Joe Lonsdale, VC, Philanthropist

Joe Lonsdale is a partner at 8VC, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. He was an early institutional investor in many notable companies including Wish, Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, Blend, RelateIQ, Joby Aviation, Guardant Health, and Synthego, and in 2016 and 2017 was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List.

Joe is a co-founder of Palantir, a multi-billion dollar global software company best known for its work in defense and finance. Most recently, he was a founding partner at Formation 8, one of the top performing private funds and the precursor to 8VC. Together, these funds manage a total committed capital of over $3.3 billion. Before that, he founded Addepar, which has over $1.8 trillion managed on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which modernizes various processes for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies. He is also a founder of Affinity, Anduin, Epirus and Esper. Previously, Joe was an early executive at Clarium Capital, which he helped grow into a large global macro hedge fund. He also worked with PayPal while he was at Stanford.

Joe and his wife Tayler are active in a variety of philanthropic and mission-driven pursuits involving public policy and liberty, classical arts, and healthcare innovation. In addition to supporting various nonprofit organizations such as Thorn, an NGO which leverages technology to fight child trafficking, Joe and Tayler are focused on harnessing the power of markets to create more opportunity for all parts of society.

Joe received a BS in Computer Science from Stanford in 2003. He often lectures and writes on entrepreneurship, technology and public policy.