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

Get our business idea database here ➡️

Episode 578Shaan Puri ( ) sits down with Joe Lonsdale ( ) 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

—

• Joe's Twitter

• Joe's blog

• Joe's podcast

• Lessons from Peter Thiel

—

Check Out Shaan's Stuff:

• Shaan's weekly email

• Visit 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:

• Ideation Bootcamp

• Copy That

• Hampton Wealth Survey

💰 Pitch your startup for a shot at a $1M investment with Sam Parr as the MC

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