From PayPal Intern to Starting 4x Billion-Dollar Companies - Joe Lonsdale Interview

My First Million

Hubspot

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 578: Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with Joe Lonsdale ( https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale ) to talk about how he leveraged one internship at PayPal into one billion dollar success after another. Today Joe is Managing Partner of 8VC and an early investor in Anduril. Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) The One Reason strategy (3:18) Learning Global Macro Finance from Peter Thiel (5:35) Taking multi-million dollar bets at 4:30am (8:43) Hire for raw IQ over expertise (10:33) Nurturing employees into unicorn founders (12:24) Solving hard problems with Addepar (13:53) Always “Being on” (15:32) How to spot opportunities for new businesses (21:10) How Epirus landed a military defense contract (27:09) Getting hits in hard domains (28:24) Business Idea: AI-powered Estate Planning (29:19) Business Idea: Business Process Outsourcing for local government (30:58) Big swings vs. base hits (31:49) Idea vs. execution (32:38) Focus vs. diversity of thought/attention (33:33) Insights from Elon’s inner circle (35:36) Joe Lonsdale’s unfair advantages (38:48) How to invest your time to make your first $1M (40:40) Working on an A+ problem as an intern at PayPal (43:15) Be within 2 standard deviations of top talent (44:14) Early days at Palantir (46:56) Building a top engineering culture (48:31) Borrowing trust as 21-year old defense contractor (52:22) Peter Thiel’s biggest contrarian bet — Links: • Joe's Twitter - https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale • Joe's blog - https://blog.joelonsdale.com/ • Joe's podcast - https://www.americanoptimist.com/ • 8VC - https://www.8vc.com/ • Addepar - https://addepar.com/ • Palantir - https://www.palantir.com/ • Epirus- https://www.epirusinc.com/ • OpenGov - https://opengov.com/ • Prologis - https://www.prologis.com/ • Lessons from Peter Thiel - https://joelonsdale.com/lessons-peter-thiel/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • #218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Transcript

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0:00.0	You have now created by my count at least four billion dollars companies directly probably more than that.
0:04.9	What would you say you are doing different than the average good founder?
0:10.9	So I have some unfair advantages right. I feel like I can rule the world I know
0:17.4	I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off on the road.
0:23.3	Okay, Joe, thanks for doing this man.
0:25.1	And thanks for inviting me into the morning workout,
0:27.7	the cold plunge and everything in between breakfast.
0:30.5	It's good to have it here, Sean.
0:31.5	So I want to start with lessons learned.
0:34.0	One of them that we were talking about this morning when we were doing a workout was making decisions
0:39.1	on blended reasons or having like a blended strategy for how you're we're gonna win we're gonna win doing these five things and why that sounds like a good idea to the average person but is actually a very bad idea.
0:48.8	Can you explain that? Yeah, I wrote this piece online like nine lessons from Peter Chil I sent to all ofons here that's been like sent all to my other companies as well and is one
0:55.3	my favorite pieces and that's one of them and the it's one of these logic
0:58.5	things where usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else
1:02.3	and that's just that's just the nature of the world
1:04.6	is that is that when something successful it's kind of like the power law rule right like an
1:08.6	venture capital like fund even there tends to be one thing that successful is like
1:12.1	bigger and everything else.
1:13.3	And that's true inside of companies as well.
1:15.2	It's very unusual, like extraordinarily unusual,
1:18.4	for there to be like two similarly equal like products
1:21.9	or revenue lines or something like that right
	...

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