From PayPal Intern to Starting 4x Billion-Dollar Companies - Joe…
About This Episode
Shaan Puri interviews Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and Addepar, about his journey from a PayPal intern to a prolific company builder. They discuss Joe's unique frameworks for making high-stakes decisions, his strategy for hiring elite talent, and how he identifies massive 'conceptual gaps' in industries like logistics and defense.
Episode Description
Show Notes
- 0:00The One Reason strategy
- 3:18Learning Global Macro Finance from Peter Thiel
- 5:35Taking multi-million dollar bets at 4:30am
- 8:43Hire for raw IQ over expertise
- 10:33Nurturing employees into unicorn founders
- 12:24Solving hard problems with Addepar
- 13:53Always “Being on”
- 15:32How to spot opportunities for new businesses
- 21:10How Epirus landed a military defense contract
- 27:09Getting hits in hard domains
- 28:24Business Idea: AI-powered Estate Planning
- 29:19Business Idea: Business Process Outsourcing for local government
- 30:58Big swings vs. base hits
- 31:49Idea vs. execution
- 32:38Focus vs. diversity of thought/attention
- 33:33Insights from Elon’s inner circle
- 35:36Joe Lonsdale’s unfair advantages
- 38:48How to invest your time to make your first $1M
- 40:40Working on an A+ problem as an intern at PayPal
- 43:15Be within 2 standard deviations of top talent
- 44:14Early days at Palantir
- 46:56Building a top engineering culture
- 48:31Borrowing trust as 21-year old defense contractor
- 52:22Peter Thiel’s biggest contrarian bet
Links
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Key Takeaways
Avoid making decisions based on 'blended reasons'—if you have five weak reasons to do something rather than one dominant reason, you likely haven't figured out the core problem yet.
When building a new company from scratch, prioritize hiring for raw IQ and ambition over specific domain expertise, as generalists are better at navigating the uncertainty of creating a new 'machine.'
Seek out 'conceptual gaps' in the world by studying complex, unsexy industries and identifying where the current path of technology and incentives deviates from what is possible.
Business Ideas Mentioned
AI Automated Trust and Estate Management
SaaS
AI BPO for Local Government
AI & Automation