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Episode 578: Shaan Puri (   / shaanvp   ) sits down with Joe Lonsdale (   / jtlonsdale   ) 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.

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Show Notes:
(0:00) The One Reason strategy
(3:18) Learning Global Macro Finance from Peter Thiel
(5:35) Taking multimillion 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: AIpowered 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 21year old defense contractor
(52:22) Peter Thiel’s biggest contrarian bet




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Links:
• Joe's Twitter   / jtlonsdale  
• Joe's blog https://blog.joelonsdale.com/
• Joe's podcast https://www.americanoptimist.com/
• 8VC https://www.8vc.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/lessonspeter...



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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