Be skeptical of any sort of external allies, and don’t trust the execution of anyone outside Palantir.

In the abstract, this is because the incentives of the other company will not line up with ours, and even if they do for the moment, they no longer will once the situation changes. In specific, other companies don’t have the same culture of execut... See more

Return to first principles and act quickly on your new conclusions.

It’s very easy to take the world as it is, as opposed to envisioning it as you want it to be. For example, when re-designing a feature, one approach is to take what you have, and imagine small changes that will solve the problems with the feature. Instead, it’s often instructive to... See more

Obsess over perfection.

If you are designing something that a customer is going to use or that will represent us in public, it’s not good enough unless it’s flawless and extraordinary.

Especially in software, many situations have winner-take-all dynamics due to network effects and switching costs. Being the winner means being in the 99.99-percentile... See more

Don’t divide your attention: focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort.

At a micro level, an extra hour of focus on the current project has a much higher return than an hour on something new, or worse, 5 minutes each on 12 new things. Before you ever do something new, you should understand the opportunity cost vs. exis... See more