We’re asking some of the biggest names in business and tech to answer 5 of our burning questions. Today’s guest: Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital, who bets big on cutting-edge tech.
Josh is answering your burning questions in a Trends AMA today at 3pm ET. Want in? Sign up for a Trends trial.
What’s your favorite book that you’ve read in the last 12 months?
Burn-In by P.W. Singer and August Cole. It’s a combination of cutting-edge technology straight from today’s headlines — and Black Mirror-esque prognostications of the near future.
It was a helpful guide to AI and robotics and the social and political implications that may arise.
What’s one thing you splurged on recently?
My Zoom setup is a bit silly with a Canon 5D Mark IV, a fixed 35mm high aperture lens, a teleprompter to make eye contact in Zoom, and HD converter cards.
Who’s the most interesting person you know?
Thomas Reardon (founder of CTRL-labs, which sold to Facebook) is a polymath who helped create Internet Explorer at Microsoft, went to college for the first time at 33 for classics and Latin, and then got a Ph.D. in neuroscience before founding a brain-machine interface company which would later get sold for nearly $1B!
What’s the best piece of advice someone ever gave you?
Jim Watson, the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA, gave me great advice over tea at his apartment, which was a brilliant double entendre: Avoid Boring People.
What’s one mistake you made in your career, and what did you learn from it?
Too many to count. But most of my errors have been errors of omission, the things I should have done instead of errors of commission — the permanency of the mistake made.
But I consider mistakes to be the result of not thinking a few moves ahead. My main learning is a quote I coined that we use at Lux: Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.
