Sam Jones, co-founder of Method Security and former Palantir employee, describes the early development model of Palantir's commercial business in 2014.
“When I got there in 2014, there was no real product. I mean, there was Gotham and it was deployed in some intelligence and special operations type workflows, but especially for the commercial business, what I focused on right out of the gates, we would get access to really hard problems at Fortune 500 type organizations and just build something from scratch.”
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More from Sam Jones
Disclosure
Jones: Method Security Shunned User Advisory Boards to Build on Pure Conviction
“Like everyone wants to go build their customer advisory board, talk to users and say like, what do you need? What do you need? We just built to our like opinion about the world that we wanted to build and basically just shut everything else out for quite some …”
Sam JonesMar 5, 2026▶ 17:40He built heads down for a year. Then landed a $1M contract. | Sam Jones, Co-Founder of Method Sec... · PMF Show
Insight
Jones: Granting data access is a higher bar than a $100k check
“Like, when you're doing security, especially, like, they're putting you through procurement and also allowing you to have access to certain data is basically a higher bar than writing, like, a hundred K check.”
Sam JonesMar 5, 2026▶ 27:38He built heads down for a year. Then landed a $1M contract. | Sam Jones, Co-Founder of Method Sec... · PMF Show
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Jones: Method Security government deals top $1M, commercial floor is $500k
“There's a huge skew between government commercial, just the nature of what the like government, they're all millions for sure. Commercial side could be like maybe a floor of 500 K then maybe closer to a million.”
Sam JonesMar 5, 2026▶ 30:11He built heads down for a year. Then landed a $1M contract. | Sam Jones, Co-Founder of Method Sec... · PMF Show
Disclosure
Method Security maintains 15 direct reports under its CTO to ship faster
“Our CTO has 15 people reporting them and maintaining that as long as we can, which thank you, Sean, by the way, for, you know, have the whole company report to you, but it gives us such an advantage because we have so few like Communication nodes of our engine…”
Sam JonesMar 5, 2026▶ 31:22He built heads down for a year. Then landed a $1M contract. | Sam Jones, Co-Founder of Method Sec... · PMF Show
Insight
AI Enables Method Security Engineers to Ship Major Features in 72 Hours
“Ability for like an engineer to be onsite with the user to learn something and for a 72 hours later to ship a pretty large feature that that is pretty game changing that we could not have possibly anticipated. That's where we're like generating a lot of alpha …”
Sam JonesMar 5, 2026▶ 33:02He built heads down for a year. Then landed a $1M contract. | Sam Jones, Co-Founder of Method Sec... · PMF Show
Insight
Jones: Founder-Led Sales Is the Only Working Approach Early On
“And that is why I think founder led sales in particular, where you're controlling sales, BD and product all at once. The only way that it really works in the beginning.”
Sam JonesMar 5, 2026▶ 38:21He built heads down for a year. Then landed a $1M contract. | Sam Jones, Co-Founder of Method Sec... · PMF Show
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