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

War Technology Success

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

Men Government Good

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

Travel Time Age

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

Truth Experience Within

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

Design Car Art

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

Joe Lonsdale

Art Which Use

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

Great Change Your

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

Health Great Finance

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

Work Time Success

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

Joe Lonsdale

Work Working Threshold

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

Joe Lonsdale

Men Car Wit

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

Power Change World

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

Technology Success Use

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

Yin Wit Wealth

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

Joe Lonsdale

Positive Want Very

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

Work Pet Great

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

Experience Business Wit

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

War Technology Success

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

Technology Positive Pet

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

Joe Lonsdale

Who Us Up

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

Work Men You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Lonsdale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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