Smart Humans: 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale on spotting unicorns early, macro market trends, and the importance of diversifying into alternative investments

Joe Lonsdale is the managing partner at 8VC, a US-based venture capital firm which manages $5 billion in committed capital. He was an early institutional investor in many notable companies including Wish, Oculus (acq.Facebook), Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), Oscar (NYSE: OSCR), Illumio, Anduril,, Flexport, Joby Aviation, and Orca Bio. Joe has been on the Forbes 100 Midas List since 2016 and was the youngest member included in 2016 and 2017. Before focusing on institutional investing, Joe co-founded Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) a global software company known for its work in defense and other industries. After Palantir, he founded and remains as Chairman of both Addepar, which has over $2.5 trillion managed on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which provides software for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies. More recently, he is also a co-founder of Affinity, Epirus, Esper, Swiftscale Bio, Resilience Bio. Joe began his career as an early executive at Clarium Capital and also worked with PayPal while he attended Stanford.