Palantir

“The average kind of deal that Palance had was very large, right? It's in the many, many millions of dollars, which means that you could kind of pay for this as part of the thing that the customer got. And then it was sort of priced according to the value that …”

“And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from, I think you may be shared in this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size…”

“I was part of a pretty small team within Palantir. I think it was 20 to 25 people when I joined, and I think at least six of them now are either Unicorn or just pre-Unicorn founders from that, like, group of 25 people, which is actually a crazy ratio, and then…”

“One of the kind of metrics that the company had to measure its own success was essentially revenue per Engineer. Right. And so the more kind of quote unquote product leverage you had, the higher that number was.”

“Palantir's biggest competitor is a company rolling its own solution.”

“When people joined, they would write principles such as, you know, move fast. And I would always be like, everyone likes move fast. Like it's not a good principle actually, because nobody can really disagree with this reasonably. Right. You need something that…”

“I looked at which companies produce the most founders, especially out of their PM team, and Palantir is by far number one. 30% of PMs that leave Palantir start a company, and that's like, and number two is number, is 18%, and that's Intercom.”

“Every week you would have like a cadence where it's like Monday, you go in, you do your meetings, Monday night, you build something. Tuesday, you show it to somebody. Tuesday, you get the feedback. Tuesday night, you iterate on it. Wednesday, you show it to so…”

“One lens through which you can view this company is they spent 20 years basically building the mother of all data foundations for every important institution in the world, and Guess what's very valuable now that AI models are out is proprietary data that isn't…”

“And the only people who did have titles were the CEO and then there were six directors and that was it.”

“So I think for Palento, they did hire a lot of Vets, for example, or maybe people who were a little bit more patriotic or pro-America than the average tech employee, and that those people had an extra reason to join Palantir and an extra reason to try that lit…”

“So they have like, 80% plus margins, which is not really what you would get if you were actually a consulting company. It would be closer to 20 or 30%.”

“For the longest time they had, everyone does this now, I think, but it's like, at the time it was a little bit rarer as a founder had to interview you in order for you to receive an offer. And so a founder, it could have been Alex Karp. It could have been Step…”

“There was also a very concrete set of ways where that place was a training ground for founders. I even think it turned a lot of people who might not have become founders into Good founders because of just because of the way it works. So I think there was a sel…”

“You need each customer's revenue to be probably in the billions of dollars. If it's below that, you're probably not looking at a traditional forward deployed engineer motion.”

“And so the ontology became a huge piece of foundry. It was directly informed by the learnings that we had from building that application inside that factory. And I would say it's still a very big differentiator today. Like I don't think too many other companie…”

“I actually am a big fan of this philosophy, though, the no titles one. I think what it did do is that it basically said you, if you are in, let's say you're in a role of you're leading a very important project, right, which would happen, what it said was, this…”

“People don't think of Palantir as this Place where innovative new product and UX ideas come out, but I actually think it's been one of the most generative companies for that specifically in the last 20 years.”

“I didn't recall the exact stat, but we did ramp up production. I think at least forex that one year, which I mean, obviously they did this and we just helped with it, but you know, that CEO said that we played a critical part, so.”

“And then Shamsankar is one of his I think he's a CTO or maybe he's the president now. He just mandated like, okay, every, every customer deployment, you have to have a customer using this within, you know, three months or whatever it is.”

“The people who succeed the most in the Marines or the special forces or whatever it is tends to be pretty smart people. They tend to have accomplished very difficult goals in very hostile environments. And it turns out that when you're starting a somewhat chao…”

“The big difference, or one big difference I noticed was that they were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way.”

“And they made every kind of forward deployed engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you Kind of read people better and interact with them better and become more conscious of how you are coming across and just modulate that.”

“The key things that made our model work were, one they were actually real engineers who could build product themselves. That's a very big difference, right? I think a lot of the time companies will say, this person's a forward-deployed engineer, but actually t…”

“When I triangulated across all the different, all these different data points, There's three companies that are kind of sat at the top. You guys, Revolut, Palantir, and Intercom.”