Joe Lonsdale
Can entrepreneurs and innovators help lift barriers to economic opportunity? Joe Lonsdale thinks so.
Joe is one of the most successful young investors of our time. When Joe debuted on Forbes’ Midas List of top venture capitalists in 2016, he was the list’s youngest member. Through 8VC, his San Francisco-based venture capital firm, and predecessor institutions, Joe was an early institutional investor in e-commerce giant Wish, virtual reality leader Oculus, health insurer Oscar, and numerous other companies. He’s best known as a co-founder of Palantir, the global software company.
Joe has also founded startups focused on transforming government: most notably OpenGov, a cloud computing platform for governments; Epirus, a developer of next-generation defense systems; and Esper, a platform for improving regulatory rule-making. “We live in a great age,” says Joe, “but many Americans are held back by the rising costs of living, limited economic mobility, and ineffective public policy.”
Joe grew up in Fremont, California, where he excelled at chess, twice winning the California state championship as a middle-schooler. “We had a smart group of friends on the chess team together,” he recalls, “but the reason we succeeded was that we worked way harder than the competition.” Joe found his way to Stanford, where he majored in computer science and edited the Stanford Review. It was at Stanford where Joe first met Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal; after Joe graduated from Stanford, he joined Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, before founding Palantir with Thiel, Alex Karp, and others.
Palantir is arguably Joe’s most important entrepreneurial success to date. It’s rumored that the $20 billion company’s big data analytics helped the U.S. find thousands of terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden. “We saw how the government was wasting enormous amounts of money on outdated and defective technology,” Joe recalls. “We knew that we could help build better software, and we wanted to take down terrorists and protect our country. We knew we could do it in a way that was consistent with our values and our civil liberties.”
Palantir has also played an essential role in the world’s response to COVID-19. “Great information technology can help health providers, epidemiologists, and governments test and trace, map PPE supplies, and manage hospital traffic while keeping health records private in the process,” says Joe. “Palantir’s platform was the common operating system for [the] pandemic response efforts in 35 countries.”
Joe has dedicated his career to improving lives through philanthropy, education, and public policy, along with entrepreneurship and investing. In 2018, Joe founded the Cicero Institute, which deploys 8VC’s expertise in entrepreneurial innovation to improve public policy in fields like criminal justice reform, education, housing, and health care.
Not coincidentally, those are FREOPP’s core policy areas as well, and Joe has joined FREOPP’s Board of Advisors to help bring the most creative thinking from Silicon Valley into our work. “A good leader will solve problems on a case by case basis, advocating for specific programs,” says Joe, “but great leaders redesign incentives and systems to enable the best ideas and solutions to compete and win. FREOPP is working to improve broken parts of our country, and I’m excited to partner with FREOPP in delivering meaningful results for ordinary Americans.”
Joe and his wife Tayler live in Austin with their daughters.
