Good morning. I'm Lissa Moon, the chairman of the Texas Business Hall of Fame, and I'm so glad everybody did make it off of 35 and here today. Welcome to our Austin Creator Series featuring Joe Lonsdale and Graham, our Texas Business Hall of Fame legend, Graham Weston. I know that y'all are going to have a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation this morning. I also want to extend a sincere thank you to JP Morgan for making this creator series possible. This is actually the fourth one we've had. We've had two in Austin, one with Janet Gurwitch, the founder of Laura Mercier, one with Tiffany Masterson, the founder of Drunk Elephant, and then in Dallas, we had John Arnold of Arnold Adventures and Mark Cuban. We're very excited about this partnership with JP Morgan and in a few weeks we will be formally announcing that they will be our presenting sponsor at the induction dinner in San Antonio in November. So we're very excited about that. Today it's my pleasure to introduce Jake Maso from JP Morgan. He is the market manager for Central Texas at JP Morgan Private Bank and he will be officially welcoming Joe and Graham to our stage. Thank you.
Thank you. And good morning everybody. Welcome. My name is Jake Maso and on behalf of JP Morgan Chase, it's an honor to welcome you to the Texas Business Hall of Fame's creator series here in Austin. We're proud to sponsor the speaker series which has featured some of the state's most innovative trailblazers and we've got two of them right here with us this morning. But first, let me just say that JP Morgan Chase, we strive to be the most respected financial services firm in the world, serving both corporations and individuals alike. And we're proud partners in the Texas Business Hall of Fame's mission to honor and empower transformational business leaders. Together, we believe that the power of entrepreneurship and innovation are central to the betterment of our local communities and the world. Thank you, Joe and Graham, for your participation this morning. And Joe, we're very excited to hear more about your story as an entrepreneur and how you've taken your vision and impact into new spaces. Graham, I know many of the topics we covered today are near and dear to you and are thrilled that you agreed to lead the discussion. So, it's my great pleasure to formally introduce our two speakers. Joe Lonsdale is the founder and managing partner at 8VC, an early-stage venture capital firm managing over six billion in committed capital. He's founded or co-founded over a dozen prominent companies including giants like Palantir, Addepar, and OpenGov. Joe and his wife Taylor are community-driven and they founded the nonpartisan Cicero Institute to promote smarter governance in over 20 states. And in 2021, Joe became the founding chairman of the University of Austin. As one of its Texas Business Hall of Fame legends, Graham Weston is well known to this group. He's an entrepreneur, real estate developer, and philanthropist whose business success and community initiatives have been well documented throughout the years. And Graham co-founded Rackspace, and its success is widely seen as the birth of the contemporary tech economy in San Antonio. Dozens of successful spin-off companies have been started by former rackers as they're called, and many launched them through Geekdom, the downtown San Antonio startup incubator that Graham also founded. Weston established the 80/20 Foundation to focus on nonprofit enterprises and attract, grow, and retain San Antonio's future workforce and job creating entrepreneurs. Today, Graham serves as a chairman of Weston Urban, which is transforming more than 25 acres of vacant and underutilized properties in downtown San Antonio into in addition to many other projects. So, we're honored to have Joe and Graham with us here this morning to share their insights, their experience. Would you please join me in welcoming Joe Lonsdale and Graham Weston?
Well, thank you for the introduction and hello. This looks like a good crowd here. Thank you very much for coming. Joe, I want you to know that this audience is filled full of entrepreneurs and young leaders who have received an award from the Texas Business Hall of Fame as a rising star. And there may be a Joe Lonsdale in the audience today listening to us. So I know everything.
Hopefully not as obnoxious, but yes. It's an honor to be here, guys. Nice to see you all.
You know, Joe, you moved to Texas. When I met you, maybe you'd only been in Texas for maybe a year. We were...
Yeah, we got here in 2020 at the height of COVID.
Yeah. And actually COVID lingered for quite a bit long after that. I would say that you were an early adopter of Texas. You left California fed up pretty quickly. Why did you do that?
Well, I wrote this piece in the Wall Street Journal at the time. You know, we're really proud to be here. We have six little kids and we wanted to raise them in a state that we thought reflected more our values trying to build in California. There's many things that we've already built here that are at scale that we probably still be in permanent process for. And you know, I'm lucky to have a lot of staff and people who help us at our home and at our work. And a lot of these people back in California, the only option even if you paid them well by market standards was to drive an hour to our house because you're just there you can't build. It's illegal to build. They've preserved everything which sounds really nice. It's a really well-intentioned but it just ruins life for middle class and lower middle class. And so I think Texas is just a much better run state and it especially is felt by people who now can live, you know, 10 minutes away really well out west instead of an hour away. And it just I think this is a healthier place to raise a family and to build a society based on these values.
I think that you've really made an impact on Texas just in the few years you've been here. I mean, but I'm very proud that you're wearing cowboy boots today with me.
I'm learning. Can I make fun of myself? The first time I got here in 2020, I was invited out to shoot AR-15s at a ranch and I was told to wear boots and I wore the only pair of boots I had and I was out there and I was slipping all over the place and this like old man looks at me. He says, 'Son, are those dancing boots?' Doing my best. Embarrassment is a good teacher.
Yeah, but you came here and you've really made a splash. That is you have I think that as I've when we first met breakfast at your house 5 years ago, you were really giddy to be here. COVID was way less disruptive than it was in California. But so much has happened since that time. And one of the things is that you told me about an idea of starting a university. You said I think I may start a university. And you know what I thought to myself silently? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really didn't of all the things we talked about that day, I really didn't take that seriously. And then I saw you 6 months later, you invited me to your Christmas party and you said, 'I think I'm actually going to do it.' And here we are a few years later and you're starting your third class at the University.
It's going really well. We're actually just finishing our STEM building. The hailstorm knocked it down the first time, but we're almost done. We're finishing our STEM building right next to Elon's Boring Company and SpaceX out there. 20,000 square feet. The guys are going to help teach mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, build some robots. But no, these young students are amazing. We have about 80 per class right now. We're going to do 100 for this third class. A lot of them are turning down Ivy League schools to come here. We're doing intellectual foundations of the West. We're doing STEM. Very entrepreneurial. You can imagine that young students with very high scores choosing to come to a new university. It's a very entrepreneurial group and hopefully we can contribute to Texas with them.
You know, it really if you think about some of the great universities of America, we think University of Chicago, we think Carnegie Mellon really the...
All about 100 years ago, right? Those guys started them.
And I think that there hasn't really been a major privately created university since that era. A lot of universities created that era, but not since then. Why did you feel that this was your time to do that?
You know, I think all of us as entrepreneurs, you build something because there's a big conceptual gap in the world where it's really needed, right? So, I think and you know, that's as a venture capitalist or an entrepreneur, you say, 'Okay, how do I work with the very best talent in the world and how do I go after something where this is possible now and it's needed and wasn't possible before?' And it just was very very obvious to a lot of us that there were just huge gaps between kind of where our top 100 universities are and where they could be if they were better run and there's gaps in all sorts of areas. There's gaps in how well we're teaching. There's gaps but there's really gaps in the character and the integrity and the courage that we're building in our young people. When I hire people from these top schools, they come out having been taught to virtue signal, having been taught to be afraid to think complex thoughts about important issues. Like you look at all of our cities that are broken, frankly, that are just run terribly compared to what's possible with all sorts of grift and special interests and waste and danger. And none of these young people are even able to think about these things because they're afraid. They're, well, if I think about that, I'll get in trouble. So we're teaching people not to pursue truth, not to be patriotic, not to fight for their civilization. And it's like the opposite of the values that built our civilization. So, I think it's really important to have a university that bucks that trend.
Now, I would have thought if you had started a school teaching technical skills, I would completely understand that. Everyone in the audience would understand it. But you actually don't have technical skills currently. It's focused on things like the classics.
Well, we do have both. So we have about half the kids are STEM. So it's about half and half. But we do force everyone to understand and study the intellectual foundations of the West. I think if you want to understand American civilization like Texas is a big part of American civilization with our republic and the values of our Declaration of Independence as well which is 190 years ago I think actually last week. And to understand these things I think there's three really key traditions. I think you have to understand the classics and the virtues of the classical world and the philosophy of the classical world and kind of how that has iterated. I think you have to understand the roots of really Judeo-Christianity and how Christian civilization has shaped things and what that has meant and then you have to really go to the Enlightenment. You have to appreciate what was the Enlightenment and where did the Renaissance come from? What did the Enlightenment thinkers uncover and do and how did that end up leading to the creation of the American experiment. I think if you don't have that background, you're not able to as a leader really play the role that I think a lot of our most successful young people and people in tech should be playing because they don't have that background.
As a tech investor and entrepreneur, you know, I know that your mind thinks about holes in the market, ways to disrupt the status quo, and you're really disrupting the university system that's still going to click along without...
It's actually built to make it really hard. By the way, there's like 3,000 pages of regulation. It's crazy. It's like a cartel that's really hard. I think in Texas there was no precedent for a non-religious university and we have a lot of respect for Christianity of course and for Judaism and etc. But we're secular which there's actually nothing in the code that would allow that to be built. So there's a lot of work getting this done.
So you're saying there are actually regulations on starting a university.
Massive. I mean like any other industry these people do not want competition and they disparage and attack. And we had 5,000 professors apply though when we started it because a lot of these professors are under siege and so it's gone very very well once you break in. But yeah, it's a very difficult thing to do.
One of the things that surprised me is that your school does not use it uses SATs at a time when a lot of the Ivy Leagues are actually dropping SATs.
It's a big advantage if we can have a merit-based system when they're not using them. And by the way, the data on this is really clear. It is the best thing for underprivileged people in America to use scores. It actually helps them a lot because if you don't use scores, then you're using all these things that the wealthier people can gain much more easily than the poor people. So scores are actually just I think merit is just really important and we should not be giving up merit in our society.
What is your DEI do you have a DEI office there at the University of Austin?
No. I want to use this as an opportunity though, Graham, to push people a little bit because the world we're living in right now, like we're all in these bubbles on our own side. And I think there are probably a lot of good people that are different politically than me and they see the past and they see that it's true but in Texas and elsewhere and I'm very proud of Texas history, but it's also true that there were people who were treated unfairly in the past and there were people not given a chance. There's a building in Palo Alto I was brought to in my 20s. You had to wear a tie which for me at the time was a big deal and it was all these guys in their 80s and 90s and it was a men only club where I was told that all the deals got done basically in the 70s and early 80s and so you basically just couldn't break in as a woman because you weren't even allowed to be there where the deals were getting done. So I personally think like the philosophy of DEI is flawed and actually kind of ends up I think equity is a kind of communist idea that actually ends up frankly hurting a lot of people because you get people who are not qualified in these positions that are hired for the wrong reasons and actually ends up creating discrimination and racism against them which is very unfair. So I think DEI is flawed but I do think that there's like good people trying to help based on things that were done wrong in the past. And I feel like to be a good leader you have to acknowledge both of the truths. You still have to overcome and make up for things that were done wrong while at the same time we, you know, I think we put a system in that by 2020, you literally had tons of companies saying you can't be promoted because you're white male. Sorry. And that's obviously evil, too. And so what I'm trying to say is I think it really behooves all of us. If you're on the right, let's understand where that part of the good part of the left's coming from. And if you're on the left, let's understand where the good part of the right's coming from and not just be in bubbles like throwing stones at each other because that's really dysfunctional. And I'm afraid that's where we're going towards right now.
The idea of holding two ideas at the same time. The Hegelian dialectic, right?
It's complicated, right? It doesn't make good sound bite or good TV.
But most of reality is these two extremes. It's very frustrating right now because I got caught. Is this on Twitter, by the way? Are we posting?
We're not posting. It's fine. I always get in trouble. I've basically been like one of the unofficial mediators for this thing between like these guys in Anthropic and my friends running the Department of War in the Pentagon. And it's just really annoying because it's just broken down at this point on both sides into these tribal lies. And I think there's actually very reasonable people on both sides that came really really close to getting something done. And it's just our society is just I think it's something about social media and you blame all sorts of people but it's frustrating just to like we're so tribal right now and then everyone's like okay I have to make the tribal thing for my side to show them I'm on the team and it's just I hate that stuff.
You know I was forget I'm really glad you brought up the war because I thought I might forget it. Now you...
It's been a very distracting week for those of us in the defense world. Yeah. Well, if you get a phone call and you have to go to the back and tell the prime minister...
No, I'm not actually running anything. I'm just obnoxious and I'm helping a bunch of my friends are running things. So, it's been very entertaining to listen. And again I want to respect different points of view. I'm like a crazy Zionist Hawk who's wanted to destroy the regime in Iran for 15 years. So, I'm very happy right now. So, I was actually worried looking around. Does anyone have a gun in the audience? Give him the latest, but I appreciate you not shooting me for our different viewpoints on this one.
But I think that Speaking of war, would you call this the first AI war?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously AI has been used for a long time. Like, we've helped stop hundreds of terror attacks with kind of earlier forms of what you'd call AI, and it's been used heavily the last few years in different operations. But, I mean, listen, it's really impressive. I mean, Israel, without saying anything, it's not public. You can piece together Israel hacked like everything right with our help as well sometimes was watching traffic cameras for years watching people carrying phones for years watching logistics company signals like every piece of data you can imagine to map out like everything going on there obscure weapons depots like you know 400 miles outside of Tehran that no one would even know exists except for it's all perfectly mapped and you know in the first 20 minutes of the conflict like with the surprise attack, 200 Israeli planes, you know, dropped 500 bombs in that 20 minutes on a prioritized list of things to take out the key things, but also to understand the systemic level implications of what they were attacking and how it would disrupt other natural plan responses. And these are all things that just be really really hard to plan without AI kind of aiding you in really dynamic ways. And it's crazy. It's so dynamic now that they're just figuring out all sorts like they'll bomb certain things in Iran, but then and keep some backup just in case. Then because they have the backup, they'll fly over this spot in Lebanon and hit Hezbollah on the way home. They were kind of making my mom's side's Jewish, but it's like they're saving money on the bombs by doing the same route for two countries with the AI. It's ridiculous, but it's amazing stuff you can never have done before, which is it's very impressive. So it seems like we have a truly an advantage against an enemy.
Yeah. It's like we fast forwarded 20 years in military technology over the last few years. And so everything else going on we're also just much further ahead of Iran than we ever had been in terms we've always been ahead of them, but we've like fast forwarded much more. So it's obviously like a very high point of leverage right now against the bad guys.
Well, there's a famous line in Hamilton that says war is easy, governing is harder.
Yeah. No, obviously the first few weeks of this is going basically as I expected. The bigger question is what happens in two months and three months and four months. That's for sure.
You've talked a little bit about a golden age for Iran and for the Middle East. Tell us about that.
I think a lot of you know, like the Persians are natural allies of our free society. They're natural allies of the Jews for thousands of years. The average man on the street in Iran, unlike other countries in the region actually is a fan of Israel and is a fan of the US. And we do a lot of business here in Texas in California with a lot of amazing people who come from Iran. I think the number three electrical engineering school in the world, maybe not number three anymore, but close to that has been in Iran for a long time. I mean, there's a lot of talent there. I think the world would be so much wealthier and so much better off getting to work with these people and build and invest and it's a beautiful country, amazing food, amazing tourist destinations. So, you know, the real question is, can we bring them back into the free world? And a lot of people there want to be brought back into the free world. You know, the president this morning was very clear. The only option is complete surrender. He's not going to make a deal with the Mullahs. The Mullahs are going to have to surrender. They're going to bring back hopefully some constitutional republic in some form. I'm not in charge of that right now. I was with my friends from Venezuela trying to figure out when Venezuela election is going to be too. We have a lot of work around the world. Secretary Rubio is famously very busy right now. We got to map all this out. But listen, these guys like this, it's hard to understate like the torture and like the funding of terror and just like the horrible nasty things like this, you know, 16-year-old girls who were raped for their hair being messed up and just raped for hundreds of days and then going in front of the judge and being sentenced to death for not being chaste. I mean, just like crazy stuff you can't even make up. It's so evil in this place. And so for me like at the time when we had the ability to do this, taking out all those people who had captured with this evil theocracy, this wonderful country is a really good thing to do. It's not going to be easy, but I don't think it's Afghanistan or Iraq. I think it's a naturally much more advanced country. So I'm really hoping we get it right. You can come back and yell at me and the president in 3 months. It's not my fault, but I'm sure, you know, we'll see. I think I'm optimistic that it'll be a lot better than what we had there before. I respect people disagree on these things.
Let me ask you something controversial. Okay. Which you may have thought about. I don't know. Okay. But I think that one of the core questions DEI the university system there's a lot of things but our society has evolved in a pro-DEI way where intentions we were trying to pay for our sins with good intentions and I think in a lot of ways didn't work out.
But I think a lot of guilt you mean.
A lot of guilt. Yeah. And I think this guilt is terrible especially around the world. I was just in Australia where they before every public event they have an apology for being who they are.
I actually do a land acknowledgement here too. You know, so we say we forgot to do it, but you know, we're sitting here on land that was historically ruled by groups like the Kiowa and the Comanches that would basically do things 10x worse than the Nazi death cult with how they slaughtered and raped and killed and tortured people. And thanks to superior civilizational virtue and superior weaponry, we've conquered it for Western civilization. And I'm grateful to our forebears, including Governor Lamar, for having done so. So that's my land acknowledgement. Sorry.
I think the core question is are some cultures better than others?
Of course. Doesn't mean that doesn't of course I think this is again the dialectic the key kind of belief and insight of Judaism and Christianity and of that whole tradition is that all lives have dignity that all of us are made in the image of God and every human life matters. Every human life has dignity. And so, and that is a strong belief of mine. And so, when you're judging a culture, you're not saying that person is worth less. That to me that's an anathema. But a lot of cultures, by the way, don't value human life as much. A lot of cultures historically have things where women can't leave the homes or can't own anything. I think that's worse than our culture. I think there's a lot of cultures that are very problematic. That would sacrifice even in this region and the Aztecs would sacrifice tens of thousands of children to make the rain come. I think that's worse. I think there's things that pre-Christian Europe I'm not saying Christianity is perfect but I think pre-Christian Europe was much worse. So it doesn't mean that you're judging the people as worse. I think the people's lives have to have equal dignity. But of course there's flaws and I think all of us even our own culture you can say okay I really like this part. I think this part of our culture is more broken. I think this part of our culture in our cities that focuses on victimhood and is obsessed over victimhood as opposed to being obsessed over agency. I think that's broken. I think that's the only way you get better is you say this is broken. We're going to improve it. And I think yeah I think this idea of like moral relativism that you can't judge anything is like really pernicious and it's actually really bad for broken cultures because it preserves the things about them that are broken and it's not like well who gets to judge them. Obviously, we each should make our own decisions about how we think about things and obviously you want to be very careful about imposing anything top down in society from government. But I think it's really important for all of us in our communities to have opinions on these things and to try to make cultures better.
So I think what you're saying is that when an immigrant moves to America, they're joining America.
I think they should assimilate. I think they should not keep a culture that encourages them to marry their cousins and that encourages values that are non-American. Yes. Exactly. And so I think and if you don't have this then you get some very broken things which you're seeing all over Europe right now. You're seeing some really broken cultures that not assimilate into some European countries and it's causing I mean there's a reason why there's like 90 times the rate of rape in the UK versus Poland because the UK has brought in these cultures that have not assimilated that are come from places that do not respect women and it's extremely broken and there's a cowardice to not talk about this well Joe you can't say there's 90 times rate of rape why not that is the stat that's true because we've brought in broken cultures there that didn't assimilate and don't respect women that's terrible right So it's like the West has lost its mind on this issue. We have to just be reasonable about the basic truth and we should judge things and try to fix them and we shouldn't bring them in if they're not going to assimilate. That's my view.
Thank you. Thank you. I look I think that we're in a new era where we become proud of our country again. We've been I think part of the...
Yeah, I think we should be proud of I mean America is an exceptional country and the American experiment is amazing and like you know one of my good friends Coleman Hughes is a young African-American intellectual who teaches at the university part time and he does a lot of other great work and he studies the history of slavery and I think his take is really powerful because obviously that was a stain on our country and it was something that was very unethical and by the way happened all over the world as well not just here. But what was really amazing about America is that the founding values the founders wrote things in a way that it was really clear to a lot of them that this was something that was a stain on our legacy and on who we were and it's like we were being hypocrites but you had to first be hypocrites to then live up to the values that actually helped us to expunge it and get rid of it. And that was like a really great thing about America is that we did have the right values and that we learned to stop being hypocrites. And it's something it doesn't mean that America was fundamentally evil. It meant that America was hypocritical and overcame that which by the way many other parts of the world took a lot longer to overcome and did a lot worse things.
So how do we think about George Washington both being a hero and a slave owner.
I mean I think it's kind of silly to judge historical people outside of the context of their time for what was normal and what they did. I think anyone who was living in that time you could see what they would have done. It would have been very different. So obviously there were things about the past that were not perfect, but there were also things where you could be a hero despite having things that were imperfect about your civilization.
You've become a public voice, a podcaster, a writer, blogger. Was this you in California or is this something that was inspired during your time in Texas?
