experience together, or the memory and laughing hysterically, which I still do with my childhood friends, of this shared moment, and AI will never get that.”

“You may think you think the things you think because you analyzed and you reasoned or whatever, but no, the reason you think the thing you think is because of the five or six most important people around you. And they sort of believe something and you believe …”

“Everybody is here Monday through Friday now. You know, at first it was Monday through Thursday, take Friday. Now I'm like, look, if you need to leave, you go family first. It's a principle here. Never miss a concert, a recital, a science fair, but we need to b…”

“I think that's possible, 10 or 15 or 20 not doubling.”

“If there is an AI that is totally trained on my voice, and my likeness, and everything I've ever said, which I have done, that my kids would actually have a dad AI, and maybe they can consult it for questions, or, and is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I do…”

“I want to be right. I want to make money. I want the credit for it, but it really is about like the status because otherwise you would just do these things in private and totally in quiet.”

“I like to know what the editor put on C-Twenty-two, That's not as visible on the website, because there's meta information that the editor is saying, this is not important to be on the front page, but if I disagree, and I think that there's a magnitude of info…”

“It is this huge randomness generator, this huge optionality generator, and the accessibility, and I just, I absolutely love it. So that's another thing where I'm really rooting for Elon in the continued success of X, because I'll continue to pay a lot of money…”

“I'm on AI easily more than Google now, but I don't know, 2:03 hours a day.”

“I will put them into three different models at the same time. So I will open three different browsers, you know, arrange them, and put it into ChatGPT, put it into Claude, put it into one of the perplexity models that's not running on those two, and, you know,…”

“I've already given over again to the privacy gods everything that my screen sees. And so I trust that that's siloed on my device. It's not going to the cloud, but it's super helpful when I'm trying to search for something.”

“TikTok, of course, a huge one, right? We banned it years ago, right when it had become TikTok from Musical.ly, in part because at the time, I seemed like a conspiratorial nut saying, I don't trust this with the Chinese Communist Party having control over this.…”

“I think there's a ton of dry powder in venture capital and private equity, but a lot of it I call wet powder, and Because this money is basically reserved for companies and people don't realize.”

“I think it's a virtuous thing because it's shining a spotlight on a lot of things that were just done because they were done and you get this bloat or in some cases there was like, Overt obfuscation. And so I think sunlight heals all and putting a spotlight on…”

“To your core question, yes, I think that if I do a calculation, and I'm using a calculator instead of like doing math by pencil, that calculation is still an input into my output. If I'm using AI to generate Art and it's my prompt instead of the gesture of my …”

“Your reactions right now, I might say something, and you might say, ah, and maybe you actually thought it was profound, or maybe you're like, ah, this is not interesting at all, but there's something authentic, right, about this, and we are reading each other,…”

“Basically, is when you meet an entrepreneur who's got an uncurable, unhealable, you know, identity wound that ends up being somebody who ends up doing really well.”

“Josh Wolf at Lux Capital wrote his quarterly letter and he predicted that 30 to 50% of venture firms would cease to exist.”

“Josh Wolf, who is a VC at Lux Capital, likes to say, chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And he is right when he speaks about that.”

“And then the other piece of that, which is sort of a toxic combination, if in the wrong hands, and I think a productive one, if in the right hands is you need confidence to be able to believe in yourself and go and do something and persuade other people, you k…”

“A scientific worldview is basically trying to come up with better explanations and at best they can be tentatively held until a better explanation yet further comes along. And so part of that is a, is that similar mix, right? Of arrogance that you can know bet…”

“A manifestation of Lux itself is looking at all of these different disparate fields. Post facto, we can often find this, you know, nice connective narrative thread, but it's what I call randomness and optionality. So randomness and optionality is another, so, …”

“In our ancestral environment you know, when you go to like a Dunbar's number of, I don't know, a 150 people, you had a smaller group of people. And so it was more effective to punish a cheater. And they would be publicly ostracized, you know, from a small grou…”

“We end up going from a million in revenue to 40, 8020, 160 forty million of EBITDA. We sold that for 10 times EBITDA to Veolia.”

“This thing that was just conceived In our New York office ended up removing 99% of the radiation from the Fukushima disaster, particularly around cesium and strontium”

“It's not really so much even a technology or an engineering problem. It's not even, we have hundreds of reactors that are working globally and we have decades of safety experience and know how. And even though you have an aging workforce, there's just like tre…”

“The cheaper your electricity and the more power you have, you can desalinate water. You could have abundant water. You could have abundant crops and agriculture, but it all starts with how do we get clean, abundant energy? And to me, the answer is elemental po…”

“The digitization of human scent is coming. Shazam for smell. The ability to identify a single molecule in a room is coming. The ability, not only a single molecule that has meaning to you. I mean, literally a molecule, a structure actually conveys to you know,…”

“I think we are going to learn more about human consciousness as we interrogate the systems and try to understand how much of the modern approaches in an AI are working to sense, make models, make predictions on those models, iterate and learn. And I think that…”

“Remember, you're investing in companies where the new normal has been that a company with five or seven or eight or sub-ten million ARR, annual recurring revenue, is getting a billion-dollar valuation. We used to look at things where it was like one or two or …”

“So what I think will tip this, and I would put my highest conviction that this is the cause, is LP indigestion.”

“And so we are spending more and more time on the deeply technical, very hard to do Under five competitors and helping those entrepreneurs start those companies because we're not playing in an auction game.”

“The problem is there are a lot of competitors in many of those businesses, and often the reasons why one becomes that runaway success, even in the power law distribution within a sector, is sometimes random. Sometimes it's related to locks. Sometimes it's rela…”

“And in this environment, the amount of diligence that the average investor is doing to identify those risks is cursory at best. It is like showing up for the finals exam if you're in college or, you know, your kids and just winging it. People are just winging …”

“Facebook made an initial entreaty. We rejected it. They effectively nearly tripled their offer. It became more financially attractive”