Palantir has produced a remarkable number of founders and technology leaders: from founding startups like Anduril (Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and

Palantir: The Founder Foundry - by Apoorv Agrawal

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2024-10-16 20:30:02

Palantir has produced a remarkable number of founders and technology leaders: from founding startups like Anduril (Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and Matt Grimm) and Affirm (Max Levchin and Nathan Gettings) to leading consequential organizations such as OpenAI (Bob McGrew - Chief Research Officer) and Fox (Melody Hildebrandt - CTO).

We wanted to dig into what makes Palantir special through the lens of company building and helping other founders apply best practices. A bit about us: Apoorv was a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir from 2013 to 2017 working primarily on the commercial side of the business (working with Palantir’s non-government customers). Cobi was at Palantir from 2014 to 2020 working predominantly on the US Government side of the business. Given our different functional and customer focus areas, we saw a broad spectrum of what makes Palantir special and below we distill some of the common elements that stand out.

Palantir has been -- and in many ways still is -- a misunderstood company. Over the years, Palantir has been called everything from a secretive spy organization that steals citizens’ data to a services business to a consulting shop.