Josh Wolfe
50 statements across 3 episodes · 25 bullish · 11 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jan 22, 2019 by Josh Wolfe · said 4 times in 2 episodes since 2023 · 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 Shane Parrish (2), Jerry Colonna (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Josh Wolfe, oldest first
Jan 22, 2019 negative
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…”
Jan 22, 2019 negative
Jan 22, 2019 bullish
Wolfe: Lux Capital is funding a genetics company to sequence rare mutants
“And so I'm doing this right now in the genetic space, you know, a space that I know a little bit about, but we started with this crazy thesis about X-Men. Could you find the rare mutants in the world and could you sequence them? And search for them, and then s…”
Jan 22, 2019 bearish
Jan 22, 2019 bearish
Jan 22, 2019 positive
Wolfe: Formally recording deal judgments is essential to prevent hindsight bias
“The process of recording people's judgments and perceptions and observations at each deal is really important. Because what we observed before we started doing this in a very formal way was that people had very selective memory. They would say, oh yeah, no, I …”
Jan 22, 2019 negative
Wolfe: Founders who speak over their teammates in pitches show poor leadership
“If somebody is there with three people presenting to us, and they do all the talking, and they are talking for the other people, it's usually not a great sign. If somebody sort of steps back and starts lauding, let's say a CEO is the founder, and they turn to …”
Jan 22, 2019 positive
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…”
Jan 22, 2019 bullish
Wolfe: Lux Capital's future investments will sit at the edge of today's
“I am a hundred percent certain that Lux will be investing in the most cutting-edge crazy stuff that you can imagine over the next two years. The zero that follows is I have zero percent certainty what those things will be. No idea. Now I have an inkling, and i…”
Jan 22, 2019
Jan 22, 2019
Jan 22, 2019 neutral
Wolfe: Persuasion tactics from Cialdini, Munger, and Kahneman fail on young kids
“You can use every tactic that Robert Cialdini has come up with, and every tactic from Munger, and every behavioral psychology thing you've learned from Kahneman, and you still get tantrums and crying and dogmatic, you know, intransigent kids”
Jan 22, 2019 positive
Wolfe: Lux partners get one solo high-conviction override investment per fund
“If you have one partner that is dogmatically table-bounding, and everybody else has said, I don't see it, what we decided to do for the tribe is, Is everybody gets one of those. So if I'm the one that sees it. Shane Parrish: One per year, one per career. Josh …”
Jan 22, 2019 positive
Wolfe: Lux Capital seeks scientists possessing hidden technological secrets
“And then the final situation, which is where we spend most of our time, is the Schopenhauer dictum, which is talent can hit a target that nobody else can hit, and genius can hit a target that nobody else can see. And that goes back to the asymmetric informatio…”
Jan 22, 2019 positive
Jan 22, 2019
Wolfe: Children win negotiations through a willingness to publicly embarrass parents
“They're not using tactics of like, you know, I know that you know, and just like a willingness to totally embarrass you in public and scream and throw a tantrum. And by the way, when they do those things, they do them because it works.”
Jan 22, 2019
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…”
Jan 22, 2019 bearish
Jan 22, 2019 bullish
Jan 22, 2019 neutral
Wolfe: Early-stage startup genius is notoriously hard to distinguish from fraud
“Now, it's very hard in the early nascent embryonic stages of a business to really, and I'm being intellectually honest here, know if somebody is going to be an absolute genius or a total fraud. Because the best storytellers are also the best con men, or women,…”
Jan 22, 2019
Wolfe: VCs must privately anticipate failure while publicly cheerleading their startups
“Venture, by definition, is a cheerleader business. You're optimist. You're promoting the future. You're supporting companies who, against all odds, are likely to fail, and you know, you're cheering them on. But I think internally and privately, you have to ant…”
Jan 22, 2019 positive
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?”
Jan 22, 2019 bullish
Wolfe: Users will soon control ambient technology using neural micro-gesture wristbands
“What that implies is that you will wear something akin to a bracelet or a wristwatch, and you will be able to gesture like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice to flick your fingers to turn on the lights, to swipe like you would swipe in three dimensional, three Rai…”
Oct 17, 2023 positive
Mar 4, 2025 bullish
Wolfe: Nvidia can reinvent itself with its cash and margins
“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…”
Mar 4, 2025 bearish
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.…”
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Wolfe: In-Person Human Interactions Will Become Increasingly Scarce and Valuable
“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,…”
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Wolfe: Behavioral discipline is the only persistent investing advantage left
“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.”
Mar 4, 2025 neutral
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Wolfe: AI-Generated Art Should Belong to the Human Prompter
“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 …”
Mar 4, 2025 bearish
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Mar 4, 2025
Mar 4, 2025 bearish
Josh Wolfe: AI will never replicate shared human experience and memories
“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.”
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Wolfe: Lux Capital requires full-time in-office presence Monday through Friday
“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…”
Mar 4, 2025 neutral
Wolfe: Great entrepreneurs prove short sellers wrong rather than banning them
“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.”
Mar 4, 2025 neutral
Mar 4, 2025 bullish
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…”
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Wolfe: Spotting deprioritized back-page news stories creates an informational edge
“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…”
Mar 4, 2025 neutral
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…”
Mar 4, 2025 neutral
Wolfe: Personal beliefs stem from close peers, not independent reasoning
“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 …”
Mar 4, 2025
Wolfe: I Query ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity Simultaneously Across Browsers
“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,…”
Mar 4, 2025 bearish
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…”
Mar 4, 2025 bullish
Wolfe: X is an invaluable generator of randomness and optionality
“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…”
Mar 4, 2025 positive
Wolfe: DOGE is virtuous for shining a spotlight on government waste
“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…”
Mar 4, 2025 bullish
Wolfe: SpaceX is an indispensable American national treasure
“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…”
Mar 4, 2025 bearish
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…”
Mar 4, 2025 bullish
Wolfe: Rising capital costs will bring a return to active managers
“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.”