Josh Wolfe
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Lux Capital · Journalist, Forbes · Founder, Lux Capital. On 6 shows, 9 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Josh Wolfe is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Lux Capital, a venture firm focused on ambitious scientific ventures. He is a founding investor and board member at Kymeta alongside Bill Gates.
6shows
9appearances
192statements
33resolved
23supported
4contradicted
70%fully supported
58said about them ↓ Everything Josh Wolfe said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wolfe: Tesla got away with accounting fraud on warranty reserves
“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…”
Wolfe: Europe Is Screwed by Demographics and Failure to Assimilate
“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…”
Wolfe: Smart employees at mega VC funds will likely never see carry
“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.”
Wolfe: AI infrastructure buildout will destroy hundreds of billions in capital
“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.”
Wolfe: Samsung will decline like Intel due to sclerotic bureaucracy
“If I had to come up with somewhat pejorative analogy, I think Samsung is going to be more like Intel. I think that they're just a little bit sclerotic and bureaucratic and slow moving, and it's going to sort of ebb and decline.”
Wolfe: SK Hynix will bypass export controls easier than Micron
“I think Micron is a US company which is going to be more constrained by restrictions that are put on export control, and I think SK being a Korean company is going to be able to skirt those in the same way that NVIDIA has with, you know, distribution to China …”
Wolfe: LLMs will trend toward zero and become commoditized
“Being able to do that is the real gold, and the large language models are effectively, like, over time, I think, going to trend toward zero in a commodity excavator of that data.”
Wolfe: AI will generate full feature films without actors or crew
“One of our companies, Runway ML, you can, and there's others that you can conjure. Today it's 10 seconds, but tomorrow it'll be two minutes, and full feature films with no key grips, no lighting, no costume design, no set design, no actors, and voices entirely…”
Wolfe: Mindfulness harms societal progress, which requires bitter, driven people
“Society benefits from everybody being plagued by these kinds of things, because it leads to human progress and, you know, woe to the
Bay Area, you know adherent to mindfulness and meditation, you know, to find calm and peace.
Like we don't get peace from pro…”
Wolfe praises Bezos as rational capital allocator, criticizing Musk's truthfulness
“And the quibble is with his relationship with the truth. And I look at Gates and I look at Bezos, both of whom I admire for different reasons. Bezos in particular, who I consider one of the greatest and most rational capital allocators, the amount of capital t…”
Wolfe: Musk's Twitter bid was a smokescreen to dump Tesla stock
“You know, he has sold eight and a half billion dollars of stock. This was a wonderful way, just like his Twitter poll before to sell stock, to get out of Twitter. Now you could, I mean, sorry to get out of Tesla.”
Wolfe: Geopolitical Rivalry with China and Russia Eclipses Climate Change
“So I think that those two forces are really going to be probably the most important thing to me, more important than climate change, more important than a lot of the things that have captured the current zeitgeist.”
Wolfe: The Sahel and Maghreb Will Become Europe's Next Afghanistan
“I believe that that will be the next Afghanistan, particularly for Europe. I think that you will have Mali pulling France in. You will have Belgium being pulled in, you will have the UK and other EU countries adjacently being pulled in, the US being pulled in,…”
Wolfe: Childless CEOs over 50 tend to be overly controlling operators
“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”
Wolfe: SoftBank-funded unicorn capital is 'dead' and trapped under their control
“Many of these businesses either have commercial deals that are tied to them, or economic terms that are tied to them where the VCs or the entrepreneurs that might be celebrating, they just became a unicorn and are valued over a billion dollars and SoftBank jus…”
Wolfe calls IBM Watson 'utter BS' and dangerous in its marketing
“And then the last thing that I rail against also, which I think is utter BS is IBM Watson. And I think it's actually dangerous what they're promoting.”
Josh Wolfe: Tourist VCs investing in frontier tech will lose a lot of money
“I think that there are a lot of tourist VCs who are in these domains that are going to lose a lot of money”
Wolfe: Tech's Praise of Failure Is Disingenuous and Founders Are Faking It
“I think that there is a culture that talks about praising and prizing failure, but I think it's disingenuous. I think people pretend to wear failure on, you know, as this badge, and every time you ever see an entrepreneur and you ask, oh, how are things going,…”
Wolfe: AI infrastructure debt has a dangerous duration mismatch
“And then you have like duration mismatch between like the hard assets and the financing. So like the chip, depending if you look at meta or Amazon debate, whether it's a three year or five year depreciation, but it's, you know, called three, the debt, Amortize…”
Wolfe: OpenAI has produced six spin-offs valued at tens of billions
“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.”
Wolfe: At least 50% of subscale VC funds will go out of business
“The long tail of funds that are subscale, I have predicted that you would see a 50% involuntary exit or extinction rate, that they would go out of business, and why? Because they're under-reserved, they've over-invested, they have too many portfolio companies,…”
Wolfe: General Atlantic, General Catalyst, and a16z will go public
“And I believe that at least General Atlantic, General Catalyst, Andreessen, maybe Insight, maybe Lightspeed, go public.”
Wolfe: Anduril is the 800-pound gorilla next-prime defense contractor
“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.”
Wolfe: Oligopolistic M&A bidding wars generate better returns than IPOs
“Our best outcomes, as an aside, have always been an oligopolistic industry structure where there's three or four players who are going to irrationally compete to own the asset because they want it and they don't want their competitor to get it leads to the bes…”
The other half of the tape: Josh Wolfe's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 56 times in 33 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most John Coogan 9Harry Stebbings 8Ted Seides 6Sahil Bloom 4Jordi Hays 3Greg Isenberg 3Shane Parrish 2Renata Quintini 2
Statements about Josh Wolfe, by other people (2)
Colonna agrees with Lux Capital's Josh Wolfe: chips on shoulders drive success
“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.”
Lessin: Defense and deep tech have shifted from contrarian to consensus
“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, …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
TBPN 22
20VC 13
Capital Allocators 10
the Startup Ideas Podcast 7
the Knowledge Project 4
2026 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Elon's Moon Mass Driver: Here's How He'll Do It
- SpaceX’s Lunar Mass Driver, OpenAI Hires Meta’s Top Ad Exec, Zuck Builds CEO Agent | Diet TBPN
- The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao, Founder @ Abridge · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 13 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- FACT CHECKERS vs. tech article (ep14)
- How to Spend a Trillion Dollars Fast (ep13)
- Taylor Lorenz Trades Teams (ep16)
- How BILLIONAIRES dress for XMAS (ep17)
- Elon's Big Week (ep4)
- David Frankel, MP @Founder Collective: Investing Lessons from Seeding Coupang, Pillpack & Suno|E1214 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Rod Wong – Empty Rooms: Innovation in Biotech at RTW (Capital Allocators, EP. 310)
- Jerry Colonna: The CEO Whisperer
- Dr. Julie Gurner (Part 1): Caring Deeply, Challenging Directly
- Porter Collins and Vincent Daniel - Big Shorts and Big Longs (Capital Allocators, EP.325)
- 20VC: What are the World's Tech Leaders Running From? Fear? Insecurity? Poverty? What Drives the Best with Orlando Bravo, Bill Ackman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Parker Conrad, Tobi Luttke, Brian Armstrong and more..
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 17 mentions in 11 episodes 2 per episode
- Kyle Harrison: Why 75% of Active Investors Will Disappear in the Next Few Years | 20VC #940 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Parker Conrad: How I Got Ousted from Zenefits and Came Back with a Vengence | 20VC #932 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Investor Psychology & Trading on the Future With Raoul Pal
- 20VC: Why You Should Think Twice Before Taking Multi-Stage Money at Seed, Why Venture Has Never Been Less Collaborative, How Becoming a Parent Made Me a Better Investor and Why We Should Be Optimistic About the Future of Diversity in Venture with Deena Sh
- The Future of Gaming | Ryan Wyatt, Polygon Studios
- Renata Quintini and Roseanne Wincek – Renegade Spin-Out in the Supercritical Stage, Venture is Eating the Investment World 11 (Capital Allocators, EP. 242)
- How To Create Your Own Luck With Julien Smith
- Sahil Bloom – Creativity, Investing, and Engineered Serendipity (Capital Allocators, EP.249)
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: The 7 Requirements For Startup Scaling, Why VCs Must Approach Every Conversation with A Yes Mentality & Why We Will See The Humanisation of Technology with Renata Quintini, Partner @ Lux Capital
- 20VC: Semil Shah on How To Raise An Institutional Venture Fund, Why LPs Mostly Have Reserve Allocation Theory Wrong & Why IPOs and Acquisitions Are Severely Constrained
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Josh's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Lux Capital | 2 | 92 | 64% 9/14 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | 3 | 62 | 82% 9/11 | full record on Capital Allocators → | |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Lux Capital | 1 | 17 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Journalist, Forbes | 1 | 15 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
 MORE OR LESSLEDGER | Founder, Lux Capital | 1 | 5 | 0% 0/1 | full record on More or Less → |
| TBPNLEDGER | 1 | 1 | — | full record on TBPN → |