Joe Lonsdale is a partner at 8VC, a San Francisco–based venture-capital fund. 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 he was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List. Lonsdale is a cofounder of Palantir, a multibillion-dollar global software company best known for its work in defense and finance.

More 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 $2.7 billion. He previously founded Addepar, which has over $1 trillion US managed on its wealth-management technology platform, and OpenGov, which modernizes various processes for more than two thousand municipalities and state agencies. He is also a founder of Affinity, Anduin, and Esper. Lonsdale 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.

Lonsdale and his wife, Tayler, are active in a variety of philanthropic and mission-driven pursuits involving public policy and liberty, classical arts, and health-care innovation. In addition to supporting various nonprofit organizations such as Thorn, an NGO which leverages technology to fight child trafficking, the Lonsdales are focused on harnessing the power of markets to create more opportunity for all parts of society. Lonsdale received a BS in computer science from Stanford in 2003. He often lectures and writes on entrepreneurship, technology, and public policy.

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