By Tom Henderson
Small Times Senior Writer

Aug. 29, 2001 — Josh Wolfe isn’t the only venture capitalist who used to be an investment banker. He may be the only one, though, who has helped with AIDS research.

Wolfe, 24, is a managing partner of the Lux Capital Group, the New York venture capital firm behind “The Nanotech Report.”

Years before he was writing about nanotechnology, he spent time studying the effects of AIDS on children at the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn. Wolfe was a high school student at the time, but he’s listed as co-author on articles in Cell Vision and the Journal of Leukocyte Biology.

“We were at the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic,” said Dominic Auci, Wolfe’s mentor then who is now manager of the biomedical labs at the Pall Corp., a maker of blood filters in Port Washington, N.Y.

Auci recalled that when Wolfe, recipient of a Westinghouse Science Scholarship, came in during his senior year of high school in 1995 to ask if he could work with AIDS patients. The scholarship paid for his research time.

“We were on the front line,” said Auci. “We were taking our lives in our hands, and it wasn’t something we wanted a high school kid doing.”

But Wolfe persisted, and Auci relented. “He was a remarkable young man, and everyone in the lab took a liking to him immediately. Josh put together a lot of his own concepts from bits and pieces we were doing in the lab. That was what was so impressive about him.”

The scholarship was supposed to last six months, during the end of his senior year and into the summer. But the research that led to the papers wasn’t done, yet, “so he’d come in after school and on weekends. He was a hard-working kid and he had a vision,” said Auci.

Wolfe ended up coming in for much of his free time his first three years in college. At the beginning of college, he was leaning toward a career in science. Auci, of all people, pushed him to the financial world.

“I was one of the people who encouraged him toward business. He had bigger fish to fry. I was getting my MBA at the time and felt that whatever came out of the lab had to have more than an intellectual foundation. It had to have marketable applications.”

“He was a big influence on me going into business,” said Wolfe. “It was absolutely my intent to get my MD and Ph.D. I was very into immunology and pathology. But we’d be in the lab and while the centrifuge was spinning, Dominic would be trading futures and options, and that seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than the centrifuge.

“Money is an exciting thing. Money and science make sense.”

Wolfe graduated from Cornell in 1999 with a degree in economics and finance, then worked in financial futures and options at Merrill Lynch and in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney before co-founding Lux Capital last year.

Related story: VC firm’s report outlines nano challenges, opportunities

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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-528-6292.