6 Lessons from Palantir
It’s rare for founders to go through an acquisition and be really motivated and inspired working for their acquirer. When acquiring Kimono Labs, Brian Rowen, Brian Schimpf and Alex Karp convinced me that Palantir wasn’t like any other company – that it truly was a home for entrepreneurs. 8 years and another company later, I can confidently say they were right. I draw from the experience and the remarkable people at Palantir every day at Arena. I was fortunate to learn from so many. Here are a few of my favorite nuggets:
Access to problems is earned. Solving one problem will earn you access to another. I learned this from CTO Shyam Sankar. Especially when working with enterprises that are large, global and complex, if you want to solve a deep problem, it’s not one you’ll understand outside in, and it’s not something you’ll get invited to solve. You’ll have to earn the right to take a crack at it. This is true with customers, but it’s also true inside the company.
STFU and Take Notes. Recognize that everyone around you is intelligent and hard working. Recognize that no matter what your expertise, you are new. Kurt Schwarz, former SWAT cop, Army vet and leader of Palantir’s R2D2 team taught me this. His advice, especially for people joining with experience and expertise, was to STFU and take notes. It lets you add the smallest bit of concrete value on day 1. If all you do is join a meeting and send well structured notes afterwards, you’ve added value. You’ll get invited back. You’ll earn the right to solve the problem.
Learn with a thief’s mindset. Kurt also shared a story from Jack Hoban, a former US Marine Captain who became the highest ranking martial arts teacher in the US. Jack spoke about going to Japan and observing his teacher (the grandmaster) Masaaki Hatsumi. There was little conventional “teaching” that happened. But when Jack spoke about how he learned – he said regarding his master – "He doesn't have to show me... I'll STEAL it". Kurt taught us to adopt the “thief’s mindset”. Palantir is full of interesting people, working with interesting customers on hard problems. There’s a lot of growth to be had, but learning won’t be given to you – you have to go steal it.
Kurt Schwarz and me Get your a** on a plane. Your customer may not be where you are. Shyam and Brian Schimpf (Head of Product and now CEO of Anduril), instilled a “forward deployed” culture by their own example. They - and all engineers at Palantir - get into the trenches with users to solve problems alongside them. Forward deploying, often across great distance and with high costs, resulted in building battle-tested products (sometimes quite literally). Ultimately, great products are built in the field.
Look at raw data. This is especially true for AI companies. Everyone, not just engineers, should have a feel for, and be able to work with, raw data. Distributions and statistics tell you a lot, but there’s no substitute for looking at single rows, columns and cells to understand what’s what. You’ll sometimes see a column of data, and looking at the trailing zeros tells you that the field was entered by a person’s “fat finger” error. These are hard to catch through statistical checks, and you can’t put this onus on just the engineers. Just like good written communication is important in any role, technical or non-technical, accessing and knowing the data should be universal.
Build the whole car. Building a complex system can be daunting, and we often want to disaggregate the problem into components, then to focus on building each of those one by one. While at Palantir, I met Engin Ural, who is my co-founder at Arena. Engin was the best engineering leader I met there, and he taught me the value of looking at the entire problem holistically and building a really crappy v0 of the entire thing end-to-end on day 1. Then iterating on the components. Building the whole car first results in a better product, shipped faster.
Unsurprisingly, Palantir is a founder factory. On Kurt’s team alone - largely due to his knack for recruiting and mentorship - a whole generation of founders and leaders have spun out into new endeavors: Camille Bamford (Plenty), Tom Bosco (Anduril), Joey Bouchard (Quotewell), James Boyd (Adyton), Colin Casey (Headway), Clark Church (Quotewell), Eliza Eddison (Fabric Nano), Alexa Freyre (Akkio Tech), Edson Greenwood (Anvyl), Connie Kang (Headway), David Kinsella (Scale AI), Shreya Murthy (Partiful), Chandra Nath (DevRev), Nghia Nguyen (DevRev), Nick Noone (Peregrine), Nick Perry (Candid Health), Ryan Podolsky (Theorem), Doug Proctor (Candid Health), Anjana Rajan (The White House), Clay Ramel (Zero Acre Farms), Kimberly Sparling (Saildrone), Sahil Sud (Stealth), Bill Ward (Biofire), Emily Zhou (Ribbon Health) and many more.
