Lonsdale: Blended Reasons Mean Founders Have Not Found Core Strategy
Joe Lonsdale · From PayPal Intern to Starting 4x Billion-Dollar Companies | Joe Lonsdale Interview · Apr 26, 2024 · at 0:56
Joe Lonsdale (Managing Partner at 8VC, co-founder of Palantir) discusses decision-making frameworks and power law dynamics in startups with Sean Puri.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else. And that's just the nature of the world is that when something's successful, It's kind of like the power law rule, right? Like in a venture capital, like fund, even there tends to be one thing that's successful. It's like bigger than everything else. And that's true inside of companies as well. It's very unusual, like extraordinarily unusual for there to be like two similarly equal, like products or revenue lines or something like that, especially early on in the company. So usually if you think you have like two or three reasons for doing something or five reasons for doing something, what that means is that you actually haven't figured it out. You have no actual reason.”
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: US defense primes engage in innovation theater without real competition
“What happened to defense is all these companies consolidated the 19 nineties after the cold war spending went down. So they all merged and became like these giant primes. And these primes started acting a lot more like government agencies themselves, like not …”
Lonsdale: Clarium Exploited BLS Payroll Flaw with 75% Win Rate
“Kevin Harrington was our head of research. He's like genius, crazy physics, biology, interesting guys. He ended up being on the National Security Council later, like super interesting, smart guy. And he like had mapped out this thing I'd helped him with where …”
Lonsdale: Early-Stage Startups Must Hire Raw IQ Over Domain Expertise
“I'd much rather hire for talent and ambition and hard work than hire for expertise. So almost, and there's exceptions, right? So if you have a company that's already really working and already really scaling, and there's like a machine that has to be run, you …”
Lonsdale: Epirus shot down hardened drones 9.5x further than legacy primes
“We ended up shooting down the hardened drones nine and a half times further away than the other guys.”
Lonsdale: Palantir's software helped eliminate thousands of terrorists
“You know, we ended up limiting thousands of terrorists, so we were happy with the results.”
Palantir Founders Initially Asked Alex Karp to Pretend to Be CEO
“And so we actually convinced him to pretend to be CEO for a few years. So that Peter would stop trying to hire like a really like senior, like military guy, but then he was such a good CEO. Then he actually was, he's still CEO, 20 years later.”