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Minus One · 2 min · Dec 13, 2024

Enterprise sellers must shape perception as well as reality

Alexandr Wang says large customers often respond more to perception than reality, so enterprise sellers need both a good product and a strong story. He points to Palantir as an example.

Alexandr Wang is founder and CEO of Scale AI.

Dropped out of MIT to co-found Scale AI in 2016; Meta invested $14.3B in it in 2025 and hired him to lead Superintelligence Labs.

Aditya Agarwal, Host · General partner, South Park Commons
One of Facebook's first engineers, he helped build its first search engine; later CTO of Dropbox.

About this segment

Alexandr Wang says large customers often respond more to perception than reality, so enterprise sellers need both a good product and a strong story. He points to Palantir as an example.

From “Scale AI & the Startup Hunger Games with Alexandr Wang”, Dec 13, 2024. Watch the full episode

“at a lot of large customers, perception is more real than reality.”

Alexandr Wangat 11:26 · Minus One11:26

Takeaways

Large customers may act on perception more than reality.
Enterprise sellers need to improve the product and shape its perception.
Palantir's sales approach offers one example.

In this episode

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Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

10:45
were very good at talking about it so which philosophy do you follow at scale do you like to build the thing or do you like to sell the thing or do you find a happy medium i think you have to do it at both well at least for what we do so at scale we have like small number of customers um they're very large customers and um and in that world you have to i think it's like one way to think about it is perception is reality a lot of times. And I think probably a lot of the companies that you all have worked with, they're very data-driven companies. It feels like the truth makes its way. The truth, everybody serves a shared sense of reality and whatnot. That's not true at most large companies and also not true within the government, unfortunately. But at a lot of large customers, perception is more real than reality. The reality is just so ugly most
11:35
of the time, that very rarely do people actually confront reality. And most of the time, they just sort of choose to believe the perceptions that they live in. So what that means is, if you end up doing enterprise sales, or you end up building enterprise products, that you have to, you know, just as much as your job is to improve the reality, it is to shape the perception. And this is, I think, in some ways, Palantir's...
12:01
one of Palantir's superpowers is that they shape the perception better than most other technology companies do because they think they view themselves, it's like a combination of a sort of acting troupe combined with a software company. And I'm not even saying that, you know, they literally give an acting book to all of the new hires, so they did for a very long time. So I think there's something profound in what you just said, because if If I'm if I'm understanding you correctly, it's that most companies, including the government, they're already living in some perception because the reality is so painful.
12:36
So your job is not to actually outsell reality. So outsell shitty perception with an even better one. OK, all right. Sorry, you also should produce value. This is like this is like dark arts on top of if you build a good product. I think that like fundamentally, you also need to build a good product. Maybe switching to you personally a little bit, what would, I mean, you're clearly very