Quotes from Joe Lonsdale

Traditional hackathons are fun and focused on skill and competition, but we believe that events which focus on the positive social impact of technology engage a wider and more diverse set of participants.

Being a great founder or early team member is a difficult dialectic - you have to be a bit overconfident, and a big ego isn't always a bad thing. To change the world requires pushing really, really hard and believing you and your team know something others don't.

Hard work makes us better people and helps our communities flourish.

In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'

Government officials and citizens care about many causes - and they all require resources. For example, I am personally passionate about ending the human trafficking that still occurs within our borders.

Creating a billion-dollar company is hard, but being a truly great leader is even harder.

One of the most important jobs of a great leader is to attract great talent.

We adapt to technological progress by raising our minimum standards of living and working to stay above this rising threshold.

The human mind and body remains the most complex, powerful machine on the planet, and we will adapt and thrive in a world of accelerating technological change.

The inability of middle-class people to receive loans in developing countries has had a stifling effect on economic growth and prosperity around the globe.

Hard work enables us to improve ourselves and the world around us, to combat injustice, reduce suffering, and increase human freedom.

If you can make finance more functional, make it a tiny percent better, you create a great deal of resources, which you can use for other things like education and healthcare.

A talented executive whose interests are aligned with the firm's and is confident in her role will always recruit stars who exceed herself in various ways, but one who is worried about her value to the firm will not.

A policy of knowing your replacement is one of the best ways to drive a growth culture. It anticipates and eliminates the most harmful politics in leadership for an expanding company and instantly sets the right tone for a high-talent, growth-mindset executive team.

There will be trillions of dollars under Addepar. You will have tons of money and information flowing through it.

There are hundreds of millions of people around the globe who could safely repay loans but nonetheless do not have access to a line of credit. Financial institutions in developing economies are broken and inefficient, and hard-working people have not been given the chance to establish a credit history.

A great leader should make it clear to her team members that as a matter of culture, her job is to replace herself. A new hire should know from the outset that she will ultimately have to bring in new talent to replace herself so that she can personally better herself and achieve loftier goals.

Those who serve in our armed forces do so from a profound sense of duty to secure liberty for their fellow Americans. They enlist to serve their fellow citizens who express their will through elected representatives, not an unaccountable defense establishment.

CEOs shouldn't worry about their budget all the time - on a day-to-day basis, they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.

Engineering is the art of managing scarcity - it's easy to design and build a massive bridge that will last forever if cost is not an issue. Similarly, to build a new company, you must manage scarce resources.

Basically, I think society functions thanks to how certain key industries work - government, finance, healthcare, education, energy. Pretty much all of these have a huge impact on everything else.

A common mistake among new entrepreneurs who have raised large rounds is that they have essentially infinite resources.

Innovative cultures transparently document spending, admit mistakes, and ask how they can do better.

Great leaders inspire incredible loyalty in their followers and subordinates.