Disclosure
Wolfe: I Record and Locally Search My Entire Screen Activity
“I've already given over again to the privacy gods everything that my screen sees. And so I trust that that's siloed on my device. It's not going to the cloud, but it's super helpful when I'm trying to search for something.”
Assertion Supported
Wolfe: US share of foreign graduates fell from 23% to 15%
“And we used to attract something like 23% of all foreign graduates here. That's down to 15%.”
Insight
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,…”
Insight
Wolfe: The most important future companies lack historical precedents
“You have no prior comps that you can look at because the most important companies that are going to exist never existed before.”
Insight
Wolfe: Venture capital is highly inefficient because the universe is unknown
“In venture capital, it's a really inefficient market because there is no known universe. You and I could be talking in a private room, and we could decide that we're going to start up a company tomorrow, and nobody else knows that information.”
Assertion Supported
Wolfe: MIT's Bob Langer created billions in value through spinout companies
“So for example, Bob Langer at MIT is a prodigious output of PhDs who are very commercially minded. This is a guy who has made hundreds of millions of dollars, created billions of dollars of market value in companies, and attracts postdocs that want to be like …”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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”
Disclosure
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…”
Assertion Partly supported
Wolfe: Bill Gates only sits on Berkshire, Microsoft, and Kymeta boards
“Which led to this company called Kymeta, which I co-founded with Bill Gates. And I'm in a board room with Bill Gates, and he's on the board of this company. It's the only board he's been on besides Berkshire and Microsoft.”
Assertion Partly supported
Wolfe: Kurion was the only US company selected for the Fukushima cleanup
“This little company became the only US company picked for the cleanup”
Disclosure
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…”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Lux would rather lose half its investors than their capital
“The typical mantra we have internally is I would rather lose half my LPs than half my LPs money.”
Disclosure
Wolfe: I Use AI for Two to Three Hours Daily, Surpassing Google
“I'm on AI easily more than Google now, but I don't know, 2:03 hours a day.”
Disclosure
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,…”
Insight
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.”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Calliope reverse-engineers the gut-brain axis to understand human satiety
“We back one guy. He happens to be this brilliant scientist at Columbia who reverse engineered the neural correlates for taste, and we funded him in a company called Calliope that is reverse engineering your gut-brain axis to understand how you feel the sense o…”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
Wolfe: Venture capital's core advantage is funding businesses to discrete milestones
“The great virtue in venture capital is you get to fund two milestones. So in a perfect world, we're able to put a little bit of money in, we can de-risk a set of things.”
Assertion Partly supported
Wolfe: GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion within a year of funding
“Nine months later, or 11 months later, GM buys them for a billion dollars, nominally. A little bit less, actually, but nominally a billion dollars. That would have been 11 X. In under a year.”
