From PayPal Intern to Starting 4x Billion-Dollar Companies - Joe Lonsdale Interview

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
You have now created, by my count, at least four billion dollar companies directly, probably more than that. What would you say you are doing different than the average good founder?

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:11)
So, I have some unfair advantages, right?

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
Okay, Joe, thanks for doing this, man. And thanks for inviting me into the morning workout, the cold plunge and everything in between breakfasts.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:30)
It's good to have you here, Sean.

**Shaan Puri** (0:31)
So, I want to start with lessons learned.
One of them that we were talking about this morning when we were doing our workout was making decisions on blended reasons or having like a blended strategy for how you're, we're gonna win doing these five things and why that sounds like a good idea to the average person, but it's actually a very bad idea. Can you explain that?

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:49)
Yeah, and I wrote this piece online, like nine lessons from Peter Thiel, I sent to all of Palantir, that's been like sent to all of my other companies as well and it's one of my favorite pieces. And that's one of them.
And it's one of these logic things where usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else.
And that's just the nature of the world is that when something's successful, it's kind of like the power law rule, right? Like in a venture capital like fund even, there tends to be one thing that's successful that's like bigger than everything else. And that's true inside of companies as well. It's very unusual, extraordinarily unusual for there to be like two similarly equal like products or revenue lines or something like that, especially early on in a company. So usually if you think you have like two or three reasons for doing something or five reasons for doing something, what that means is that you actually haven't figured out. You have no reason. You have no strong reason yet.

**Shaan Puri** (1:34)
Yeah.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:35)
Like that means you have five weak reasons, which is not good. You want to find like what's like one really strong thing you're driving towards and that's how startups work. And this is, it's a really seductive trick. I mean, first of all, you have to be taking a big risk to even do a startup. It feels like rather than like, you know, most people, a lot of people like to incubators because they're like, oh, I don't want to do one company. I'm gonna do 10 companies. And like, by the way, that's like much less likely to have big success because you're not focused. And then, but so even within a company, they're like, they're trying to do the same thing. They're trying to be like, well, here's five ways I'm gonna make money. And like, no, no, no, man, if you really want to do a company, figure out the way you're gonna make money. And that tends to be how it works, you know?

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**Shaan Puri** (3:16)
And that applies to revenue streams. So eight revenue streams means you probably don't have one awesome revenue stream.