Joe Lonsdale Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I work 110-hour weeks.
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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.
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I'm always investing and building things at the same time.
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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.
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I believe we live in a positive sum world and wealth isn't just taken or moved around; it's mostly created.
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The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.
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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.
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Backing a company is a serious business.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have learned that if I only see and deeply appreciate one side of an argument, it means I am probably missing something important.
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Hard work enables us to improve ourselves and the world around us, to combat injustice, reduce suffering, and increase human freedom.