Joe Lonsdale, American entrepreneur, investor & philanthropist.

We founded Palantir (NYSE, PLTR)  after 9-11 to apply breakthroughs from Silicon Valley to bring the US Defense and Intel community into the 21st century, to help it coordinate globally to track down terrorists and prevent attacks, while protecting civil liberties.  In order to succeed we had to build one of the strongest technology cultures in Silicon Valley and create new frameworks and platforms, solving extremely difficult technology and policy problems.

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Together with a large number of Stanford students, I founded California Common Sense, a nonprofit to uncover waste, compare performance between states, and highlight the most and least efficient areas of state government. We created the first online portal for state government data, filed FOIA requests, and attracted over a thousand media articles. 

As more agencies began coming to us for data, we realized that local governments were plagued by corrupt companies charging them absurd amounts to see their own data through bottom-quality software. In an early example of Smart Enterprise, we realized the solution was a mission-focused, data-driven, for-profit company, and Opengov was born. We built a platform to fix budgeting, licensing, citizen services, and reporting. Today, that mission is a success: OpenGov helps over 3000 government customers to bring constituents the transparency and efficiency they deserve.

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We were early investors in RelateIQ, which pioneered the use of network effects and AI for CRM. While RelateIQ showed great promise, they were acquired earlyon by Salesforce, which froze development of some of their best ideas. In the early days of 8VC, we recognized the need for a better solution for tracking and leveraging the firm’s relationships than the unwieldy, frustrating products available then. 

Sequoia built a proprietary solution in-house. We did the opposite, partnering with a pair of extraordinary cofounders to create Affinity, a scalable relationship intelligence platform to maximize value creation in multiple industries. Today, Affinity serves over 3,000 firms across VC, investment banking, private equity, commercial real estate, family offices, and consulting – in short, anyone who does deals.

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Like Palantir, Addepar was created in response to crisis: the 2008 financial meltdown and the information asymmetry that helped to drive it. Up to then, there was little data on wealth holdings and complex portfolios available, and little electronic access to what did exist. We saw how this held everyone back: Registered Investment Advisors couldn’t give their clients the best options, essential systems couldn’t talk to each other, and across the global economy, efficient exchanges were constantly thwarted. We realized that finance did not just need better tools, but an entire operating system to bring it into the digital age. We founded Addepar to effect this transformation. Today, Addepar’s platform manages nearly $4,000,000,000,000 in assets, across 5,000,000 custody accounts.

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I started 8VC with a handful of close friends and collaborators, betting that we could continue to be entrepreneurs under the guise of investing, while solving bigger and bigger problems along the way. In this spirit, we adopted the motto “The world is broken. Let’s fix it”, and have been fortunate to partner with many like-minded entrepreneurs.

8VC primarily invests in software/infrastructure, Bio-IT, logistics, and healthcare. These diverse problem spaces are knit together by our Smart Enterprise thesis, which focuses on creating platform-based approaches to complex, data-intensive, non-linear challenges. Together, we’ve invested in hundreds of companies, creating numerous industry leaders.

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Part of the value proposition -and mystique – of venture capital is access to exclusive deals that most investors, even most high net worth individuals, can’t get. Over time, however, I’ve come to realize that this is largely just a case of manufactured information scarcity allowing a few to centralize control. I’ve long believed wealth is not a zero-sum game. Everyone benefits from more participation and opportunity, and the best performers rise to the top. We should be multiplying, not restricting, opportunity – especially in private investments.

Opto is a private markets investment platform designed to give independent RIA firms access to a vast array of alternative investment opportunities in private credit, private equity, real estate, venture capital and other hard to access asset classes. With access to exclusive alternatives managers, Opto empowers advisors to help their clients build diversified, customized portfolios.

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My partners and I founded the Cicero Institute to apply our experience creating mission-driven ventures to some of the most troubling policy issues facing American society: public safety /criminal justice reform, the cost and performance of healthcare, and homelessness. While these problems are often thought of as intractable, their inherent difficulty has been compounded by special interests and a lack of meaningful incentives. 

The Cicero approach can be summarized as applying functional solutions to dysfunctional areas. In the process, we’ve found that the widespread assumption that “it can’t be done here” is typically just that – an assumption. While there is a long way to go, it’s been heartening to learn that none of these problems is a given. When competition, innovation, and value creation are rewarded, people will rise to the challenge.

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I started the American Optimist podcast as an alternative – perhaps even an antidote – to the polarization, cynicism, and division that have dominated our airwaves for too long. It’s been a uniquely rewarding forum to engage with some of the people who’ve inspired me the most, and expose a number of under-the-radar visionaries to a wider audience.

Real optimism is not utopianism, magical thinking, nor is it trusting in other people’s money or inherent goodness to accomplish things. It’s backed by sacrifice, commitment, and action. American Optimist is above all a chance to learn from the people fearlessly tackling our most urgent challenges, while bringing their fellow citizens along for the journey.

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As the world reeled at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 8VC team hunkered down in pursuit of the most important problem we could solve given our expertise and resources. We developed a thesis around remedying critical vulnerabilities in medical supply chains and radically increasing production capacity for novel treatments. Done properly, this could spell the future of medicine manufacturing – but the thesis was the easy part.

Realizing that preparation was about to collide head-on with opportunity, we worked furiously, raising hundreds of millions and assembling a team of world-class scientists, academics, pharma executives, and government leaders. Today, Resilience has added thousands of employees, stood up multiple operational facilities, inked pivotal manufacturing deals (including an agreement to produce mRNA for Moderna), and joined forces with leading biomedical institutions to develop next-generation therapies.

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UATX is developing a curriculum that synthesizes the best of the liberal arts tradition with a forward-looking 21st-century education in order to prepare coming generations to meet the world’s greatest challenges. Our curriculum is being designed in partnership not only with the world’s great thinkers but also with its great doers—visionaries who have founded bold ventures, artists and writers of the highest order, pioneers in tech, and the leading lights in engineering and the natural sciences.

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