The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Thiel: Lawsuit discovery proved the Army covered up reports favoring Palantir
“And then when you and then what you can do when you sue somebody is you get discovery and you discover, and you sort of discover what's going on in the sausage making factory that no one's investigated for 22 years. And there's a lot of stuff and we're sort of…”
Thiel: U.S. military's DCGS software was a failed billion-dollar boondoggle
“There was this software program. This was once we moved from intelligence community into the broader military called DSIGs, which was just sort of this in theory was a system we were supposed to figure out ways to integrate the data across all these units in t…”
Karp: Palantir is a civil liberties juggernaut
“And I always thought from the beginning, and this is why, despite what people thought about Palantir, sometimes, I view Palantir as a civil liberties juggernaut.”
Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX sued the government for initial major contracts
“And one of the examples I use Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for their first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated at protecting their interests.”
Sankar: Balancing customer and product engineers requires a central dictator
“I think the thing that most people don't understand about this is it is an unstable equilibrium. So if you were going to pursue a strategy like this, it actually requires a dictator to sit between these two organizations to manage that tension, to make sure it…”
Palantir and SpaceX sued the US government for first defense contracts
“Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for the first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated protecting their interests.”
Lonsdale: Protesters targeting Palantir are paid by the political left
“The protesters get paid by the left to do it, but then they're actually just encouraging you.”
Lonsdale: Palantir caught Chinese intelligence blackmailing employees to steal IP
“Obviously, you know, at Palantir, we catch them in the old days trying to steal stuff. And it's, it was interesting. The thing that really I've mentioned before, but that shocked me was there's people we knew and trusted from PhD programs who are working with …”
Lonsdale: Palantir partnered with special operations to eliminate thousands of terrorists
“And I know what this means, because obviously building Palantir, we partnered to help you know, use a lot of very advanced techniques in partnership with special operations forces to wipe out Several thousand terrorists.”
Joe Lonsdale: Palantir helped locate over 10,000 terrorists for elimination
“And so Palantir ended up, as you probably know, helping find like over 10,000 terrorists to be eliminated in those years.”
Karp: Palantir AI identifies adversary positions across large land masses
“The most powerful use of our product currently, and again, of one of our products is Being able to identify an adversary over a large lying mass using AI, and that obviously it's been reported has led to a different level of ability to acquire the adversary's …”
Lonsdale: Education Department officials covered their eyes to avoid Palantir data
“I remember when I was at Palantir, 15 years ago, and we were exploring different ways to help the federal government, and we went into the Department of Education, and we were going to show them something they could do to use data to do a better job, We put so…”
Ghamsari: Palantir prioritizes customer outcomes over software polish and APIs
“Everyone talks about companies and software companies being success oriented, but not in the same, people don't understand what success oriented is until you go and you see how Palantir approaches success orientation, where it's like the customer's outcomes, t…”
Sankar: Enterprise software development requires embedding engineers with customers
“The only way to solve for the product that must exist is through back propagation. You have to have really technical people sitting with the customer, understanding, figuring out what's the right product, the ability to, like, mutate and ship that product, and…”
Sankar: Forward deployed engineers metabolize pain and excrete product
“I describe forward deployed engineers as people that that metabolize pain and excrete product.”
Cinnamon: Successful government contracting requires aligning five distinct factors
“So the way that I think about it is like any government contracting, you requires money. It requires a contract vehicle. It requires the right person at the top to be advocating for it, the right users of it, who are the actual end users of it wanting it, and …”
Thiel: Palantir faced zero competition for a decade after launch
“And so there was sort of an element where if you could get through, you would have no competition. And then, you know, a decade later, we still had no competition.”
Lonsdale: A $500k tech job at 21 would have prevented him founding Palantir
“It would have been tough if someone offered me half a million dollars a year when I was 21. I probably wouldn't have gone to start Palantir, I have to be honest.”
Lonsdale: Palantir helped stop major classified security attacks
“It was really interesting to live knowing, obviously Palantir had helped stop some really major attacks that were not public.”
Karp: Ukrainian sites using Palantir were bombed and staff resumed work same day
“Some of the places that have used our product have been bombed. People have died, and the same day, those people are back at work.”
Caliri: Making Money and Having Scaled Impact Are One and the Same
“Making money and having impact at scale are one and the same.”
Lonsdale and Karp banned Ghamsari's Aston Martin from Palantir office
“You and Carp made me not bring it to the office. Cause you thought it didn't reflect well on the culture of Palantir.”
Sankar: Palantir succeeds most with founder-led companies willing to restructure operations
“We're usually incredibly successful with founder-led institutions, or where the leadership acts as if they are founders, because they have an ownership mentality over the entire outcome, and are willing to reimagine everything in order to achieve the goal.”
Lonsdale: Early Palantir paid employees extra to live near the office
“This was my policy that I done. You pay people more if they live near the office.”
Sankar: Palantir maintains a strict divide between customer and product engineers
“We still have the really strong distinction because it's like, are you accountable to your customer succeeding? Are you accountable to the product succeeding?”
Kaplan: Cognition has dozens of FedRAMP deployments across military and primes
“Right now we have dozens of kind of fed ramped deployments of cognition both with agencies and with primes. You know, we work with US Army, US Navy, the Treasury we work with folks like Palantir, with Andrel and other primes”
Loeffler: SBA aims to share its fraud detection model across government
“The goal is to create a replicable model that we can apply to other parts of not just our agency, but to share that broadly across the administration.”
Thiel: No VCs wanted to fund defense tech when Palantir started
“In 2004, 2003, 2004, 2005, when we started Palantir the idea of trying to do a military related software startup. There was nobody who even wanted to give you money as a venture capitalist.”
Lonsdale: David Hume inspired many of the ideas for Palantir
“I've actually also been obsessed with Hume. He's inspired a lot of the ideas for Palantir.”
Lonsdale: Palantir and OpenGov succeeded by partnering with internal civil servants
“That's how I've always succeeded at Palantir, and I think at OpenGov as well, as you find, but also you find at the government that there are some good people there, and you partner with them, and they pull you in.”
Lonsdale: I overrode a founder veto to hire Shyam Sankar at Palantir
“One of the other founders tried to veto it, and I overrode the veto, so that's one of my strong moves.”
Perry: Effective AI in Healthcare Billing Requires Massive Underlying Infrastructure
“The actual useful application of machine learning is the tip of a very large iceberg, and we're building the infrastructure under the ocean right now of, like, the infrastructure for how do you do all that automation correctly and the machine learning correctl…”
McGrew on Palantir CEO Karp's rule: Great engineers are artists
“And I remember, you know, carp always used to talk about this, that the best engineers were artists, right? And if you want to keep an engineer happy, what you actually have to do is just let him do his art, just get out of his way, let him do his thing.”
Alex Karp: Palantir now powers 13-14% of all US hospital bed allocations
“On healthcare, pharmaceuticals hospital care, we had basically very few clients last year, and now I think we power allocation at 15, between 13 and 14% of all hospital bed allocation in the country.”
Hodges: Vietnam engineers rival the best talent at Palantir and Blend
“Oh, the talent is, I mean, that was sort of the, we've got, I mean, on par with, you know, the best engineers that I worked with at Palantir and at Blend, and what's cool about Anduin was they were a pioneer, like, Who would have thought that there would be th…”
Lonsdale: Palantir fired a brilliant early employee for disrespecting engineers
“We did that at Palantir too early on. There was someone who was really, really bright, but they weren't really someone who was a team player in the right way, and they weren't respecting the engineers in the right way, so they couldn't fit into the culture.”
Kupor: Tech Force is partnering with about 25 tech companies including Palantir
“We're partnering with about 25 of, you know, the best technology companies, obviously companies that you know well, like Palantir and Anvil and others.”
Ian Cinnamon: Synapse team was key to building Palantir AIP
“So, got to Palantir and had the opportunity to take the team that we had built and really be a key part of building out AIP and kind of that product line, which obviously is, I think, one of the coolest products that Palantir has.”
Joe Lonsdale: Observers repeatedly assumed Palantir and Addepar were failing
“There were multiple times when people thought for sure Palantir was dead. There were multiple times when at a par open government, next to companies look like they were failing.”
Lonsdale: Direct Feedback from Field Users Is Critical for Early-Stage Team Morale
“It was a key early on in the company bringing those people in once we really started to have the impact because people even internally, Tyler, as you probably know, like the first year, four year, five, it was, it's tough getting to the point where we were mak…”
Lonsdale: David Hume's philosophy heavily influenced the creation of Palantir
“You know, when we were building Palantir, one of the biggest impacts on me was David Hume's treatise on human reason about how the brain works, and we're trying to extend the human brain into massive amounts of data, and you really have to go back to first pri…”
Lonsdale: Thiel funded Palantir's second round because McGrew joined
“You joining was really, really critical to Peter giving us like our money for the second time. Cause he was like, you guys got Bob to join. How'd you do that?”
Hodges: Early Palantir had to educate customers on their own pain points
“At Palantir early days, we really had to educate people on their pain before we could sell them technology.”
Hodges: Palantir had a strong hiring bias against MBAs
“There's a strong anti MBA bias at that company. So which but there's only rare exceptions allowed.”
Lonsdale: Palantir spent tens of millions before customer commitment
“At Palantir, we also were spending tens of millions of dollars on something we were very confident in well before there's any suggestion they were going to pay for it.”
Lonsdale: Palantir tracked supply chains and disrupted slavery in Southeast Asia
“We were involved a lot when I was at Palantir company started 18 years ago, like looking into supply chains and figuring out where slavery was and helping disrupt it. It was amazing. We found slavery in Southeast Asia and places.”