Quotes from Joe Lonsdale

Funding has not kept pace with demand for expanded lanes and well-maintained roadways.

Backing a company is a serious business.

I was really lucky about two things about my life as a kid: I had awesome parents, and I had awesome peers.

The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.

Success gives you a platform for further success - suddenly everybody wants to work with you, and your opportunities and possibilities open up. But at the same time, success is also immensely challenging - it ultimately often creates pride, stubbornness, and sloppiness that beget failure, taking down people and organizations.

I believe we live in a positive sum world and wealth isn't just taken or moved around; it's mostly created.

My personal experience with companies in the PayPal ecosystem taught me that a superb engineering culture is indispensable to building a winning business.

In an increasingly competitive technology world, VCs must work more and more closely with portfolio companies to develop superior technology, talent, and operations.

America faces a mounting transportation crisis, and the primary culprit is road congestion. Traffic makes us unhealthy, wastes enormous amounts of time, and cripples national productivity. America needs expanded roads and transportation infrastructure, but traditional gas tax funding is no longer available.

Hours wasted in traffic represent not only lost wages but enormous amounts of economic activity that might have happened. Congestion indirectly increases consumer prices, makes travel times unreliable for commuters and truckers, and precludes many people from accessing jobs in urban hubs.

Palantir is the new wave of companies solving big problems for big industries.

Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.

We created Addepar because we saw a place where a multi-billion dollar global platform clearly should exist - but did not yet - to fix many of the challenges that exist in the finance industry.

Wealth is only ever actually created from the bottom-up, with free people employing their distinctly human creativity and finding ways to serve and employ others.

Addepar not only helps improve private wealth management workflows so that advisors can do a better job at what they currently do, but it also helps build a data-driven and integrated view on top of the many important financial decisions within a client portfolio.

If our society was a lot wealthier, I think we'd also probably have better education systems - this is pretty intuitive, I think, to make as a claim.

The degree to which society creates wealth, I think, is largely determined by government and financial systems.

Palantir owes much of its success to the amazing talent of the first 30-40 technologists who joined the company, as well as to the internal leadership that helped motivate this core group to achieve its ambitious goals and to continue to attract extraordinary people.

While it can be overwhelming to realize how many problems there are to solve in the world, it's always inspiring to see so many talented people willing to spend their time and energy in hopes of making a difference.

Good government is one of the most important factors in economic growth and social well-being.

Because the private sector has evolved processes and metrics for growth over many generations, for-profit models are more likely to efficiently accomplish their goals.

A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.

In a well-run tech company, small, elite groups who have ownership in the company are given the freedom to define and achieve their tasks in line with a broader mission that they have internalized as their own.

Engineering talent is the most precious resource for any technology company - Palantir and Addepar are successful first and foremost because of their top tech cultures, and the same is true for our best portfolio companies at 8VC.