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

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

April 26, 2024

Duration

54m

Channel

My First Million

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Get our business idea database here ➡️ https://clickhubspot.com/noq 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. — 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:

• Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com
• Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire global talent (like Shaan does) and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than their US equivalents.

— 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

💰 Pitch your startup for a shot at a $1M investment with Sam Parr as the MC https://clickhubspot.com/pitch 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

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Shaan Puri

  host

  Co-host of the My First Million podcast and entrepreneur known for startup investing and business breakdowns.

• Joe Lonsdale

  guest

  Entrepreneur and investor; Palantir co-founder, founder of Addepar and OpenGov, and co-founder of 8VC.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of My First Million, featuring Shaan Puri and Joe Lonsdale, From PayPal Intern to Starting 4x Billion-Dollar Companies | Joe Lonsdale Interview explores joe Lonsdale on Building Billion-Dollar Companies Through Focus, Talent, and Unfair Advantages Lonsdale says strong decisions and strategies come from one dominant reason rather than a blended list of weak ones, a lesson he credits to Peter Thiel and PayPal-era thinking.

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