Reflections on Palantir

During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.

but very few companies were tackling what felt like the real, thorny parts of the economy. If you wanted to work on these ‘harder’ areas of the economy but also wanted a Silicon Valley work culture, Palantir was basically your only option for awhile. My goal was to start a company, but I wanted (1) to go deep in one of these industries for a while first and learn real things about it; (2) to work for a US company and get a green card that way. Palantir offered both. That made it an easy choice.

It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. The main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s no surprise they’re talent magnets.

The world needs more companies like SpaceX, and Palantir, that differentiate on execution - achieving the outcome - not on playing political games or building narrow point solutions that don’t hit the goal.

This is one reason why former FDEs tend to be great founders. (There are usually more ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Googlers in each YC batch, despite there being ~50x more Google employees.) Good founders have an instinct for reading rooms, group dynamics, and power.

This isn’t usually talked about, but it’s critical: founding a successful company is about taking part in negotiation after negotiation after negotiation, and winning (on net).

Another is that FDEs have to be good at understanding things. Your effectiveness directly correlates to how quickly you can learn to speak the customer’s language and really drill down into how their business works.

This insight goes for companies, too, and Palantir had its own, vast set of terms, some of which are obscure enough that “what does Palantir actually do?” became a meme online. ‘Ontology’ is an old one, but then there is ‘impl’, ‘artist’s colony’, ‘compounding’, ‘the 36 chambers’, ‘dots’, ‘metabolizing pain’, ‘gamma radiation’, and so on.

Some people were more influential than others, but the influence was usually based on some impressive accomplishment, and most importantly nobody could tell anyone else what to do. So it didn’t matter if somebody was influential or thought your idea was dumb, you could ignore them and go build something if you thought it was the right thing to do. On top of that, the culture valorized such people: stories were told of some engineer ignoring a Director and building something that ended up being a critical piece of infrastructure, and this was held up as an example to imitate.

But it was incredibly generative. It’s underrated just how many novel UI concepts and ideas came out of that company. Only some of these now have non-Palantir equivalents, e.g. Hex, Retool, Airflow all have some components that were first developed at Palantir. The company’s doing the same for AI now – the tooling for deploying LLMs at large enterprises is powerful.

You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere. The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific.

When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators.