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: 50% of AI Inference Will Run Locally On-Device
“I'm of the belief that 50% of your inference and your queries will be on device. They will not be on device going to the cloud. They will be on device. Locally hosted on models that are either etched into the silicon or using flash memory.”
Wolfe: 2D AI is saturated, the next frontier is biology and robotics
“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…”
Wolfe: Scientific wet lab research will be completely automated by robots
“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…”
Wolfe: AI Agents Interacting on Frontends Portend the Death of APIs
“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…”
Wolfe: 30% to 50% of AI inference will occur on-device
“I think that you're going to end up doing a lot of inference on device. Meaning, instead of going, ah, to the cloud and typing a query, like, 30 to 50% of your inference may be on an Apple or an Android device.”
Wolfe: AI Will Cut Software Engineering Hiring by 10% to 30%
“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.”
Wolfe: DeepSeek release accelerated OpenAI model launch timelines
“The second that DeepSea comes out, it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from OpenAI of when are we gonna release models.”
Wolfe: AI model developers without proprietary data will struggle
“I think the people that are continuing to develop ever better models, unless they have proprietary data, are going to be sort of screwed.”
Wolfe: Automated 24/7 Machine-Led Scientific Discovery is Inevitable
“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…”
Wolfe: Physical reactions will bottleneck AI-driven scientific breakthroughs
“So, I definitely think that there will be this recursive improvement, but you're still going back to being rate limited by time and biological or chemical reactions. You still need to instantiate this into a physical experiment. And so you can model and simula…”
Wolfe: Everyone will run multiple virtual companies within 20 years
“Like that, in 10 or 20 years, people look back and be like, how did we not see that coming? And look at all the jobs that are being created, because every single person is now creating And has, like, six virtual companies.”
Wolfe: Allocations to Private Credit Are Now Overdone
“Where private credit in particular, I think, was wise to do a few years ago, and now is overdone.”
Wolfe: Retail Inflows into Illiquid Private Equity Could Cause a Massive Blow-Up
“There's something here to watch about the flood of retail money that will go into illiquid alts, private equity in particular, and new vehicles that are formed to be able to provide liquidity because of that. And I think that that's both going to be really int…”
Wolfe: Trained AI Avatars of Loved Ones Will Become a Reality
“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…”
Wolfe: Anduril will be a $30B–$50B public company with software margins
“I deeply believe that Anderil in the next few years will be a 30 to fifty billion dollar publicly traded business doing single-digit mid-billions of revenue with software-like margins that are not like these cost-plus margins, so that is gonna usher in a big w…”
Wolfe: US SOCOM drone operations require legal authorization for strike ratios
“In the Pacific region with SOCOM, and there's a drone operator who's flying the drone, there's another drone operator who's piloting the weapon system, and there's two lawyers. So, they're helping the commander who is effectively given, like, a godshot of, you…”
Wolfe: Lux banned TikTok internally and helped push for its divestment
“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.…”
Wolfe: Much of VC and PE 'dry powder' is actually reserved 'wet powder'
“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.”
Wolfe: 38% of US AI researchers are from China
“In our own country, in the United States, 38% of researchers in AI are from China.”
Wolfe: Venture Returns and LP Cash Distributions Will Slow or Turn Negative
“Eventually the great things that we've seen over the past few years, which are exceptional returns, not just unrealized, but realized and returned and distributed cash to LPs is going to either slow down or reverse and potentially be negative, which is somethi…”
Wolfe: LP Indigestion Will Tip and Deflate the Venture Capital Market
“So what I think will tip this, and I would put my highest conviction that this is the cause, is LP indigestion.”
Wolfe: Software Winners Depend on Randomness and Momentum, Not Better Tech
“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…”
Wolfe: Average Venture Investor Does Cursory Diligence and Wings Decisions
“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 …”
Wolfe: Denying Early Liquidity to CTRL-Labs Founders Was a Colossal Mistake
“What I realized was what I should have done, which was a colossal and historic mistake, was make sure that we gave some interim liquidity. Because if we had put a few million dollars in that founder's pocket early on, the ability to stay the course would have …”
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 → |