YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Wolfe

lines on the record: 143
first: 2019-08-16
most recent: 2019-08-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Every look, 98, 99, 2000, you know, people thought you just got to pick the winners, whatever, but the system was rigged. IPOs were rigged, the distribution of IPOs was rigged, housing markets, CDOs. There's always a game being played, and there's a secret that the people who are making the most money basically keep. They won't acknowledge publicly until after the fact. And so I think at any point in time in some domain, it's happening. And whether it's central bankers today or whether it was the housing crisis or whether it's the soft bank stuff today, that there's always some game that's being played that is totally unfair and rigged. And to sort of appreciate that and look for it, try to figure out where is the system rigged because it always is somewhere.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish that I would have known, and this is going to sound a bit cynical how rigged the game is. I think every system at every point is rigged. And if you can figure out that little mechanical turk in the machine that's pulling the con. Rigged. Yeah.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the single most important thing for anybody is to build your brand, be differentiated, be indispensable, stay close to the money, find where the capital is flowing and stay close to it. That was one of the great early advices that I got from somebody. And be voracious in your reading. I think you have to be exposed to so many things so that you can sort of develop your passion. And then from your passion, develop an expertise and be able to stand out. So all those things are interlinked. And the best advice that I probably give, again, with regret to my older self is I think you need to find the balance between having the chip on your shoulder and the ambition and then being mindful that every relationship you have and every person that at some point in the future they're going to be a call option and you don't want that to expire. So be good to people.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think this is a constant. I'm always optimistic about scientists and the incremental discoveries and the big breakthroughs that they're going to make because I think it's an inevitability. I always talk about this sort of directional arrow of progress. And I think there's an absolute inevitability just driven by human greed, pursuit of status that we are going to continue to discover incredible things that by definition nobody ever anticipated. So I'm optimistic about science itself as a process. I am generally pessimistic about human nature. I mean, the best and unfortunate the worst things that I think happen in the world are not because of inanimate things. It's because of animated things. It's about people, two-legged mammals who are filled with too much greed or too much fear or too much hate or too much ignorance. And so generally pessimistic about human nature and that classic daggers and men smiles.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“National Scape. In fact, there was a Sunday morning crew of dads that are sort of between 40 and 45, and we go out and try back at the skate park.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My kids are just, you know, it's an amazing adventure. I've got three of them. Now they're nine, six and three, two girls and a boy. And you get to just see the world through their eyes and make all kinds of new mistakes over. So I love my kids. I love my family. I was an only child all I ever wanted was a big nuclear family. And my parents blew when I was young. So this is sort of the chance I've had to make it right. Love reading, skateboarding, basketball.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know too cliche here, but like the biggest failures for me are the things that have the permanence of regret. So choices I made or relationships that I under invested in or people that I didn't spend enough time with who passed, like those to me are the biggest failures. And if there was a younger Josh that I can go back to, it would be, you know, some of the relationships that I wish I could have fixed or people like I said who passed that I could have spent more time with those to me are the biggest failures because you can never fix them You lose money in an investment you know big deal You'll make money in another one. Right. But you lose a person or a friendship or a relationship. I think those are the biggest failures.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is process versus outcome, right? So there are times where we actually make money, but we consider it a failure because we had the wrong process. So what I mean by that is maybe our thesis was we were going to make a certain amount of money or was going to work for this reason. And we ended up making money, but we were totally wrong. We consider that a process failure. But being, you know, I don't want to sound like, um,”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, there's business failures and there's personal failures. The business failures you lose some money, right? Or you made a bad decision. So if you're against money.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then TV writers like David Milch and Deadwood and the Kern writers on Westworld, I just think it's absolutely brilliant scintillating soliloquies that they put forth and philosophically erudite and really interesting.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neil Stevenson, I mean, by far the depth, the rigor, the foresight, the diamond age for me, probably around the time that we were starting Lux was just such an inspiration. I don't”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outline is the first, and then transit was the second, and kudos, I think, is the third. Fiction recently overstory by Richard Powers. It's just brilliant. And I really got turned on to fiction because I think that you can tell more in a paragraph by an amazing fiction author who understands human psychology than you can reading an entire textbook in psychology.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Oh, it was dark and cool and psychologically. That turned me on to a British writer, Rachel Kusk, who's writing like every sentence. I mentioned before I love the line that there's daggers in men's smiles from Shakespeare. And so just her use of language and the psychologically astute prose that she has is great.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we are two primates sitting here talking, right? And related to that, there's a great book that Robin Hansen wrote in the past one or two years called The Elephant in the Brain. Sure. About signaling, and if you understand why people, the motives behind why people do things, I think it's really interesting. Let's see. On the fiction side, it's interesting. My wife really got me into fiction. I don't know, going back 15 years or something like that, but The Magis. And it was sort of the psychological profile that? Oh, I can't remember the author's name, but it was spelled.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a voracious reader. So fiction and nonfiction. So Conciliency O. Wilson was a great how the mind works, Stephen Pinker. I loved the operator about David Geffen. And I like reading biology. Why zebras don't get Olska? Oh, sure, out of Stanford. What's his name?”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super smart guy. And the way that he always thought about risk and technology was an influence. There's an older guy, Chris Brody, who is a Warburg Pincus who I spent a lot of time with. I probably learned how to be a good board member from watching Chris hold people accountable. So a lot of individual lessons, but from an investing philosophy, I mean, hands down, it's like the value investors because they were just rational. And they wouldn't touch venture capital. Charlie Munger and Buffett and everything that I could read that they've ever written or said and all the acolytes that followed from them, I think are just, it gives you a grounding sense of a true business and markets and human psychology. And so I think even as venture capitalist, if you haven't studied those greats, you get a massive deficit.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just need one because you get one hit and then that hit begets a reputation, a reputation begets more hits and so on. So on the venture capital side, it was a handful of individuals. The person who I have the most respect for in venture capital hands down is Bill Gurley. I think he's a true investor. I think he came from the sell side on Wall Street and he understood how to be an analyst first. He understands businesses. He understands human nature. I think he happens to be a towering giant because he's very tall and I'm very short. But we're both on the board. The Santa Fe Institute and...”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I think I read every bio and every article that I could about the early venture investors. So, you know, Tom Perkins and General Dorio and all the early venture capitalists. And so many of these lessons are basically irrelevant because you have this path dependence. There's an idiosyncratic moment. I remember there was a guy from a firm, he was a legendary investor back in the day, Ben Rosen from Seven Rosen. He was early investor in Compaq, which was once a significant technology investment. And Ben said, you just need one.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He has a diplomatic way of saying things, and sometimes the message isn't what he doesn't say. And I find that there's a handful of people that can communicate that way where you sort of intuit what they mean without them actually being explicit.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right there. So that library wall. So inspiring. I love it. And you're looking down, you're looking at your feeder, you're looking at your phone or whatever, and you notice these things. But that one always hit me because so many of my mentors, in a sense, are people that I never met that are dead, right? They're just alive in the pulp and the ideas. But the one human mentor that I really, I feel, oh, my career and the intellectual honesty is Bill Conway, the founder of Carlisle, who is just his ethics, his integrity. It doesn't matter what the deal docs say. It doesn't matter what the contract says. You just do the right thing, the kinds of questions he asks, the way that he speaks without saying things.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that's like Exactly. Well, it's interesting. There used to be this placard outside of our old office. We were on 41st Park in Madison. Now we're down on Broadway 20, 21st, and it said that reading great books is like having conversations with the best minds of history. And so many of my...”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, and on the heavy metal side, it would have been deaf tones, life of agony, biohazard. You're hard for it to life.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly I mean, you know, there's so much that I don't even know about Josh Wolfe, right? So being intellectually honest. But personal side of me, I love heavy metal and hardcore. I grew up going to Moshplyn place called Lamores and Life of Agony. And I like skateboarding. And I like people that just have this sort of gritty rebel side to those. Heavy metal, hip hop”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the time 1994 Ford Explorer. It was Hunter Green, and I think I had it for a year before it spun out on the highway. And I never drove it again.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He traded a bunch of alpaca blankets to some people over in Eastern Europe to be able to get a runway and then actually fly a drone. He was looking at Milosevic. And that early drone was Predator by this Israeli entrepreneur Abe Karam At the time, Wolsey went to the DoD and said, I need a drone. I want to be able to have an unmanned pilot that could pilot a vehicle that could give me eyes on the ground. And they said it'll cost $500 million and take six years And he was able to go to this entrepreneur and earn $5 million in six months, they were able to create this.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always, I mean, even Jim Wolsey, who's former CIA, who's a venture partner at our firm for many years. He tells a story of Amber, which was,”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is something that over the past 20 years I think has slipped away. I think very few engineers want to really work on these problems. And I think the smartest ones that do are not only going to make a fortune, but they're going to do a tremendous patriotic duty.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in some cases, you have people that are doing amazing things, but it takes a very long time, and they're working on huge multibillion projects like the F35 Joint Strike Fighter. In other cases, you have many, many small beltway bandits who are just getting these cost plus contracts because they know somebody that knows somebody But true innovation, the thing that I think gave American military might, which in turn gave our economy the ability to project power across the globe and control two oceans and all the geographic players.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the new entrance in defense, you know, you've got Lockheed, you've got Raytheon, you've got BAE, you've got General Dynamics. There hasn't been anybody over the past 25 years.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are co invested in a company called Anderal. I think it is going to be one of the greatest companies in defense. If you look at the new entrants.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which itself is another ethical issue we should touch on because military technology, I think, is going to be an absolute boon in venture capital. I think it's one of the most exciting and important areas. In the next five years, in part because the vast number of big tech companies from Google on down are eschewing, wanting to do work with military. They have such pressure from the HR and IR departments that people are saying, I don't want to work on this stuff. It is creating a giant. Gaping hole avoid where there's a tremendous opportunity for some of the smartest technologists, some of the smartest scientists and engineers to work on these wicked thorny problems in defense.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, it is a US citizen, your tax money goes to university research and you might fund some research whether you agree with that or not. I mean, that's the ward.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That may be so, but they are definitively doing work on primates. And I think what's going to end up happening is we will import from China the drugs, much in the way that the U.S. exports Hollywood to the rest of the world? I think China will be exporting drugs, and hopefully it's well tested, close to FDA-approved apparatus so that we're not importing crazy stuff.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a huge market. We have shifted much of our primate research outside the US because of ethics reasons. China does not have any such. Ethics research”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason I say that is, first of all, with the growing demographic population we have that are going to get older here in the US and suffer from things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and neurodegenerative diseases.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And the result of that, I think, is that many of the advances in biotech will actually in the near future occur in China. Particularly around CNS disorders, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not you, but you can today edit embryos. You can, you know, in China is doing this. And this is something I always say that China lacks something that we have. And because they lack it, they will be ascendant. And the thing that they lack is the ethics and regulatory apparatus that slows things down here in the US.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can actually use this technique to be able to transpose codons or nucleotides from one part to another. And so that allows you to literally edit like on Microsoft Word with precision. But we are still so far away from being able to deliver. There's been no CRISPR in a human. There's been no technique where you say, you know, geez, Barry's got a genetic defect here and let's edit that out. It's just so far away from practical reality that it's still a lot of hype.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no. So in biology, there are people that have gene libraries. They're trying to assemble nucleotides. There are people who are editing them using the technique of CRISPR. CRISPR is really, I don't want to say an overhyped technique, but it is a very hyped technique that was a fundamental breakthrough. And the fundamental breakthrough was effectively Control C, Control V in computing. It was copy and paste.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is another area where I actually am very excited about biology, which is the imaging and microscopy tools that are coming out to be able to capture things in real time at a near atomic scale inside of cells. But the idea of teleportation is, you know, today science fiction, 3D scanners coupled with 3D printers will closely approximate it, but it's still a trick.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scanner. Scanning. Yeah, no, and 3D scanning, the resolution has increased exponentially over the past few years, and so that's going to continue. And I think that you can capture very discrete elements.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've turned the atoms into a representation in bits and I can send those bits as a CAD file digitally to a 3D printer and I can print a version of that. But I am not actually transporting the individual atoms. I copied it.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think you can do, I mean, that is science fiction. What you can do is I can take a picture, I'm looking at a coffee cup on our desk here. I can 3D capture. A similacrum of that cup. It's a CAD design”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three dimensional, you have a screen, but you have no VR or AR glasses. Right. So it's an optical trick, like holograms are. But the future there is that you'll be looking at something akin to a pitch on a soccer field and it's in three-dimensional like a fish tank and you're watching the game right there.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of autonomous vehicles, increasingly the technology stack is maturing. You have LIDAR, you have solid state LIDAR, but the really valuable thing is the simulation. And this is a fascinating phenomenon because it is affecting many different industries. The gap between reality and that which is simulated. So the ability to render reality in physics engines is leading to everything from you can play a simulator on something like drone racing league and you can actually fly a drone and it's indistinguishable. You can actually simulate something inside the human body using a CT scan of a body and have a GPS guided experience using a surgical robot. You can actually have a simulation of a street and then have an autonomous vehicle that is learning on the simulation as opposed to actually learning driving in the road. And it's increasingly indistinguishable.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, but over time, you can see this clear progression, almost like a Moore's law of visualization. But we went from CPUs, the central processing units, which were primarily dominated by Intel, to GPUs, which were primarily dominated by NVIDIA. Now, the narrative in public markets around NVIDIA was this is tightly coupled to PlayStations, PS4, and Xboxes. But suddenly, something happened a few years ago, about seven years ago, where they invented a language called CUDA, C-U-D-A, and it put it in the hands of academics and researchers who suddenly said, wait a second, instead of using CPUs for high throughput computing, we can instead use GPUs to do this processing. And they started doing the processing for neural networks to be able to do artificial intelligence and machine learning. And so you saw this shift where GPUs were primarily coupled to the consoles and gaming to suddenly being the soul of the new machine inside of things like autonomous vehicles and drones and simulations. This is an area when you say like, what's next?”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, GPUs are graphic processing units. This is the ability to do large scale multidimensional processing of polygons. So back in the day, if you had in a Nintendo 64, it was this big revolution if you were playing James Bond back in the day. It was like, wow, you know, like three-dimensional simulation.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metabolites are spiking at a different rate. So the idea of chronobiology is within the cells, between the cells, and even between people, is there something about the dimension of time that plays relevance for medicine in the body?”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The gut and skin cells you have are maybe days at most weeks old. So different parts of your body are basically regenerating and growing and dying at different times. You're not like, there's not one barrier, right? You're made up of lots of different things at different ages. And so being able to do a body clock to understand those different things is important. Second, it turns out, of course, we have circadian rhythms, right? You get tired at night. You have different levels of hormones at different times of the day, different people might be night owls. People might be, but there's something to that physiologically throughout the day. The third is that there's now evidence and scientific papers are coming out showing that if you give chemo at certain times of the day to certain types of people, that it might be more effective than others. Really? So there's something in the body about when you're being reactivated. Look, you, I'm sure, have a time when you feel that you are your most alert. When caffeine works on you, whereas you might after lunch, go into your food coma at 3 o'clock or something. And caffeine just doesn't work as well as it does, say, at 9.30 when your hormones.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's many different dimensions of this idea of chronobiology, and the biggest one is that different cells in your body are different ages. And there are markers on those cells that can tell how old something is. So the Purkinje cells in your brain are probably 25 years old.”
2019-08-16 · Masters in Business · Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source