April 29, 2024

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

58 minutes

My First Million

Key Takeaways

You must have “one reason” to found a start-up; if you have five or six reasons to start it, then you have not yet found the single, very strong reason
Hire for raw IQ and hard work, then constantly iterate on solving the single problem at hand
Using your mind to its fullest capacity is the ultimate pleasure
The most successful people in the world are extremely focused and allow their focused efforts to compound over time
It is easy to identify conceptual gaps; developing the path toward closing that gap is the challenging part
You must figure out 1) what you are passionate about and 2) what you are good at
How you invest your time is more important than how you invest your capital, if wealth creation is your goal

Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.org

Episode 578: Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with Joe Lonsdale ( https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale ) to talk about how he leveraged one internship at PayPal into one billion dollar success after another.

Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5

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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

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Links:

• Joe's Twitter - https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale

• Joe's blog - https://blog.joelonsdale.com/

• Addepar - https://addepar.com/

• Palantir - https://www.palantir.com/

• Epirus- https://www.epirusinc.com/

• OpenGov - https://opengov.com/

• Prologis - https://www.prologis.com/

• Lessons from Peter Thiel - https://joelonsdale.com/lessons-peter-thiel/

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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:

Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd

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Check Out Sam's Stuff:

• Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/

• Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/

• Copy That - https://copythat.com

• Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth

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

Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.

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