Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and 8VC, talks about scaling teams and teaching managers to replace themselves. He covers setting company vision, recruiting talent, and balancing Palantir's dual mission of supporting national security while protecting civil liberties.
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I mean, I guess being young and going from a startup of 2 or 3 people, that's one thing, but when you manage teams and lead big teams of 200, 300 people, what were some of the learnings there? Because some of these people will actually have to do that.
Yeah, well, I think it's actually very similar, and I wasn't managing the whole company by that point at all, but I think a lot of this is very similar, actually, to being a venture capitalist in some ways. a lot more than some people think, because you're basically teaching people how to manage and how to lead. At some point, your job as a leader goes from managing your people yourself, which is still important, to managing managers and teaching people how to teach managers. It's like you're teaching managers yourself, teaching people how to teach managers. It's a lot. I think it's actually really interesting. You don't really learn how to do something really well until you've tried to teach it. I think it's a very good experience as a leader to try to figure out how to help other leaders. But that's really what your job becomes, is how to empower people to do that. One of my favorite quotes from Bloomberg's book on business is he basically says, everyone's job is to replace themselves.
Mm-hmm.
And so you're teaching people how to think about replacing themselves, because as a good leader, you should be seeing what you're doing, and find— if you have a growing company, you should find someone else who could do it better than you, so you have more time freed up for other things. And so your job is to constantly replace yourself. He says of his direct reports, don't have someone who's a replacement necessarily, then they're not going to be direct reports for long because they're not very good if they're not constantly replacing themselves.
Got it. I guess that connects a little bit to vision, which that's the whole purpose of this entire week. This is their first week here, is setting the vision for the entire team and giving that vision to other leaders. What was the vision then and how did that adapt?
Yeah, that's a good question. That was a very key part of Palantir. We were very mission Very vision-driven company. One of the things we'd do is I'd go around to each of the engineers and make sure they could explain the vision and the mission. The reason this was important is because it was everybody's job to be talking to their smartest friends and to be bringing their friends into the company. I didn't want anybody at the company, if they weren't proud enough of the company, to be trying to recruit the best people they'd worked with in the past. In order to do that, you had to be on the same page about what the vision is, what the vision is, why it's important to you. I think it's always going to be a little bit different to everybody if they're actually explaining in a heartfelt way why they care about it. But that was very important to me that people could do that. And, you know, for Palantir at the time, it's— you have to remember, it was like a little bit different time in our, in our, in our history where people were very sensitive about, about the fact that we'd been attacked and we could be attacked again anytime. And it was— at the same time, it was very scary how, because people were so sensitive, there was a chance of them abusing the data and treating people incorrectly. So it was, it was a dual mission, both to protect our country and to, and to arm and to arm our intelligence and defense forces with the most important weapon, which was the best information possible, and to do it in a way where they're literally wasting billions of dollars on things we could do for millions, right? So do it in a way to save our government a lot of money, and then at the same time to protect civil liberties and to build in a policy system here where the tools that we were equipping the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and the counterterrorism centers and everyone with had ways to watch the watchers and had ways to make sure people were using the data legally and not illegally, 'cause if you're gonna have really strong software that can do these things, you have to build it in so the policy is such that you can't get away with corruption. So it was kind of this dual mission from both sides of that, and people, some people were more passionate about killing the bad guys, some people were more passionate about the civil liberties side, but it kind of had both of those built in.
What was the most important lesson you learned from your experience at the NSA?
