Josh Wolfe
30 statements across 3 episodes · 11 bullish · 13 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Aug 20, 2018 by Josh Wolfe · said 10 times in 7 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Josh Wolfe's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Ted Seides (6), Renata Quintini (2), Vincent Daniel (1), Sahil Bloom (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Josh Wolfe, oldest first
Aug 20, 2018
Aug 20, 2018 negative
Founders should view competition as infuriating, not as market validation
“When entrepreneurs say of competition, that's validating. When somebody sees news of a competitor and says, oh, you know, it's definitely validating of our market or something like that, I pull my hair out because I don't want you to find competition validatin…”
Aug 20, 2018 positive
Wolfe: VCs must be cynical and distrustful to spot carny charlatans
“You've got all kinds of carny charlatans that basically sculpt you into a somewhat cynical, squinty eyed, distrustful person of, you know, somebody trying to scheme over you, which I think in my business where you never really know if somebody is going to be l…”
Aug 20, 2018 neutral
Aug 20, 2018 neutral
Wolfe considers a 3.5x return on Crystal IS a process failure
“And here we ended up making three, three and a half times our money, but we considered it a process failure because all the expectations, all the modeling that we had and what the outcome could be, the reasons that a business would be bought all proved false. …”
Aug 20, 2018 bullish
Wolfe: Future computing will replace keyboards with invisible human-machine interfaces
“When you step back, and you see that directional arrow of progress, it is that we are going to be less
Hunched over a QWERTY keyboard and a mouse and much more natural human interaction with our computers, which means the technology has to get more and more so…”
Aug 20, 2018 negative
Aug 20, 2018 negative
Lux Capital passed on Cruise at $80M pre before GM's $1B acquisition
“The story which I tell publicly is about cruise automation. We offered them a twenty million dollar financing at a forty million pre, and they wanted eighty million pre money, and we thought that was absurd and too high. In the course of diligence, we introduc…”
Aug 20, 2018 bearish
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 …”
Aug 20, 2018 negative
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…”
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
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 …”
Feb 21, 2022 bullish
Wolfe: AR Will Beat VR Due to Innate Desire for Physical Presence
“Virtual reality will be for some a medium to express their genius and unleash it for the rest of the people. But I am generally less excited about VR. Why? Because I do think that there is this natural analog human desire that is hundreds of thousands of years…”
Feb 21, 2022 bullish
Feb 21, 2022 neutral
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…”
Feb 21, 2022 negative
Feb 21, 2022
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
Feb 21, 2022 bullish
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
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.”
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
Wolfe: Sub-$10M ARR Startups Routinely Received Billion-Dollar Valuations
“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 …”
Feb 21, 2022 bullish
Dec 8, 2025 negative
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.”
Dec 8, 2025 bearish
Dec 8, 2025 bearish
Dec 8, 2025 positive
Dec 8, 2025 neutral
Wolfe: Lux Capital divides investments equally across biotech, aerospace/defense, and core tech
“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…”
Dec 8, 2025 bullish
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…”
Dec 8, 2025 bullish
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…”
Dec 8, 2025 bullish