The Generalist - Modern Meditations: Josh Wolfe

Friends,

Last year, we kicked off the Modern Meditations series to ask the most interesting people in tech the most interesting questions we can think of. In short order, they’ve become some of my favorite pieces to read and share.

I love learning what these intelligent, polymathic people think about beyond their work. What secret obsessions do they have? What strange opinions have they yet to give voice to?

Today’s edition of this series focuses on Josh Wolfe. Lux Capital’s co-founder has built a career capitalizing tech’s strangest, wildest, and weirdest ideas, from autonomous aquatic drones to low-cost satellites to gut-brain biotech companies. Perhaps because of these eclectic passions, this piece covers a lot of fascinating territory.

Jump in to hear Josh Wolfe's thoughts on ants, entropy, environmentalism, and the biggest thing he's changed his mind about over the past 10 years.

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Modern Meditations: Josh Wolfe

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's what investors, operators, and founders should know about Josh Wolfe’s meditations.

• Three spaces. Though Lux Capital invests across multiple categories, Josh Wolfe is currently focused on three “spaces”: inner space (biology), outer space (aerospace and defense), and latent space (the magic of AI models).
• The magic of interdisciplinary thinking. Great ideas and big opportunities are often found at the interstices between fields. Wolfe draws on fields like myrmecology (the study of ants) and physics to inform his work as a venture capitalist. The work of E.O. Wilson introduced Wolfe to this kind of thinking.
• Fiction’s transformative power. For much of his adult life, Wolfe read biographies and other works of non-fiction. Recent years have increased his appreciation for fiction, and its ability to reveal more fundamental human truths.
• The threat of the “environmental” movement. Some players in the environmental movement do their cause more harm than good, in Wolfe’s view. Those that advocate for austerity and de-growth inhibit capitalism’s ability to solve such problems. Overlooking nuclear energy is another frequent mistake.
• Mounting political tension in Africa. We may wish to pay closer attention to the actions of great powers in Africa. While China builds influence through the Belt and Road initiative, Russian mercenary groups are sewing discord. When combined with other risks, these maneuvers may create the conditions for conflict.

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This interview is part of the Modern Meditation series, where we ask the most interesting people in tech non-obvious questions. We hope to bring new aspects of their personality and processes to light.

When I first conceived of Modern Meditations, one of the names I had in mind was Josh Wolfe. As co-founder and Managing Partner of Lux Capital, Josh has invested in some of the most remarkable companies of the past decade, with a focus on those at tech’s far frontier. That includes startups experimenting at the fringes of biotech, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, space, and robotics. As Lux itself notes, it specializes in turning “sci-fi into sci-fact.” It has supported players like Variant Bio, Hugging Face, Saildrone, Anduril, Hadrian, Shapeways, DesktopMetal, and many others in that mission.

In addition to his work at Lux, Josh is also a Board Member at the mind-bending Santa Fe Institute – the preferred hangout of one of my favorite authors of all time, Cormac McCarthy; a place once referred to as “the mecca for the science of ‘complex systems.’” He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a voracious reader of fiction, and the founder of Kurion, a nuclear clean-up company. It played a pivotal role in Japan’s recovery from the Fukushima disaster.

Here are his meditations.

1. What would you be doing if you didn’t work in tech?

Science – perhaps, working at a multidisciplinary lab, studying the intersection of different disciplines. The Santa Fe Institute is the rare place that excels at this sort of work. It brings brilliant, curious, serious, and irreverent practitioners together into a contrarian collective – as oxymoronic as that may sound. Together, they investigate the science of complexity, exploring universal phenomena like power laws and scaling laws. They work to understand things like signals, noise, and emergent phenomena like quorum sensing or non-equilibrium dynamics in financial markets.

What the Santa Fe Institute does so well is leverage analogies from one field to unlock insights in another. This is something I love and can think about endlessly. For example, studying the evolved foraging strategies of ants helped me formulate a worldview of “randomness and optionality.” When ants finally find a morsel of food, they send chemical signals to others in the colony. It’s similar to the work I do as a venture capitalist: scouring for unseen crumbs and staying alert to new signals.

Another example riffs on my unending obsession with the concept of entropy. I am endlessly fascinated by the process by which order emerges from disorder. How can that happen? How does something spontaneously come from nothing?

The work of Nobel laureate Ilya Priogine beautifully explained how dissipative structures (think: whirlpools in a bathtub or a hurricane) share common characteristics. They have observable, stable forms that dynamically evolve in response to unequal distributions of energy or pressure. A similar pattern plays out in finance. Talent, financial resources, and technological know-how often cluster, creating discrete pockets of abundance and scarcity. Companies form to degrade and diffuse these asymmetries, creating new opportunities. Founders might not realize that’s what they’re doing, but from a structural perspective, their work draws on these dynamics to create something like an entrepreneurial hurricane.

In a meme

​​​​​​​​​​​​For the pictorially inclined, here's the whole piece — all 2,500 words of it — in a single meme.

Puzzler

​​​All guesses are welcome and clues are given to anyone that would like one. Just respond to this email for a hint.

Greg K claimed the maillot jaune in last week’s sprint, edging out Redemption F, Will R, Shashwat N, Kevin H, Saagar B, Jim W, George R, Michael O, Krishna N, Austin V, Courtney N, Sagar S, Vanshi T, Trung L, Gary J, Joshua K, Elliot O, Ozair S, Sylma M, Syed H, Carlos F, Shayon C, and Alexia B. All powered their way through this puzzler:

The answer? A pencil.

Until next time,

Mario

PS – If you haven’t had a chance yet, you might enjoy our recent piece on Destiny and its audacious mission to disrupt BlackRock.​