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A $200B Opportunity for Policymakers and Entrepreneurs Since we published our proposal on “How to Save $900B Annually in American Healthcare” three years ago, the crisis facing the US healthcare system has deepened. Spending continues to grow at twice the rate of GDP, reaching $3.8 trillion in 2019 even as health outcomes stagnate.[1] This steady […]

The past year underscored the vital role healthcare plays in our lives: we relied on doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and countless others to keep us and our loved ones safe during a devastating pandemic. For many, the experience was also a sharp reminder of how confusing, impersonal, and expensive our healthcare system can be. From […]

Today’s IPO marks an important milestone for Wish and an exciting day for our firm. Over the last decade, CEO and founder Peter Szulczewski and his team grew their company from a small ad recommendation engine into America’s third largest e-commerce platform. As investors, we co-led the angel round in 2010, led the Series A […]

Since leading Ushur’s Series A in 2018, we have watched them dramatically grow their intelligent automation (IA) capabilities and traction. We are excited to announce 8VC’s participation in Ushur’s $25M Series B, led by Third Point Ventures, alongside Pentland Group. We are thrilled to be continuing to partner with Ushur as they revamp insurance, financial […]

This summer I had the pleasure of being part of the third 8VC Fellowship cohort, joined virtually by 25 incredibly smart & talented students from across the country. The Fellowship Program offers an inside track to meeting world-class founders and engineers across the 8VC network as well as a deep look into the world of venture.

Our partners have built many great technology companies over the years as founders or early leaders, and we are deeply enmeshed in a number of industries, debating what is coming next and working with leaders to help our entrepreneurs succeed or to put together new companies.   To formalize our entrepreneurial work alongside our investing, Joe […]

Paul Ehrlich, one of the forefathers of modern medicine, famously proposed the idea of a “magic bullet” that would selectively kill pathogens while sparing the body. His research led to the first drug for syphilis and established the chemistry-driven paradigm of therapeutics that would persist for the next 70 years. Unfortunately, it turned out that […]

Today, we announced that 8VC has led a $5.8M round of financing in Quaestor alongside our friends at Spark Capital, Abstract Ventures, Riot Ventures, Fathom Ventures, and GFC. We’re excited to tell the world more about Quaestor and its source of inspiration.  Building a startup is a thrilling experience. Entrepreneurs move quickly, make bold moves, […]

Every year in America, roughly 23,000 people undergo a Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT). These procedures are typically last-line interventions to save cancer patients. When successful, the therapy is often curative.

Imagine you have an incurable disease — maybe Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis. Though you might be willing to take a chance on science, you would nonetheless face a difficult decision in choosing whether to volunteer for a clinical trial.

Why health IT has under-delivered, and how we can recover the promise of the 2010s.

We all saw the empty aisles and mad rush to grab that last roll of toilet paper on grocery shelves this past week.

People will demand more goods. And the quickest and most flexible way to move things is on trucks.

The life of application developers in today’s cloud-native world has been profoundly affected by two conceptual developments: containers and microservices. These have led to the creation and maturation of orchestration engines, which offer software developers more simplicity, velocity, reliability and agility in launching and managing cloud-first applications.

American society mythologizes great inventors and celebrates the “stroke of genius”. But profound ideas are usually the result of incremental and often painstaking progress on hard technical problems. Entrepreneurs must rapidly prototype, test their products against the market to determine if they’re addressing real challenges, and develop profitable business models, all at the same time.

8VC traditionally invests in companies that tackle industry-wide problems by reimagining traditional paradigms and helping modernize some of our oldest technological infrastructure. That’s why we invested in and launched Esper...

Alex Kolicich explains why Deliverr is poised to fix the fulfillment industry

At 8VC we invest in technologies with the capacity to transform antiquated processes in old-line industries. In the private sector, one of the least tech-enabled industries is Law.

While my title says “VC”, I first and foremost identify as a maker. I have always focused not only on how and why things work, but how to make them operate with greater efficiency.

8VC is thrilled to announce our investment in Assembly Brands, an innovative consumer product platform building crave-worthy brands for a new generation.

John Tenet writes on why he joined 8VC and his vision for the firm.

A suite of reforms aimed at unseating corrupt players, increasing access to healthcare data, and aligning incentives towards quality care could save our country as much as $900 billion a year.

America should harness entrepreneurial innovation in higher education by financially rewarding for-profit colleges only if they help students succeed in the American economy.

America’s reactive model of kidney care enriches an oligopolistic dialysis industry, wastes billions of dollars a year, and creates worse health outcomes for millions of Americans each decade

Presidents Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and others supported a separate, lower capital gains tax rate. A lower capital gains rate encourages investors to reallocate funds from existing investments to higher-growth companies, stimulating economic progress and creating jobs for American workers

Human relationships are the basic fabric of any economic transaction. Whether a 1-to-1 handshake deal or a complex, multi-year merger process between multiple corporations, markets run on personal relationships between people.

State governments should competitively reimburse private prisons that are most effective at reducing recidivism and helping prisoners reintegrate into normal American life. Only by rewiring incentives can we attract the best and brightest entrepreneurs to solving America's mass incarceration nightmare.

CEOs shouldn’t worry about their budget all the time — on a day-to-day basis they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.

America faces a mounting transportation crisis, and the primary culprit is road congestion. Traffic makes us unhealthy, wastes enormous amounts of time, and cripples national productivity. America needs expanded roads and transportation infrastructure, but traditional gas tax funding is no longer available.

Yesterday, on Tuesday, November 21, Heather Mack of the WSJ published an article entitled “Joe Lonsdale-Backed Blink Health Faces Potential Loss of Half of Its Customers.” The article is a response to a lawsuit brought by our investment Blink Health...

When an employee of a privately held technology company leaves the company and exercises her stock options, she typically has 3 months to qualify for favorable tax treatment. However, if there has been a run up in the value of the company since the options were originally granted, the employee may face enormous tax obligations.

Joe Lonsdale and Jack Abraham are pleased to announce the launch of Terminal, a talent group which will enable technology companies to access top talent worldwide.

The private equity industry, though much-maligned, plays a vital role in making America's economy run more efficiently. In the coming years, elements of the PE and VC industries will begin to share strategies and best practices.

Eugene Kleiner is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley - a great technologist, entrepreneur, and investor. In this essay we reflect on "Kleiner's Laws" for investing successfully.

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, legendary female leaders have shaped the course of our economic destiny. I am proud to consider the women here friends, mentors, and role models — and hope they inspire you as much as they inspire us at 8VC.

Today, there are more than 5.5 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. labor market, up from 3.2 million just five years ago. It’s not due to a lack of workers aspiring for better jobs, but a lack of workers qualified for the very positions employers need filled. America is facing a skills gap that only continues to grow as innovation outpaces our education system.

We recently conducted a survey of what our portfolio CEOs say they want most from a venture capital firm. What do entrepreneurs think about the inner workings of a VC?

Wisdom is very often dialectical in nature. Extreme, conflicting viewpoints are often simultaneous true – whether in business or more broadly in human life.

The fear that robots will soon take your jobs has a grain of truth to it - however, the future paves the way for more jobs for humans, based in technological innovation

Operations Director Caroline Graham describes how 8VC manages our network of investors, entrepreneurs, and fellow venture firms more smoothly than vinyl.

Inspired by our piece ‘A Deficit of Leadership’, two up-and-coming leaders in our community shared some of the most important principles of leadership below. We’re excited to see what’s next for Aneesh Pappu and Josh Singer.

New technologies can enable organic, market-driven solutions to regulatory problems, but only if they escape legislative straitjackets

This is the first installment in a two part series. Here we unpack the philosophical and evolutionary assumptions at work in the debate over technological unemployment. In Future of Labor II, we will discuss the economics of new job creation and chart several industries of the future which will create employment opportunities for American workers.

In the wake of the $125 billion Pentagon waste scandal, the case for transparency and data-driven financial reporting is stronger than ever.

One of the most important jobs of a great leader is to attract great talent. How adaptable you are as a firm depends in part upon the how your company is organized, but most of all it depends upon the people operating it.

We recently put together a speech outlining the major functions of a modern Venture Capitalist. These notes from the speech articulate our basic framework for thinking about the shifting nature of the Venture Capital industry.

This topic of how to value experience and how and when to hire experienced leaders into a startup comes up a lot. It's a source of a lot of confusion and controversy - here are some of the ways we think about it.

Learn how design extends beyond UX/UI to add value to cross-functional startup teams.

Brett Cummings explores the fine print of the SAFE agreement in his assessment of whether SAFEs are the best method for aligning investor and entrepreneur incentives.

Drew Oetting does a deep dive into the specific metrics startups should use to benchmark their performance.

In this essay we discuss leadership and a serious cultural issue: the failure of Silicon Valley to train world-class leaders.

GSAM interviews Joe Lonsdale on his view on big data and examines some of the companies pushing the boundaries of the technology today.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz of the Hoover Institution shares his thoughts on attitude, credit, and progress.

Pittsburgh was a prominent economic hub during the American Industrial Revolution. It might well be an important city in the American Information Age, too.

In this piece published on Tech Crunch, Joe explores the wisdom of caps on convertible notes and other issues of investor - entrepreneur alignment in financing structures.

Although certain TV portrayals are clearly unrealistic or over the top for comedic value, this episode dealt with a lot of issues we face in our industry.

With 8VC’s focus on smart enterprise, we often emphasize engineering and tech culture, but this is only a part of the picture. It’s critical to incorporate design for companies to thrive.

According to our partner Kimmy Scotti, the best part of her role at 8VC is working with our founders and their amazing teams. After recent marketing hackathons with Plated and OpenCare, she shares her key learnings.

Blend Labs is fixing the back-end of one of the most important areas of our economy, the mortgage industry, to help improve the financial system and prevent housing bubbles. In this post, we explain why Blend is an exemplary 'Smart Enterprise' company.

At the start of our first 8VC fund, after getting feedback from our team, Joe wrote a holiday note about the values of 8VC and how he is influenced by Tikkun Olam, the Jewish concept of philanthropy and the duty to work to fix the world.

Ambassador Andy Young is one of the great men of our times. In this post we share some extremely valuable lessons we learned from him after spending an evening together.

History, Dealing with Success, Operational Debt, and The S-curve that Makes the Next Decade Really Important

Explore a handful of clever ideas that we have learned or applied recently.

Our team is proud to lead the early-stage round in Branch. Branch will apply cutting-edge machine learning to the data available on smartphones to enable access to credit to millions of people around the world.

Joe Lonsdale recently shared his perspective on entrepreneurship: “Great entrepreneurs see the world with a positive sum mindset.”

As a student in the 90s, Marissa Mayer was dubbed a campus icon in a Stanford Daily column about distinctive individuals on campus. The article referred to her as “the blonde woman in the upper-division computer science classes” without a single mention of her name, yet those terse descriptors were more than enough to identify the now-CEO of Yahoo, as she was one of the small handful of women in the department at the time.

The reality is technologists hold great power in the world, and not only does big industry need our help right now, but so do a lot of the most important causes.

Healthcare consumes more than 17% of US GDP, and our government is on course to go bankrupt based on promises it’s made in the space.

Technology is not reaching its full potential, but we think that world-changing applications are closer (and different) than people realize.

These lessons summarize what Joe Lonsdale learned from working over many years with Peter Thiel, a chairman and founder of Palantir.

By the time that Alexander the Great’s armies had conquered most of the known world, it had become much harder to get the men to fight — even for one of the most talented and inspiring leaders that has ever lived.