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: Crypto Market Cap Could Reach $5.5 Trillion by Displacing Gold
“If you accept just as a store of value the total gold market at 11 trillion dollars, half of that, five and a half trillion dollars, if you just had generational shift where people said, you know what, I prefer this in the same way they prefer Bonobos to Docke…”
Wolfe: Lux Avoids Nuclear Startups Because Timelines Depend on Public Acceptance
“People that are pursuing nuclear power today, at the moment, do not count us as investors. Because I believe that the timeframes are not dependent upon the technology development. They're dependent on popular acceptance.”
Wolfe: VCs Will Never Admit Slowing Investments to Protect Deal Flow
“We will never publicly come out and say, we're slowing down our pace. Because anybody that does that is going to lose deal flow.”
Wolfe: Psychology drives 90% of Lux Capital's successes and 99% of problems
“All that's important, but what really matters is understanding human nature and psychology, and so, 90% of our successes and 99% of our problems in our companies are us playing armchair psychologist and trying to diagnose, why is this team not effective?”
Wolfe: Only a dozen elite scientists generate America's deep-tech startup diaspora
“And there's probably a dozen such scientists in the war in the country. Where that you in the US where you can go and find these people and the postdocs and where they sort of, ah, traverse to and find that diaspora and develop relationships with them, stay cl…”
Wolfe: Satellite imagery will commoditize while AI data processing captures the value
“All the imagery that's going to be coming off of these satellites is going to be commoditized, and the real value is going to be the processing of that using artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at different spaces over different times to make …”
Wolfe: Disreputable advisory board members signal a startup CEO's poor judgment
“But then I see an advisory board with one or two people, and for me, these are, like, red flag people. They're, like, total BS scientists or promoters or, like, authors that I think are full of it, and I just, like, shake my head, and to me, it's a It's a sign…”
Wolfe: Technological progress follows inevitable directional vectors independent of specific actors
“If you look at a directional arrow of progress in energy, you went from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons to uranium, and the undeniable arrow of progress there was more and more energy density per unit of raw material. When you discover the directional arrow of p…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital's unanimous consensus investments have typically been very wrong
“And so, when the team has total consensus, we typically make an investment, and we've typically been very wrong.”
Wolfe: Bill Gates will aggressively eviscerate flawed ideas in the boardroom
“You know, publicly, he sort of has this Mr. Rogers persona, you know, sweater, and I think in the boardroom, you know, he'll eviscerate somebody. Somebody will say something, he'll be like, why would you possibly do that? You know, that's the stupidest idea, a…”
Wolfe: Venture capitalists have shifted to funding irrelevant 'fufu' mobile apps
“And I think that that guard has given way to people that are funding, you know, what I consider fufu apps and You know, mobile stuff that I think has very little relevance, but like real hard technology. It's provable. It's real. It's verifiable. It's not, you…”
Wolfe: Lux Capital hasn't used a financial spreadsheet in over a decade
“I joke, I haven't looked at a spreadsheet in over a decade. There's nothing for us to model.”
Lux Capital partners get one 'override' investment per fund despite team disagreement
“We have implemented, starting about five years ago, a process where if there's a super strong table pounder, where the vast majority of the team does not agree, but somebody is psychotically passionate about a particular entrepreneur and opportunity, they get …”
Wolfe predicts a massive pullback in institutional LP allocations to venture capital
“Private equity generally, of which venture capital is like, you know, the tiny bit that's generally clustered into that ass glass, I think is going to see a huge pullback in at least new allocations, if not the pace of allocations.”
Wolfe: WeWork will face severe downside operating leverage when economic conditions contract
“The operating leverage that those businesses, by the way, get on the upside is huge. But once you have this precipitous pruning and these people start disappearing, I think the operating leverage that you get on the downside is going to be really painful. And …”
Wolfe: Passive ETF unwinds will crush bad companies and revive short sellers
“In the public markets, companies are going to be sold indiscriminately in the same way that they're being bought indiscriminately. So I think that there is a big structural issue. I think that similar as we looked at vaccines when they were out of favor, today…”
Wolfe: The future of AI and machine learning is in GPUs
“The future of AI and machine learning is going to be in GPUs.”
Wolfe: Cognitive diversity is the form of diversity that matters most
“My whole view is that the diversity that matters most is cognitive diversity.”
Wolfe: Vast Majority of People Will Keep Using and Trusting Closed AI Labs
“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.”
Wolfe: Europe Is One Sahel Terror Event from Its Next Afghanistan
“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…”
Wolfe: Increasing VC fund size is the enemy of returns and founder alignment
“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.”
Wolfe: Science and technology is a major vector for modern diplomacy
“And you think about the diplomatic vectors of military and economic and political, science and technology is another vector for diplomacy.”
Wolfe: OpenAI Generates Roughly $13B, 70% from $20/Month Subscribers
“Today, roughly, thirteen billion of revenue at OpenAI. 70% of that revenue is from 20 dollar a month paying subscribers like me.”
Wolfe: Wearables Passively Recording 24/7 Will See Mainstream Youth Adoption
“There will be lots of little devices. They will start with third-party pendants and rings and necklaces, hardware microphones, recording passively, twenty-four-seven every day. The young people will be comfortable with this as digital natives.”
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 → |