Lonsdale: Every entrepreneur needs a written 10-page deck
Joe Lonsdale · I Asked 6 Billionaires How To Get Rich · Jul 23, 2025 · at 4:42
Joe Lonsdale, founding partner of 8VC and Palantir co-founder, explains the practical value of forcing oneself to write down fundamental business assumptions.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“This is why building a deck is really good for an entrepreneur, even if it's a small business, is you want to put together, here's 10 pages on who I am, what I'm doing, what the goals are, why it's going to be successful. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs say, oh, I'm just so smart and fast, and why would I do this stupid thing that's for stupid people? It's not for me. And it's actually, It's for everyone because everyone needs to get back to the core of like exactly like what and why and who and how. And sometimes those principles you'll notice have actually changed in a way you have, maybe you intuitively realize one of them's changed, but you don't really find it until you go back and actually write it down.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Joe Lonsdale
Lonsdale: Government regulators target Elon Musk to punish public speech
“If they want to go to attack Elon to punish him for speaking up, they will, and they do.”
Lonsdale: Fund managers hide conservative views to preserve pension fund LP capital
“And I have a lot of friends who in person are like, Joe, I totally agree with you. This is crazy. Like, I can't believe they're doing this. This is so wrong. But of course, I can't say that in public. I'd mess up all my fundraising with all these pension funds…”
Lonsdale: Harris-Warren price gouging proposal covers 23,000 large companies
“Well, if you look at the price gouging law that Kamala Harris and Senator Warren and all these people on the very extreme left were putting forward, it's actually something that applies to about 23,000 big companies, and it would give them a lot of arbitrary p…”
Lonsdale: US federal government abandoned merit-based testing 45 years ago
“So this was basically a form of DEI. It's like proto-DEI in the late seventies, and it was under Jimmy Carter's administration, and then eventually the courts pushed it and finalized it in the early eighties. So for 45 years, We haven't had merit-based tests i…”
Lonsdale: Palantir Helped Reduce IED Deaths in Iraq
“Palatine worked because we worked really closely with a lot of the special forces communities and the teams and people like that who were competent, and we helped go to Iraq, we helped reduce the number of IED deaths, and really kind of, you know, fix things, …”
Lonsdale: Billionaires avoid public attacks by echoing moderate Democratic stances
“If you're a billionaire in our country, If you just put out, like, standard kind of moderate left Democratic stuff that goes along with that party, then you're like, you're totally fine, and everyone's going to like you, and everyone's going to not attack you.”