Josh Wolfe

Josh Wolfe is the co-founder of venture-capital firm Lux Capital. Lux is a relatively small player in the world of venture capital. In the past two years, its assets have doubled to $4 billion. Wolfe has been called a Renaissance man by such individuals as Carlyle Group co-founder Bill Conway, Lux’s first outside investor, and acquaintances like Herb Greenberg, the former CNBC journalist who is now a senior editor at Empire Financial Research. Wolfe’s (admittedly biased) wife, Lauren Taylor Wolfe, co-founder of hedge fund Impactive Capital, says her husband “ingests more content than any human I’ve ever encountered in my entire life, and I know a lot of English professors.” A longtime New York resident, Wolfe says he learned most everything he needed to know about humanity growing up on Coney Island. Lux co-founder Peter Hebert, who both men agree is the opposite temperamentally. The only child of divorced parents, Wolfe was raised by his public school teacher mother, living in a two-bedroom apartment with his grandparents, a retired meter maid and a truck driver who worked nights delivering the New York Daily News. He was the pride and joy of his family and early on got into gifted and talented school programs, eventually becoming a semifinalist in the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Wolfe went on to study at Cornell University a few years later, starting out as a biology major but ending up with a degree in economics and finance. Wolfe and Hebert, friends who were working at separate Wall Street firms at the time, had an itch to go out on their own. By the time they incorporated Lux in March 2000, however, tech investing was about to collapse. Lux was different from other VC firms. While most of its investors now are endowments or other nonprofit institutions, Lux had a number of heavy-hitter financiers as investors in the early days, including Stanley Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, and Peter G. Peterson.