Organizational Wisdom

October 16,2024

last update: 2024-11-07

What started with Nabeel Qureshi’s Reflections on Palantir led me into an incredibly deep and rich rabbit hole of companies, intensity, operating them and, a whole host of new (to me) industry operators within the palantir circles such as, Tyler Cowen, Shyam Sankar, etc.

I had a lot of my perceptions changed from this rabbit hole. Highly recommend spending a couple of hours going through their blogs. Incredibly strong and deep ideas

Orientation

Palantir started as a defense service industry, when service industry was unsexy and frowned upon.

But palantir wanted to solve real problems. They wanted to create something of value to their clients. Which is why starting with a hypothesis and building a product (which how it is typically done) was non-optimal

Palantir had a ton of talent in Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) who travel to the client’s location to work on their data problems. After which they come to base and discuss with others about the type of problems they face in the field. This communal knowledge of large organization’s data problem enabled them to build a product company.

Palantir started out as a service company and ended up a product company. Palantir seems to have had a lot of influence on today’s data dashboarding designs. Which is quite interesting.

A FDE is there to solve the problem for a client. It does not need to software. FDE will also have to balance the politics within the company and navigate them which is quite difficult.

tldr

• Seek Truth, Solve Real Problems not Shiny Ones
• Go outside the building
• Deliver outcomes, not Software

Leadership and People

People need to be intense and quirky. A lot of palantir’s ideologies were deeply philosophically rooted. Peter Thiel being a philosophy major played a big part in it. But, the philosophical tilt bought in people with deep understanding and ideas.

Palantir was a batsignal for people with a certain philsophical tilt and rigor in living.

Intensity in an organization comes from the top down. This is the same argument as

tldr

• Transparency, Learn from Everything
• Intense competitiveness
• This is the marines vibe

Structure

Shyam Sankar in his blog mentions how a team needs complementary skills.

you don’t need everyone to be organized in the same manner. You need weird mutations, strengths, and weaknesses. Which is very important for the velocity of the team.

tldr

• a project should be owned by an individual not a team.
• Outcomes are important.
• Team is like a team of mutants