Joe Lonsdale's Billion-Dollar Journey

A story about Joe Lonsdale's background and his candid response about his early achievements.

"Someone asked him in an interview what he was like as a kid, and most successful people typically give humble origins of some kind. But Joe was hilariously candid. He said, 'Yeah, I grew up, had great parents, great family. Stuff came pretty easy to me. I was basically really good. I aced all my tests, I was 99 percentile math, 99 percentile science, I was a programmer.'

He said there were smarter kids than him, but school was pretty easy. He focused on it, did well, got into Stanford. That was his story, which I found to be hilariously candid because most successful people try to bend their awesome upbringing to focus on some one bad thing. But he was like 'No, my parents loved me, they really put me in a position to succeed, and I was super competitive and I won.'"

He went on to get into Peter Thiel's orbit when he was around 20 or 21, still in college. He became Thiel's protégé, working at his hedge fund. From there, he co-created Palantir, a $50 billion company, and claims he's created more billion-dollar companies than anyone else in America - at least five billion-dollar companies in a short period of time.