Top 60 Joe Lonsdale Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I work 110-hour weeks.

Backing a company is a serious business.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.