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.
-
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.
-
Many of humanity's most intractable challenges will only be solved through market-driven innovation.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Those who ultimately shake up an industry are often outsiders who don't know any better.
-
One of the most important jobs of a great leader is to attract great talent.
-
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.
-
Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Technological unemployment is scary for those affected - but has always gone hand in hand with economic progress.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My personal experience with companies in the PayPal ecosystem taught me that a superb engineering culture is indispensable to building a winning business.
-
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.
-
Keeping government running really well, to me, is incredibly important.
-
I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.
-
Creating a billion-dollar company is hard, but being a truly great leader is even harder.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Innovative cultures transparently document spending, admit mistakes, and ask how they can do better.