Quotes from Joe Lonsdale

Savvy, competitive investors able to build, buy, and fix companies will continue to stimulate growth by allowing us to do more with less - the only way to create prosperity.

Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it's our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.

In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.

The reason we have so much talent in Silicon Valley building and investing in for-profit technology companies is that markets richly reward successful ideas, no matter who invents them. But to remain competitive in a free market, companies must exercise discipline to meet quantitative goals and eventually become cashflow positive.

David and Ellen Siminoff are legends in Silicon Valley - they are two of the most influential mentors to top executives and leaders behind the scenes, with long track records of success.

The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It's a form of debt that is really more a type of equity - one where the valuation hasn't been determined yet.

For me, seed investing isn't just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.

I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.

We founded Palantir in 2003-2004 because we perceived a giant gap between how the defense and intelligence community was harnessing technology to achieve its goals and what we had seen was possible in Silicon Valley over the last decade.

There are people who are better managers than I am. I aspire to be a really good manager, but it's not my natural personality to do the same thing for 14 hours a day. I have a lot of different interests. I really like product and strategy and business strategy, and I think I'm not bad at it.

A true leader must strive towards a grand vision of human progress, but remember that the minor details of her everyday life really matter to those who look up to her as a role model.

Those who ultimately shake up an industry are often outsiders who don't know any better.

One of the fun things about venture capital is you are constantly learning new ideas and strategies from one business and then applying them to others.

Being able to access that Stanford alumni network was huge - I actually interned at PayPal while I was at Stanford and learned a lot. Being in that environment and learning about it as a student was really fun.

When I spend a lot of time reading, discussing, or thinking about an area, I'll often really appreciate why a strong viewpoint is true and come to very firm conclusions. But if I am later exposed to a strong opposing view, I frequently find this countervailing view persuasive as well.

A deep concern of mine is that leaders in the technology sector have not developed a culture that insists upon courage, honor, duty, and humility - what we might call a culture of virtue.

Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.

Creating efficiencies in private markets is a huge win for the economy.