Joe Lonsdale

America’s reactive model of kidney care enriches an oligopolistic dialysis industry, wastes billions of dollars a year, and creates worse health outcomes for millions of Americans each decade

When an employee of a privately held technology company leaves the company and exercises her stock options, she typically has 3 months to qualify for favorable tax treatment.

The only way to create prosperity is to do more with less. In economic terms, an increase in productivity is an increase in the amount or quality of output generated for each unit of input. Jobs do not make society wealthier – productivity does.

For most, the word “charity” evokes concepts of altruism and justice completely divorced from considerations of efficiency and profit. The distinction between the spheres of charity and commerce is reflected in the unique legal status accorded to each, and the kinds of people each sector tends to attract.

This blog addresses a recurring topic for our CEOs — how to think about the value of experience at a technology startup, the seniority of a company’s team, and when it’s the right time to make certain executive hires.

Our age is not short of great ideas — of ways new technology can be applied to fix global industries and increase prosperity. But we are starting to notice a serious deficit in Silicon Valley: a shortage of great leaders. A common refrain from startup entrepreneurs is that they have no problem attracting high-energy contributors, but are having difficulty finding talented, driven executives who can lead and inspire. It is growing harder to ignore SV’s leadership deficit as one of the central challenges for companies fighting to scale — and as a central question for Silicon Valley’s impact on the world at large.

Since the recovery from the dot-com crash, doomsday prophets have consistently warned of a bubble in the private technology company ecosystem. This may sound like a valid concern to Silicon Valley-outsiders confronted with a spectacle of far-fetched startup ideas, wild blow-ups, and the transfer of large sums of money into the hands of audacious twenty-somethings. But we are not in a tech bubble. Iterative, trial and error experimentation is the mechanism by which firms drive the evolution of the market economy; it is the natural adaptation of industry to new technological paradigms. Moreover the amount of money involved in this vital discovery process is a tiny fraction of total economic output. Like any industrial revolution, the present era is one of rapid flux of the economy in response to new technological possibilities. Economic historians looking back on the present period will characterize it as the early innings of Golden Age of the information technology revolution.

Secretary Shultz is one of the great men of our age, and I am lucky to have gotten to know him over the past several years during his time at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Born in 1920, he has lived an extraordinary life and is still actively working on some of the most important problems of our time including nuclear non-proliferation and mentorship of government leaders.

Pittsburgh, which was founded two centuries ago in 1816, was one of the great economic centers of the United States. It was the 8th biggest city by population in 1920, and it peaked at over 700,000 in the 1940s. A geographic center where the rail lines met between cities including Chicago, Cleveland, DC, and New York, Pittsburgh was the home of great industrialists including Mellon, Heinz, Frick and Westinghouse, to name a few who many of us still recognize today. During the second world war, Pittsburgh itself produced as much steel as each Axis power and was at the heart of American industrial success.

The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It’s a form of debt that is really more a type of equity — one where the valuation hasn’t been determined yet.

Although certain TV portrayals are clearly unrealistic or over the top for comedic value, this episode dealt with a lot of issues we face in our industry.

Some of the most talented people I used to work with at Palantir founded Blend, and it exemplifies much of what we have written about at Formation 8 and now 8VC (www.8vc.com). Blend aligns with our views about how to create a top technology culture and focus on an uncrowded, yet critical, vertical. It also exemplifies the ‘Smart Enterprise’ theme, as it replaces legacy infrastructure with deep Silicon Valley technology to help an underserved industry and create tremendous value for American lenders and borrowers alike.

Congress gives the Pentagon $600 billion a year: our largest non-entitlement expense. In return, the military must spend money efficiently and report back to civilian leaders. Fulfilling these obligations builds trust and ensures every dollar in the defense budget benefits America and our sons and daughters who protect us.

We believe the technologists and entrepreneurs of our generation are in a position to have a more widespread, positive impact on the world than any group in any previous generation — and that we have an ethical duty to recognize and act on our power. We believe in the power of technology and business to enable greater prosperity. We believe in progress, and in markets, and in creating opportunity for all.

Lately I’ve had a strong sense that we’re living at a particularly important time in history, and I feel really lucky to get be able to interact with a lot of the actors firsthand.

One of the fun things about venture capital is you are constantly learning new ideas and strategies from one business and then applying them to others. Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it’s our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.

There are 5.7 million businesses in the United States, 89.9% of which have fewer than twenty employees. In aggregate, small and medium businesses (SMBs) produce nearly half of GDP and account for roughly 60% of new job creation. They are the lifeblood of the American economy.

The term ‘big data’ is a pervasive Silicon Valley colloquialism. The expression now describes a range of technologies, from back-end infrastructure to front-end consumer software applications. This development corresponds with a trend: the allocation of billions of dollars by investors into ‘big data’ companies which, simply put, stand little chance of becoming transformative companies.