My THORN's Board of Directors series : https://www.wearethorn.org/about-our-fight-against-sexual-exploitation-of-children/

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JOE LONSDALE, Founding Partner at 8VC and Co-Founder of Palantir

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lonsdale

Joseph Todd "Joe" Lonsdale V (September 12, 1982) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. In 2004, Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies, a company focused on analyzing, integrating, and visualizing data especially in defense and finance.

Early career

Lonsdale joined the financial arm of PayPal as an intern while a student at Stanford.[6] After graduation he left to work in a variety of roles with PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel. Lonsdale also served as an early executive from 2013-2014 at Clarium Capital, a macro hedge fund founded by Thiel.[7] At Clarium's peak the fund had nearly $7 billion in assets under management.

Palantir's Party Culture: Beer Pong, Office Pranks, and a Bad Case of the Hives

Palantir has lost top-tier clients including Coca-Cola, which backed away from a five-year contract in part because the beverage giant had a “difficult” working relationship with Palantir’s young staff. Coke reportedly admitted it needed “to get better at working with millennials.”

Coke isn’t the only one that had trouble working with Palantir’s fun-loving millennials. Gizmodo has obtained a legal demand letter and internal emails written by a former senior technical writer named Bernie Cohen, who was fired in July of 2009, describing Palantir as a frat-house environment so out of control that he twice had to seek medical treatment from alcohol-related workplace incidents.

The emails document a series of complaints Cohen lodged in 2009 to Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and other senior staffers, shortly before he was fired. While some of Cohen’s claims may sound like something out of Office Space, they include allegations that Palantir’s deadly serious work for intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and financial institutions took place in an environment that tolerated office drinking and juvenile behavior.

In 2013, Lonsdale was embroiled in a sexual assault case, according to wikipedia:

On January 27, 2015, former Stanford student Ellie Clougherty filed a lawsuit against Lonsdale accusing him of rape and sexual and emotional abuse.[4][52] Lonsdale denied the claims and filed a counter suit against Clougherty.[53] Stanford University banned Lonsdale from campus as a result of the allegation.[54]

Clougherty dropped all of her legal claims against Lonsdale in a court filing November 2, 2015. Lonsdale also dropped his counterclaims.[55] Stanford University investigators, citing evidence uncovered during discovery, said Lonsdale did not violate Stanford's sexual harassment policies and there was no basis to support a ban from Stanford's campus.

The New York Times did a piece here: The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor

excerpt:

That spring, she took a trip with her mother to New York, where a photographer they had met through her modeling work introduced her to a friend of his from the tech world: Joe Lonsdale.

Anne was impressed by Lonsdale’s professional accomplishments, but as we drove through Virginia in October, she said she initially wondered what he saw in her college-age daughter. Anne is a tall, attractive and forceful presence, and she said that at the end of February, she flew to California for parents’ weekend at Stanford, and Clougherty arranged a dinner with Lonsdale. At first, Anne found him awkward. He had a hard time making eye contact, and she noticed his facial tic. (He cuffs his chin with his fist and grimaces.) But her doubts melted, she says, when he promised to guard her daughter from the valley’s wolfish atmosphere. Lonsdale says that the subject did not come up then, but that later he tried to shield Clougherty from other men. “She said guys were coming after her, and it got me angry,” he told me. “She’s very beautiful, and you want to protect her.”

Another link to the story: http://uk.businessinsider.com/joe-lonsdale-ban-from-stanford-reversed-after-lawsuit-is-dropped-2015-11?r=US&IR=T

Of course as stated, the charges against Lonsdale were dropped. But one does wonder if his appointment was such a wise choice for an organisation of this nature ? Usually people who work with children and sensitive data to do with them have to pass strict vetting codes and regulations with a squeaky clean background. Does THORN use any of these vetting procedures ?