How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)

Palantir 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 selection effect there, but there is also some sort of training effect too, but that's kind of unique to the way the company works.

Palantir screened hard for independent-minded people who weren't afraid to push back, question everything, and think for themselves. They also sought individuals with broad intellectual interests, evidenced by the CEO quoting European intellectuals, an uncommon practice in tech. Furthermore, they looked for intensely competitive individuals with a win-at-all-costs mentality. To screen for these traits, founders interviewed every candidate, engaging in unpredictable, deep conversations to test the limits of their understanding. Palantir's 'distinctive bat signal,' focused on preserving the West and military/defense, attracted individuals who sought to solve the world's hardest problems, differentiating it from the social media-focused companies of the time.

On my team at Palantir, when starting a new project, we followed a process where you had to organize what they called a murder board for it. You write up a two-page plan for the project, you invite three or four smart folks who don't know anything about the project, and their job is just to tear apart your plan. One section was principles that you're following for this project. When people joined, they would write principles such as, you know, move fast. And I would always be like, everyone likes move fast. You need something that actually a lot of people are going to disagree with.

Palantir attracted talent outside the tech ecosystem, such as individuals from the military or intelligence agencies transitioning into the corporate world. These individuals possessed valuable skills, having accomplished difficult goals in hostile environments, which proved useful in a chaotic tech company. By valuing mission alignment and seeking undervalued talent, Palantir differentiated itself from companies focused on inclusivity or perks. The game that was being played there was one of mission alignment, like you're doing a defense company. That's the kind of person you want to attract. But I think there's also two, which is just what is the talent that maybe is a little bit undervalued now? And how do you actually draw those people to you?

Palantir avoided internal competition by giving everyone the same title, preventing unproductive conflicts and gaming the system. While this approach had downsides, such as competition for executive favor, it fostered a meritocratic environment where individuals had to earn their place and the right to work on specific projects. This fluidity allowed for easy shifting of responsibilities based on performance, as there were no explicit titles to create rigid hierarchies.

The job of the forward deployed engineer is not just to deploy software, it is not just to sell software, it is to actually solve the problem. You would have to be there, you would have to meet the key stakeholders who are actually in charge of reporting to the CEO about this specific issue. You would have to become their friend, you would have to gain that trust, and you would have to, in some cases, create new software such that it could actually solve the novel problem that was in front of you. Every week you would have a cadence where it's like Monday you go in and 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.

Palantir's success in transitioning from a services business to a product company was due to incredible talent in the product development organization. They recognized that they knew things that most people did not know about how data works in large organizations. The basic one was just data integration is massively painful inside organizations. This is very hard to understand unless you've worked in a large organization, but it is actually impossible to even now to get access to a lot of your own internal data that you need to do your job.

The initial problem that we came into with Airbus was that they had a new aircraft called the A350. And their mandate to us was, okay, we need to ramp up production of this really fast, much faster than we've ever done it before. And so this goes back to what I was saying earlier is the mandate wasn't like, hey, we need to upgrade our data infrastructure. It was much more just like, please help us accomplish this mission. 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.

Palantir had a very aggressive attitude towards travel. You need to be willing to just jump on a plane that night if that's the best thing to do for this customer and if it's going to get us to where it needs to be to win. Just going there for a few days and spending time with them, maybe going out for dinner, you build so much more trust than if you're trying to close a customer over zoom or do an engagement over zoom. It's just the vibe is completely different.

On the forward deploy piece, you have to be willing to be quite almost wasteful. Like you have to be willing to invest a lot in finding the thing and for that you just need a certain ticket size. So you need each customer's revenue to be probably in the millions of dollars. If it's below that, you're probably not looking at a traditional forward deployed engineer motion. I think the err that people make more often than not is they are actually too stuck on their own product vision. That's the mistake I've seen a little bit more actually than the other way around.

The key things that made our model work. One they were actually real engineers who could build product themselves. That's a very big difference. I think a lot of the time companies will say this person is a forward deployed engineer, but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect or they're not necessarily building anything de novo. They're not empowered to do new product. And so the really radical thing Palantir said was no, like go in and if you need a completely new product to do this, you can go ahead and build it.

Everywhere we went, this was the big pain point was we have to wait six, eight weeks just to get data access. And then when you do get data access, it's not like the data is in an easily queryable format. You actually really have to know what you're doing in order to get the right metrics out and so on and so forth. And so it turned out like, okay, it's this iceberg analogy where the actual analysis is actually just the tip of the iceberg. It's kind of the last 5 or 10% and the 95% before that is I am gaining access to the data, I am cleaning the data, I'm joining the data, I'm normalizing it, putting it all the same format.

The thing that is really hard to find is somebody who really, really cares a lot about doing the thing and will go that kind of extra 20%. A lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like, no I'm really gonna. I'm gonna work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working. And I'm not just gonna check my boxes. I'm actually gonna look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve. And so I think aggressively filtering early on for things like mission fit. How much have you cared about stuff in the past and what's an example?

Palantir was quite anti-PM for a while and eventually we did need them because we just got more serious about classic story. 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. It's going to be someone who understand how customers work and has that customer empathy and it's going to be someone who has this drive to get things done because that's what BD selected before.

I don't think that it's rare that disengagement is the correct answer. And I think it's more recognized now, but especially then it went a bit too far. There was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just like, hang on, it's not like working on defense is inherently evil. It's actually a pretty interesting thing. And then there's this question of well, would you rather be in the room and making this better or not? You have to be okay with these kinds of gray zones and actually actively thinking about what you are doing.