Who am I?

I’m Joe Lonsdale: serial entrepreneur, venture capital investor, philanthropist, husband, father of four girls, and lifelong builder.

In 2003, I founded Palantir Technologies to bring together the country’s best technical talent to defend America after 9/11. We built a revolutionary platform to help intelligence services map networks of terrorists and hunt them down — preventing hundreds of attacks on Americans and others. Palantir remains a global leader in software for healthcare, government, defense, and more.

In 2009, I founded and served as CEO of Addepar, a wealth management technology platform created to address many technical problems with the way finance worked before the Great Recession. Nearly 15 years later, Addepar has over $4 trillion managed on its platform, and I am a proud Chairman of the board.

I have a habit of starting mission-driven technology businesses, and I haven’t stopped after twenty years. Today, I’m the managing partner at the venture capital firm I founded: 8VC.

Investing allows me to work with the most talented and ambitious people on the planet, both my colleagues at 8VC and the entrepreneurs we back. We also build our own businesses with our 8VC Build program.

We invest and build in areas like defense, healthcare, logistics, the biosciences, enterprise software, AI, and more. It’s all driven by our core thesis: The world is broken. Let’s fix it.

8VC is where I spend most of my time nowadays. Our firm is headquartered in Austin, TX, with offices in San Francisco and New York.

I’ve founded companies like Epirus, which builds the world’s most advanced EMP weapons to protect our country.

OpenGov provides cloud software to thousands of municipalities, bringing them into the 21st century.

Resilience is bringing advanced bio-manufacturing back to American shores at an absolutely critical time.

Affinity is next-generation relationship intelligence for the best businesses to keep track of who matters, and why.

Standard Metrics changed the way venture capital funds and startups interact with their investors, with streamlined tools and metrics.

Saronic engineers autonomous, subsurface maritime vehicles for American defense.

TAP (Training All People) is forging a new path to the middle class via skills-based education and revitalizing key American industries.

Opto Investments is transforming alternative investments and asset management with new technological tools.

Esper makes the regulatory process for thousands of government agencies more streamlined and transparent with technology

In 2018, my wife Tayler and I founded a non-partisan public policy organization, The Cicero Institute, where I am Chairman.

At Cicero, we work to apply the lessons of the innovation world in the world of governance to help build a more functional, prosperous future for our country. We’re tackling issues like better and more affordable healthcare, homelessness, public safety, education, regulation, and more.

We are working aggressively to retake government from unaccountable bureaucrats, and teaching America how to solve big challenges. We’ve achieved dozens of legislative victories in just a few years.

In 2021, I became a founding trustee and the chairman of the University of Austin (UATX) along with Pano Kanelos, Bari Weiss, and Niall Ferguson.

We are building a new university right here in Austin, TX, dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.

I live with my wife, Tayler, and our four daughters in Austin, where we moved in 2020 from our longtime home of California.

Thanks for reading and be sure to subscribe to get all the new blog posts and podcasts. You can always tweet me @JTLonsdale