Joe Lonsdale
Everything Joe personally uses, recommends, or has created — plus things they don't recommend — sourced from their own show and appearances on other podcasts.
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Ranked by repeated personal use, excluding sponsorships.
Warned against
"I think OpenAI kind of let themselves be conquered by the left."
"Palantir has become a symbol for the foreign interventions in the ways in which data and now increasingly autonomous or at least AI-assisted attacks. Alex Karp of course goes to places like the World Economic Forum and brags about donating Palantir to Ukraine. Did Palantir when they were functioning under Obama or under Biden — were they conscientious objectors? No. Whoever is in charge of these systems will use them."
"TikTok is evil. And I hate that X is having to copy it because the financial incentive for social media is evil right now. I've blocked TikTok for years. Partially because of the CCP and stuff, but partially because also I don't have the willpower not to freaking scroll these things."
"I was the first big investor in Wish and I led the seed in the A and then it went all the way up and all the way down. That was tough but we learned a lessons about how this stuff worked."
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"Level one is the chips companies. Right now, Nvidia dominates that with Intel and AMD, that's over 99%, but there's a lot of new chips companies, too."
"I think Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are like 99% of the value right now. And that 1% is probably going to change to like 15 or 20% from new things would be my guess because there's so many new architectures."
"Level one is the chips companies. Right now Nvidia dominates that with Intel and AMD. That's over 99%, but there's a lot of new chips companies, too."
"Nvidia dominant but there's been a lot of new things there we're excited about."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Level four is the software infrastructure. These are the companies that help you deploy AI no matter who you are. So, it's something like Databricks for organizing your database infrastructure."
Mentioned in 6 episodes
"I was on the Zoom with Dario, who runs Anthropic, today. It's one of the top three labs, you know, he's raising at $350 billion."
"Anthropic has pulled way ahead in the coding area. I'm second most long Anthropic. It's just an extraordinary technology and they're just growing so fast. All of our companies are using this."
"The positive is that it is still being used right now with Palantir and Anthropic and it's working like really really well. This is like one of the most accurately fought wars with least civilian deaths and the most bad guys falling so fast."
"when you talk to the smartest guys like Dario who runs Anthropic, like as of a few months ago, he thought that like the next few years of this really fast advancement is kind of locked in"
"I think there's people I respect at Anthropic despite the fight they've had with the department and stuff, and there's some but there's some leftists there, too."
"a lot of the firms you probably saw that invest in lowend SAS companies got crushed because Anthropic's new stuff came out"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Obviously, you were saying in 2020, I think you realized you said that AGI was going to become possible. I think that's right around when GPT-3 came out from OpenAI."
Mentioned in 4 episodes
"That's exactly what Palantir works. Exactly. That's the value — you described it well."
"My best healthcare billing company with a bunch of ex-Palantir guys is going to double to over 100 million revenue this year."
"I hired a lot of the first few hundred people at Palantir and I spent a lot of time on talent."
"Palantir has become a symbol for the foreign interventions in the ways in which data and now increasingly autonomous or at least AI-assisted attacks. Alex Karp of course goes to places like the World Economic Forum and brags about donating Palantir to Ukraine. Did Palantir when they were functioning under Obama or under Biden — were they conscientious objectors? No. Whoever is in charge of these systems will use them."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"If you watch, for instance, the Coppola film, The Conversation — I think it came out in the 70s — and what did it talk about already? You had the technologies of surveillance and you had the idea that if these went out of control, there would be no part of your life that would be untouched. And anyone who was able to observe you all the time would have power over you."
Mentioned in 5 episodes
"I'm most long SpaceX. Next I'm second most long Anthropic."
"Palantir and SpaceX and then later Anduril and now Saronic broke through. And when they broke through and showed these better solutions, showed what was possible, it was 10 times better than what was there before."
"Elon did Tesla and SpaceX."
"They also think they're the best at building infrastructure. And so it's like not only is Elon building these giant things faster than everyone, but he he owns SpaceX."
"Every time SpaceX launches a rocket, it doesn't go well. You don't want to be sued, right?"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I think you're referring to the essay on the Pendleton Act, which is something I've become obsessed with recently — this 1883 act. American government massively expanded in the Civil War, and after Lincoln was gone, for the next 15 years whenever somebody would win office they'd bring in thousands then tens of thousands of friends, and finally both sides said okay this is ridiculous, let's cut things back and put in tests so we actually had a merit-based system."
Mentioned in 4 episodes
"Famously probably being in the first couple rounds of Anduril is pretty amazing. That's the top defense company."
"I know Anduril and Palantir are working really hard on the new C2 systems there, which is obviously critical for our country."
"What Palmer and Anduril and Dino at Saronic and others have demonstrated is actually there are designs that you can make a hundred or a thousand more of these for the same cost and that are many times in use cases even better."
"Anduril is building their autonomous fighter jets there, too. So, I guess great minds think alike. Palmer said the same thing."
Mentioned in 4 episodes
"One of the biggest success stories we're in right now called Cognition. The guy who started it used to work for me at Addepar. He won the gold medal in programming three years in a row. This is the fastest growing company I've ever been in."
"Cognition — we led a round last year and it's absolutely crushing it. One of the most important new AI companies. I think it's had three rounds now since we got in a year ago."
"I think I'm pretty bullish on Cognition because I think Scott and like these like 20 other like gold medal like Olympiad winners like probably could do something that's very very valuable"
"This guy worked for me at Addepar and had won the global programming competition three years in a row. It's three years later it'll do well over a billion dollars revenue this year and goal was to be very useful in creating a colleague."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Leading the seed round in Quince, which she loves. It's like super high-end luxury for affordable prices. Like for like a fifth of cost. And they just manufacture the exact same thing, really high quality. And it's doing billions of revenue."
"Quince we were the first big investors in. My wife's like obsessed with it which she's like look Joe I'm making you money like yes darling. It's like more than doubling again this year and the billions of revenue and it's just just did such a great execution."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Iron Dome was actually a major, major accomplishment. It's extraordinary that Israel was not wiped out a lot more by the insane amount of things shot at it."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"When I helped my friend start Epirus, that's what I was thinking — what a crazy terrorist could do to attack something in a stadium, and you actually do need to be able to turn these things off cheaply and affordably."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"If you ask Claude to generate an exploit, it's really hard to get it to do it. They're really big on that."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"I'm learning a little bit about this from Saronic and other companies I'm involved in."
"Well, we're working on it with Saronic and others."
Mentioned in 3 episodes
"Before we started Palantir, the thing we'd learned how to do was stop the fraud service at PayPal. The Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all of our money and made our competitors go bankrupt. I was just an intern back then, and when we were founding Palantir, it was from the lessons from fraud."
"At PayPal we had to stop the Chinese and Russian mafia from stealing all of our money. We got to know all the guys who were helping us arrest the bad guys — there were Secret Service and the FBI."
"The DNA of Palantir came out of the anti-fraud work at PayPal, right? The Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing massive amounts of money from PayPal."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I think it was founded by people who had been at Palantir in Europe. We're fans of them."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Orca Bio was officially approved, got their labels. That means it went through phase one, phase two, phase three. The data was so strong that it got through a little bit faster than normal and is able to basically do bone marrow grafts, which are used against blood cancers, much more safely, much higher survival rate over the first year. And this also has lots of potential applications against autoimmune diseases like Crohn's and multiple sclerosis. That company is very exciting to me."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Addepar is doing a lot with AI now and there's a lot of people there each managing tons of agents. You've probably invested almost two billion dollars now into the product, right? Because it's like 16 years old. It wouldn't take that much money to build it now."
"Addepar, for example, a company I started — there's like 1,500 firms on it, some are very big banks, big RIAs, some smaller family offices. They've put billions of dollars in the product. It's the number one in the market."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Elon did Tesla and SpaceX."
"Yeah, exactly. I shouldn't leave out Tesla. You have these amazing robots coming."
2 recommended · 0 sponsored · 4 warned against · 105 episodes