Tan turned down being Palantir's first engineer due to media sentiment
Garry Tan · 20VC: Garry Tan on The Biggest Takeaways From Advising 700 Companies @ Y Combinator & Why Now Is The Golden Age For The Early Stage? · Dec 14, 2016 · at 21:07
Garry Tan, co-founder of Initialized Capital and former Y Combinator partner, reflects on turning down Palantir when he was 23 years old because he followed prevailing market media trends.
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“Why did I turn down being first engineer at Palantir? I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, and it actually came out of this thinking, because this is why I'm very, very careful about it, that when I was 23 and I got an offer from one of the best investors in Silicon Valley, proven operator, plus my best friends from college who I had worked on other projects with, I couldn't imagine a better co-founding team for me to work with, Stephan Cohen and Joe Lonsdale. Why did I say no? And it actually kind of went back to something as simple as that, that I was waiting for the universe to tell me what was going to be hot. And, you know, TechCrunch didn't exist at the time. Maybe I was looking at the Wall Street Journal tech section, or I was looking at media to tell me what was hot, to tell me this is what, you know, you should be working on. And at the, you know, precipice of starting this twenty billion dollar company, I was thinking this is a team that had never sold enterprise software before, and I've read online that enterprise software has fallen deeply out of favor, and so that was just the wrong thing to think.”
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