Palantir's PayPal Origins
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A story about how Joe Lonsdale and his team developed the idea for Palantir from their experience fighting fraud at PayPal.
"At PayPal, we were going bankrupt because Chinese and Russian mafia were stealing all our money. I ended up hanging out after work with guys who were working on how to stop the bad guys.
You'd go to 7-11 and the clerk might be having a bad year, angry at capitalism, and they're writing down secretly the numbers on credit cards. They write down 500 of these numbers, they can sell them online for 5 or 10 dollars. The Russian mafia buys them up, and suddenly you get a chargeback for $200 on PayPal. PayPal is left with the bill. This was costing PayPal several million dollars a month and many competitors went bankrupt.
We got to know these guys at the Secret Service and FBI who were in charge of anti-fraud and arresting the mafia. They would come to us for advice on other things. Then 9/11 happened, and the government started spending billions of dollars on supposed solutions to catching bad guys. We knew these guys and watched what they were spending money on. We thought 'Oh my god, this is stupid - this is way behind Silicon Valley.'
Whatever was being done in DC with the old integrators, they're still doing stuff from 20 years ago. Our nation was under attack and we're wasting billions of dollars on stupid things. That's when we said 'okay, let's get together and draw up what we could actually be doing here if they did it better.' That became the genesis of Palantir."
Joe Lonsdale
Co-founded 8VC, a venture capital firm focused on building sustainable businesses. Helped launch Resilience to address vulnerabilities in medical supply chains.
Serial entrepreneur with a track record of founding and guiding companies in various sectors. Instrumental in the success of Epirus, which secured significant contracts and funding.