Joe Lonsdale Quotes

A true leader must strive towards a grand vision of human progress, but remember that the minor details of her everyday life really matter to those who look up to her as a role model.

- Joe Lonsdale

Marketing is your battle plan for the sales team - it's about defining the landscape. Marketing is doing cohort analysis and understanding exactly what possible customers are out there. It's understanding not only which customers will respond to what messages, but also how customers will become clients if you include certain product features.

- Joe Lonsdale

When I spend a lot of time reading, discussing, or thinking about an area, I'll often really appreciate why a strong viewpoint is true and come to very firm conclusions. But if I am later exposed to a strong opposing view, I frequently find this countervailing view persuasive as well.

- Joe Lonsdale

In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'

- Joe Lonsdale

What would I advise an aspiring young entrepreneur? Certainly I'd say read the works of great entrepreneurs and investors like Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and many others. But what's more important is to get real experience at a great startup.

- Joe Lonsdale

Being a great founder or early team member is a difficult dialectic - you have to be a bit overconfident, and a big ego isn't always a bad thing. To change the world requires pushing really, really hard and believing you and your team know something others don't.

- Joe Lonsdale

The reason we have so much talent in Silicon Valley building and investing in for-profit technology companies is that markets richly reward successful ideas, no matter who invents them. But to remain competitive in a free market, companies must exercise discipline to meet quantitative goals and eventually become cashflow positive.

- Joe Lonsdale

America faces a mounting transportation crisis, and the primary culprit is road congestion. Traffic makes us unhealthy, wastes enormous amounts of time, and cripples national productivity. America needs expanded roads and transportation infrastructure, but traditional gas tax funding is no longer available.

- Joe Lonsdale

A talented executive whose interests are aligned with the firm's and is confident in her role will always recruit stars who exceed herself in various ways, but one who is worried about her value to the firm will not.

- Joe Lonsdale

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

- Joe Lonsdale

In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.

- Joe Lonsdale

A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.

- Joe Lonsdale

The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It's a form of debt that is really more a type of equity - one where the valuation hasn't been determined yet.

- Joe Lonsdale

There will be trillions of dollars under Addepar. You will have tons of money and information flowing through it.

- Joe Lonsdale

A policy of knowing your replacement is one of the best ways to drive a growth culture. It anticipates and eliminates the most harmful politics in leadership for an expanding company and instantly sets the right tone for a high-talent, growth-mindset executive team.

- Joe Lonsdale

If our society was a lot wealthier, I think we'd also probably have better education systems - this is pretty intuitive, I think, to make as a claim.

- Joe Lonsdale

Palantir owes much of its success to the amazing talent of the first 30-40 technologists who joined the company, as well as to the internal leadership that helped motivate this core group to achieve its ambitious goals and to continue to attract extraordinary people.

- Joe Lonsdale

One of the fun things about venture capital is you are constantly learning new ideas and strategies from one business and then applying them to others.

- Joe Lonsdale

Private equity firms working closely with venture capitalists and technologists may be able to unlock assets that others have not leveraged and build technology cultures to iterate on solutions that make these assets more productive.

- Joe Lonsdale

Our best and brightest must conceive of themselves as stewards of our society and confront the critical challenges of our time. It's the best bet for our society, for entrepreneurs, and for the investors who believe in them.

- Joe Lonsdale

Fear is the wrong response to technological unemployment. Focusing on economic flexibility and adaptability - with special attention to eliminating the barriers we've accidentally created to the mobility of the working classes - is the right response to technological disruption.

- Joe Lonsdale

One of my biggest intellectual influences in my life was Alex Karp of Palantir.

- Joe Lonsdale

We founded Palantir in 2003-2004 because we perceived a giant gap between how the defense and intelligence community was harnessing technology to achieve its goals and what we had seen was possible in Silicon Valley over the last decade.

- Joe Lonsdale

Because the private sector has evolved processes and metrics for growth over many generations, for-profit models are more likely to efficiently accomplish their goals.

- Joe Lonsdale

A great leader should make it clear to her team members that as a matter of culture, her job is to replace herself. A new hire should know from the outset that she will ultimately have to bring in new talent to replace herself so that she can personally better herself and achieve loftier goals.

- Joe Lonsdale

Good government is one of the most important factors in economic growth and social well-being.

- Joe Lonsdale

David and Ellen Siminoff are legends in Silicon Valley - they are two of the most influential mentors to top executives and leaders behind the scenes, with long track records of success.

- Joe Lonsdale

Hours wasted in traffic represent not only lost wages but enormous amounts of economic activity that might have happened. Congestion indirectly increases consumer prices, makes travel times unreliable for commuters and truckers, and precludes many people from accessing jobs in urban hubs.

- Joe Lonsdale

Addepar not only helps improve private wealth management workflows so that advisors can do a better job at what they currently do, but it also helps build a data-driven and integrated view on top of the many important financial decisions within a client portfolio.

- Joe Lonsdale

In a well-run tech company, small, elite groups who have ownership in the company are given the freedom to define and achieve their tasks in line with a broader mission that they have internalized as their own.

- Joe Lonsdale

Savvy, competitive investors able to build, buy, and fix companies will continue to stimulate growth by allowing us to do more with less - the only way to create prosperity.

- Joe Lonsdale

Engineering is the art of managing scarcity - it's easy to design and build a massive bridge that will last forever if cost is not an issue. Similarly, to build a new company, you must manage scarce resources.

- Joe Lonsdale

It always struck me as pretty cool that people who changed the world often knew each other. After reading them separately, hearing that David Hume and Adam Smith were friends made sense.

- Joe Lonsdale

Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it's our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.

- Joe Lonsdale

Basically, I think society functions thanks to how certain key industries work - government, finance, healthcare, education, energy. Pretty much all of these have a huge impact on everything else.

- Joe Lonsdale

The only way to create prosperity is to do more with less. In economic terms, an increase in productivity is an increase in the amount or quality of output generated for each unit of input. Jobs do not make society wealthier - productivity does.

- Joe Lonsdale

There are hundreds of millions of people around the globe who could safely repay loans but nonetheless do not have access to a line of credit. Financial institutions in developing economies are broken and inefficient, and hard-working people have not been given the chance to establish a credit history.

- Joe Lonsdale

For me, seed investing isn't just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.

- Joe Lonsdale

I'm always investing and building things at the same time.

- Joe Lonsdale

Palantir is the new wave of companies solving big problems for big industries.

- Joe Lonsdale

I think that the culture at Stanford really shapes how you view the world, and you get a lot more out of an entrepreneurial mindset.

- Joe Lonsdale

Being able to access that Stanford alumni network was huge - I actually interned at PayPal while I was at Stanford and learned a lot. Being in that environment and learning about it as a student was really fun.

- Joe Lonsdale

There are people who are better managers than I am. I aspire to be a really good manager, but it's not my natural personality to do the same thing for 14 hours a day. I have a lot of different interests. I really like product and strategy and business strategy, and I think I'm not bad at it.

- Joe Lonsdale

America has the greatest military in the world, and it's up to our leaders to set the bar for what a 21st century military culture of innovation with transparent, collaborative leadership looks like.

- Joe Lonsdale

Those who serve in our armed forces do so from a profound sense of duty to secure liberty for their fellow Americans. They enlist to serve their fellow citizens who express their will through elected representatives, not an unaccountable defense establishment.

- Joe Lonsdale

The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.

- Joe Lonsdale

CEOs shouldn't worry about their budget all the time - on a day-to-day basis, they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.

- Joe Lonsdale

Private equity investors are an integral part of the economy and should be celebrated for making our country wealthier.

- Joe Lonsdale

The human mind and body remains the most complex, powerful machine on the planet, and we will adapt and thrive in a world of accelerating technological change.

- Joe Lonsdale

Hard work makes us better people and helps our communities flourish.

- Joe Lonsdale

Backing a company is a serious business.

- Joe Lonsdale

I have learned that if I only see and deeply appreciate one side of an argument, it means I am probably missing something important.

- Joe Lonsdale

One of the most important jobs of a great leader is to attract great talent.

- Joe Lonsdale

Creating efficiencies in private markets is a huge win for the economy.

- Joe Lonsdale

Government officials and citizens care about many causes - and they all require resources. For example, I am personally passionate about ending the human trafficking that still occurs within our borders.

- Joe Lonsdale

Traditional hackathons are fun and focused on skill and competition, but we believe that events which focus on the positive social impact of technology engage a wider and more diverse set of participants.

- Joe Lonsdale

There's no substitute for experiencing ups and downs - seeing how it's okay that things are overwhelming or broken sometimes and how companies recover from mistakes.

- Joe Lonsdale

As we progress as a species, we will unlock new means for enhancing our lives at every turn - and our conceptions of wealth and poverty will evolve in tandem.

- Joe Lonsdale

I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.

- Joe Lonsdale

My personal experience with companies in the PayPal ecosystem taught me that a superb engineering culture is indispensable to building a winning business.

- Joe Lonsdale

If you can make finance more functional, make it a tiny percent better, you create a great deal of resources, which you can use for other things like education and healthcare.

- Joe Lonsdale

Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.

- Joe Lonsdale

While it can be overwhelming to realize how many problems there are to solve in the world, it's always inspiring to see so many talented people willing to spend their time and energy in hopes of making a difference.

- Joe Lonsdale

Technological unemployment is scary for those affected - but has always gone hand in hand with economic progress.

- Joe Lonsdale

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

- Joe Lonsdale

Hard work enables us to improve ourselves and the world around us, to combat injustice, reduce suffering, and increase human freedom.

- Joe Lonsdale

Applying smarter IT to genomic data may offer the potential to cure many types of cancer and other diseases.

- Joe Lonsdale

Success gives you a platform for further success - suddenly everybody wants to work with you, and your opportunities and possibilities open up. But at the same time, success is also immensely challenging - it ultimately often creates pride, stubbornness, and sloppiness that beget failure, taking down people and organizations.

- Joe Lonsdale

Wealth is only ever actually created from the bottom-up, with free people employing their distinctly human creativity and finding ways to serve and employ others.

- Joe Lonsdale

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

- Joe Lonsdale

Not everybody has to work on the big problems, but if nobody does, they don't get solved.

- Joe Lonsdale

A common mistake among new entrepreneurs who have raised large rounds is that they have essentially infinite resources.

- Joe Lonsdale

We created Addepar because we saw a place where a multi-billion dollar global platform clearly should exist - but did not yet - to fix many of the challenges that exist in the finance industry.

- Joe Lonsdale

In an increasingly competitive technology world, VCs must work more and more closely with portfolio companies to develop superior technology, talent, and operations.

- Joe Lonsdale

The inability of middle-class people to receive loans in developing countries has had a stifling effect on economic growth and prosperity around the globe.

- Joe Lonsdale

Creating a billion-dollar company is hard, but being a truly great leader is even harder.

- Joe Lonsdale

Those who ultimately shake up an industry are often outsiders who don't know any better.

- Joe Lonsdale

Our philosophy at 8VC is that many of the companies that present the greatest economic opportunities also create the greatest value for society.

- Joe Lonsdale

When you solve big, hard problems, problems that fundamentally improve how an industry works, financial returns follow, giving you resources to do more of the same.

- Joe Lonsdale

Many of humanity's most intractable challenges will only be solved through market-driven innovation.

- Joe Lonsdale

We use convertible notes a lot at our fund - 8VC - so often that we just call them 'notes' to save time.

- Joe Lonsdale

The degree to which society creates wealth, I think, is largely determined by government and financial systems.

- Joe Lonsdale

Engineering talent is the most precious resource for any technology company - Palantir and Addepar are successful first and foremost because of their top tech cultures, and the same is true for our best portfolio companies at 8VC.

- Joe Lonsdale

A deep concern of mine is that leaders in the technology sector have not developed a culture that insists upon courage, honor, duty, and humility - what we might call a culture of virtue.

- Joe Lonsdale

Top technologists have a tremendous capacity - and, therefore, a tremendous responsibility - to build things that make a positive impact on the world.

- Joe Lonsdale

Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.

- Joe Lonsdale

Innovative cultures transparently document spending, admit mistakes, and ask how they can do better.

- Joe Lonsdale

A lot of the companies that I am inclined to get involved in have a mission to fix something that is 'broken' in the world.

- Joe Lonsdale

Funding has not kept pace with demand for expanded lanes and well-maintained roadways.

- Joe Lonsdale

We want to inspire everyone to recognize the positive social impact they can have if they choose to become technologists.

- Joe Lonsdale

Keeping government running really well, to me, is incredibly important.

- Joe Lonsdale

Great leaders inspire incredible loyalty in their followers and subordinates.

- Joe Lonsdale

Great VCs are more than mere investors; they are often seasoned leaders who have built companies themselves.

- Joe Lonsdale

Our family is very, very competitive. But it's a fun and inspiring sort of competitive. It makes you proud of what you do and makes you want to work hard and do all your homework so you can win.

- Joe Lonsdale

I was really lucky about two things about my life as a kid: I had awesome parents, and I had awesome peers.

- Joe Lonsdale

My experiences building Palantir and running Addepar made me aware of serious problems with government and inspired me to build a non-profit to look into state spending.

- Joe Lonsdale

I believe we live in a positive sum world and wealth isn't just taken or moved around; it's mostly created.

- Joe Lonsdale

I work 110-hour weeks.

- Joe Lonsdale