Mastering the billion-dollar software playbook: Joe Lonsdale of 8VC & Eric Poirier of Addepar
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What early experiences shaped Joe Lonsdale’s and Eric Poirier’s approach to building software companies?
I think the areas that AI unlocks is there's a lot of companies started 50, 60 years ago even that are doing services that suddenly we can now go compete with with technology, which you couldn't have done 10 years ago.
Welcome to Orbit, the HG podcast series, where we speak to leaders from across the tech ecosystem to hear how they've built and scaled some of the most successful software companies in the world.
I'm not going to embarrass you guys, but we just did a quick bio, perhaps just so people kind of know who you are. So uh Joe is founding partner of 8vC, um, obviously a big venture capital firm, um, partners with a lot of founders and entrepreneurs. Began his career working with Peter Thiel um in PayPal, well, an undergraduate at Stanford, then went on to work with Peter Teal's Clarion Capital, and then I think about the age of 21, 22, forms Palantir. So um obviously now. growing to a $60 billion EV business. Obviously a number of startups, so Joe's been responsible for a number of businesses that have hit a you know a billion of of value and frankly way beyond. And it's now working that through the the 8 VC platform.
I would say part of the PayPal mafia if that's still allowed to be described. Obviously includes, you know, Peter, Elon Musk, uh Roloff Berter, Reid Hoffman, et cetera, et cetera. Um and I thought it was particularly important to or interesting to hear from Joe's around how he thinks about, you know, industries that are evolving, how you build software that serves those in industries, how that how that grows through. Eric is CEO of one of one of the major companies that Joe's founded. So Adipar. Adipar works with hundreds of financial advisors. I think you're up to about six trillion of AUM now on the platform. This business is frankly revolutionizing, changing the way that wealth management works globally.
It's been a very arcane industry, very poor data, very poor customer experience. And Adipar is now, frankly, established as being like the leading platform and is going to frankly take enormous market position already has and is going to continue to grow. Over that time. And I think you've been there since thirteen years or something. It's been a it's been a long journey. So you've been right the way through the journey in terms of where this has come from as a small company with minimal revenue and a lot of losses and taking that through the journey. So I thought it was very interesting to kind of get that perspective when you're thinking about some of these end industries that look very stable, frankly slightly boring.
How do you think about innovation, product innovation in that in that context?
Mm-hmm.
So Joe, if I can start with you. Um you've built Adipa, you've built Palantir, you've worked in local government, there's a bunch of these market spaces, you've done stuff in trucking. It's very interesting, this sort of, you know, your your the conventional idea of you know you build technology which is in these kind of high growth, sexy areas, you're almost playing a counterplay and with a very long term horizon. Space these businesses are running fifteen, twenty, thirty years. So I'd love to kind of open a bit on how do you think about where you put your time, how do you build innovation, what are you looking for, how does that process work? Sure.
Well thanks for having me. It's good to see you guys. Uh you know, in in in my part of the world, which is a little bit different, we write a lot smaller checks than you guys and and start at the beginning. Yeah, there's really two big things we're looking at. One is we we need to work with the very best technologists in the world because these these things are very hard to build. So we spend a lot of our time tracking talent and trying to trying to trying to build teams yet again like the early PayPal team where you had all of Peter Teal and Elon Musk's smartest friends. And I think we achieved that at Palantir and Adipar. And so that's the whole talent game. And then two, which maybe is intellectually more interesting, is it's really a question of what's possible now that wasn't possible five years ago.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What early experiences shaped Joe Lonsdale’s and Eric Poirier’s approach to building software companies?
0:10–4:17
2
How does the rise of AI unlock opportunities for legacy service businesses?
4:17–8:34
3
Why did Addepar focus on transforming the wealth‑management data stack?
8:34–12:02
4
What criteria do 8VC and Addepar use when selecting long‑term, high‑impact markets?
12:02–14:57
5
How can SaaS firms create sustainable moats without relying on imitation?
14:57–19:15
6
What role does talent acquisition and culture play in scaling deep‑tech companies?
19:15–23:42
7
How is generative AI being applied to improve data quality and workflow efficiency at Addepar?
23:42–26:35
8
What are the biggest service‑industry bets for the next five years and how should founders act on them?
26:35–29:59
Speakers
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