Joe Lonsdale Quotes
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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.
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I work 110-hour weeks.
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Backing a company is a serious business.
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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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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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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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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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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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Palantir is the new wave of companies solving big problems for big industries.
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We use convertible notes a lot at our fund - 8VC - so often that we just call them 'notes' to save time.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.
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Funding has not kept pace with demand for expanded lanes and well-maintained roadways.
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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.
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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.
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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.