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If you can make finance more functional, make it a tiny percent better, you create a great deal of resources, which you can use for other things like education and healthcare.
In my experience, it's common that deep truths exist at both extremes of a dialectic, and the wisest stance on an issue will incorporate 'both of the opposites within itself.'
For me, seed investing isn't just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.
A true leader must strive towards a grand vision of human progress, but remember that the minor details of her everyday life really matter to those who look up to her as a role model.
I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.
It always struck me as pretty cool that people who changed the world often knew each other. After reading them separately, hearing that David Hume and Adam Smith were friends made sense.
David and Ellen Siminoff are legends in Silicon Valley - they are two of the most influential mentors to top executives and leaders behind the scenes, with long track records of success.
A deep concern of mine is that leaders in the technology sector have not developed a culture that insists upon courage, honor, duty, and humility - what we might call a culture of virtue.
We created Addepar because we saw a place where a multi-billion dollar global platform clearly should exist - but did not yet - to fix many of the challenges that exist in the finance industry.
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.
Our family is very, very competitive. But it's a fun and inspiring sort of competitive. It makes you proud of what you do and makes you want to work hard and do all your homework so you can win.
Basically, I think society functions thanks to how certain key industries work - government, finance, healthcare, education, energy. Pretty much all of these have a huge impact on everything else.
America has the greatest military in the world, and it's up to our leaders to set the bar for what a 21st century military culture of innovation with transparent, collaborative leadership looks like.
Government officials and citizens care about many causes - and they all require resources. For example, I am personally passionate about ending the human trafficking that still occurs within our borders.
Traditional hackathons are fun and focused on skill and competition, but we believe that events which focus on the positive social impact of technology engage a wider and more diverse set of participants.
Engineering is the art of managing scarcity - it's easy to design and build a massive bridge that will last forever if cost is not an issue. Similarly, to build a new company, you must manage scarce resources.
Being able to access that Stanford alumni network was huge - I actually interned at PayPal while I was at Stanford and learned a lot. Being in that environment and learning about it as a student was really fun.
In a well-run tech company, small, elite groups who have ownership in the company are given the freedom to define and achieve their tasks in line with a broader mission that they have internalized as their own.
While it can be overwhelming to realize how many problems there are to solve in the world, it's always inspiring to see so many talented people willing to spend their time and energy in hopes of making a difference.
A talented executive whose interests are aligned with the firm's and is confident in her role will always recruit stars who exceed herself in various ways, but one who is worried about her value to the firm will not.
CEOs shouldn't worry about their budget all the time - on a day-to-day basis, they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.
Our best and brightest must conceive of themselves as stewards of our society and confront the critical challenges of our time. It's the best bet for our society, for entrepreneurs, and for the investors who believe in them.
Engineering talent is the most precious resource for any technology company - Palantir and Addepar are successful first and foremost because of their top tech cultures, and the same is true for our best portfolio companies at 8VC.
Private equity firms working closely with venture capitalists and technologists may be able to unlock assets that others have not leveraged and build technology cultures to iterate on solutions that make these assets more productive.
We founded Palantir in 2003-2004 because we perceived a giant gap between how the defense and intelligence community was harnessing technology to achieve its goals and what we had seen was possible in Silicon Valley over the last decade.
What would I advise an aspiring young entrepreneur? Certainly I'd say read the works of great entrepreneurs and investors like Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and many others. But what's more important is to get real experience at a great startup.
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.
Those who serve in our armed forces do so from a profound sense of duty to secure liberty for their fellow Americans. They enlist to serve their fellow citizens who express their will through elected representatives, not an unaccountable defense establishment.
Being a great founder or early team member is a difficult dialectic - you have to be a bit overconfident, and a big ego isn't always a bad thing. To change the world requires pushing really, really hard and believing you and your team know something others don't.
Addepar not only helps improve private wealth management workflows so that advisors can do a better job at what they currently do, but it also helps build a data-driven and integrated view on top of the many important financial decisions within a client portfolio.
A policy of knowing your replacement is one of the best ways to drive a growth culture. It anticipates and eliminates the most harmful politics in leadership for an expanding company and instantly sets the right tone for a high-talent, growth-mindset executive team.
Palantir owes much of its success to the amazing talent of the first 30-40 technologists who joined the company, as well as to the internal leadership that helped motivate this core group to achieve its ambitious goals and to continue to attract extraordinary people.
In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.
Fear is the wrong response to technological unemployment. Focusing on economic flexibility and adaptability - with special attention to eliminating the barriers we've accidentally created to the mobility of the working classes - is the right response to technological disruption.
When I spend a lot of time reading, discussing, or thinking about an area, I'll often really appreciate why a strong viewpoint is true and come to very firm conclusions. But if I am later exposed to a strong opposing view, I frequently find this countervailing view persuasive as well.
Hours wasted in traffic represent not only lost wages but enormous amounts of economic activity that might have happened. Congestion indirectly increases consumer prices, makes travel times unreliable for commuters and truckers, and precludes many people from accessing jobs in urban hubs.
I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.
There are people who are better managers than I am. I aspire to be a really good manager, but it's not my natural personality to do the same thing for 14 hours a day. I have a lot of different interests. I really like product and strategy and business strategy, and I think I'm not bad at it.
A great leader should make it clear to her team members that as a matter of culture, her job is to replace herself. A new hire should know from the outset that she will ultimately have to bring in new talent to replace herself so that she can personally better herself and achieve loftier goals.
There are hundreds of millions of people around the globe who could safely repay loans but nonetheless do not have access to a line of credit. Financial institutions in developing economies are broken and inefficient, and hard-working people have not been given the chance to establish a credit history.
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.
America faces a mounting transportation crisis, and the primary culprit is road congestion. Traffic makes us unhealthy, wastes enormous amounts of time, and cripples national productivity. America needs expanded roads and transportation infrastructure, but traditional gas tax funding is no longer available.
Success gives you a platform for further success - suddenly everybody wants to work with you, and your opportunities and possibilities open up. But at the same time, success is also immensely challenging - it ultimately often creates pride, stubbornness, and sloppiness that beget failure, taking down people and organizations.
The reason we have so much talent in Silicon Valley building and investing in for-profit technology companies is that markets richly reward successful ideas, no matter who invents them. But to remain competitive in a free market, companies must exercise discipline to meet quantitative goals and eventually become cashflow positive.
A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.
Marketing is your battle plan for the sales team - it's about defining the landscape. Marketing is doing cohort analysis and understanding exactly what possible customers are out there. It's understanding not only which customers will respond to what messages, but also how customers will become clients if you include certain product features.