I’m not sure if they still do this, but at the time when you joined they sent you a copy of

Impro

,

The Looming Tower

(9/11 book),

Interviewing Users

, and

Getting Things Done

. I also got an early PDF version of what became Ray Dalio’s

Principles

. This set the tone. The Looming Tower was obvious enough – the company was founded partly as a response to... See more

The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company... See more

Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games. Impro is popular with nerds partly because it breaks down social behavior mechanistically. The... See more

Another key thing FDEs did was data integration, a term that puts most people to sleep. This was (and still is) the core of what the company does, and its importance was underrated by most observers for years. In fact, it’s only now with the advent of AI that people are starting to realize the importance of having clean, curated, easy-to-access... See more

1. Why I joined

I joined in summer 2015, initially in the newly-opened London office, before moving to Silicon Valley, and finally DC – as a forward deployed engineer. For context, the company was around 1500 people at the time; it had offices in Palo Alto (HQ), NYC, London, and a few other places. (It’s now 4000 or so people, and headquartered in... See more

Palantir is hot now. The company recently

joined the S&P 500

. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.

This made the software hard to describe concisely - it wasn’t just a database or a spreadsheet, it was an end-to-end solution to

that specific

problem, and to hell with generalizability. Your job was to solve the problem, and not worry about overfitting; PD’s job was to take whatever you’d built and generalize it, with the goal of selling it... See more

This is one reason why former FDEs tend to be great founders. (There are usually more ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Googlers in each YC batch, despite there being ~50x more Google employees.) Good founders have an instinct for reading rooms, group dynamics, and power. This isn’t usually talked about, but it’s critical: founding a... See more

Palantir was an unusually weird place, too. I remember my first time I talked to

Stephen Cohen

he had the A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. (Apparently there are cognitive benefits to... See more