You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans.

In this episode I sat down with Josh Wolf, the co-founder of Lux Capital, one of the most prominent firms investing in innovative businesses focused on solving national security problems.

This was a fascinating, interesting, provocative, and wide-ranging conversation.

Hope you enjoy it.

So first I'd like to start with a question that I often ask people when I'm interviewing them for a job

is, why do you do what you do?

Venture for me is the intersection of two things that I love which is science and finance

and science is the sort of an ever bush-like endless frontier.

There was always somebody driven by greed, ambition, a chip on their shoulder,

or whatever it might be that is trying to basically

discover something that other people haven't and venture it's interesting has

analogies to both Hollywood and journalism in that in journalism many people are basically trying to say I'm here you're not I found this piece of tidbit or

Intel and it's going to be valuable for the masses to know

and in Hollywood somebody is basically trying to make a blockbuster movie and you have a low probability high magnitude event that occurs.

And then in Venture, it's very much the same thing where you get to back somebody ideally that nobody else has seen or found yet.

And I love the thrill of finding something or somebody or

some technological breakthrough that nobody else has found. It is petty and

vanglorious and competitive, but it is this endless frontier where there's always somebody that you can

find that is developing something that is going to blow people's minds and I want to be the

one to back them.

That's great.

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