Palantir's culture won him over by turning ideas into action

Transcript

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

1. 2:55

   exists in the ecosystem right now? Yeah, I mean, the Palantir story is actually maybe a relevant one here because I was working in the US intelligence community. I wasn't looking at startups. I frankly had no expectation that I would spend my career in tech. I thought I was to be a civil servant my entire life. So not only was tech less noisy in 2007, but tech for national security purposes was, you know, nothing other than Palantir. So I had this experience of basically trying to fight to get Palantir into the agency where I was working. And I was told, no, they basically said, if you believe that there's a requirement that isn't being met, you need to write up like a statement of work, and then we'll see if we can get it funded.

2. 3:37

   And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this already exists. Like literally the product exists. Other people in the intelligence community are using it. We can just use the existing product. And they're like, oh, no, no, no. We don't buy things. We build things. I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. And so I reached out to the guy who gave the demo. It was a very small team at the time. They're only like 20 people.

3. 3:57

   So some of you might know Shyam Sankar, who's... like the president of Palantir now, he was the guy that gave the demo. And I reached out to him and I'm like, man, I hope you're not wasting your time because this is going nowhere. Like I've been fighting this battle internally. And he just sent me this email and he's like, wow, it's adorable that you think you're going to be a government civil servant if this is bothering you of all things. And so he asked me to come out to Palo Alto. So I took a day off of work and flew out on a red eye and hung out for one day at Palantir. And I was like, oh my gosh, these are my people.

4. 4:31

   He offered me a job. Well, Dr. Karp offered me a job on the spot after talking to me for literally five minutes. And I'm like, whoa, I had spent 18 months going through an interview process for a government job. And I just met the CEO and he offered me a job five minutes later. It was like a baptism by fire into like how startups really work. Two questions. Why was it immediately apparent to you that these were your people and also why did he offer you the job do you think after just five minutes man by the way for what it's worth my experience at facebook was actually very similar which is that i remember walking into the facebook kind of like house slash office and my first reaction was like oh these are my people this is going to be super fun this reminds me of like the people that i love hanging out with it feels like a dorm room they're writing code

5. 5:17

   drinking beer, eating pizza, playing video games. Like I am going to love it here. And I think I talked to Mark for literally five to seven minutes. He asked me maybe one question about databases and he's like, you seem to know databases. So it was very apparent, like on both sides pretty quickly. I'm curious, like what was your experience like? Well, I think there's like a corollary to venture capital here that's probably worth mentioning in quick passing.

6. 5:42

   Please, please, yeah. Which is that people believe that there's some like KPIs or something that VCs are looking for and that, you know, when you ask, how do you know that, like, this founder is going to be a great founder? How do you know that this company idea is going to be a great company idea? And, you know, I think people are really desperate for, like, the, you know, the insight. The reality is, is, like, it's actually really obvious most of the time.

7. 6:08

   And if you're just being honest, like, within five minutes, you can usually tell, like, okay, this person is insane. Like, I obviously want to have, like, a 10-year relationship going on with this person. And 95% of the time, you know, you meet with a company and you're like, oh, my gosh, this is not it. Like, I'm not going to do this. Now, there's, like, the mean way of handling that where people are like, I'm going to pass in the meeting.

8. 6:33

   And I try not to do that because I think people have passion and you want to, like, be respectful to that and be helpful if you can. But I think it's the same thing in recruiting for hiring. You know, in the government, a typical meeting is basically like 20 people come into a room. You have like the 10 people sitting at the rolling chairs around the table. And then you have the 10 people sitting along the back benches in the chairs that don't roll, if you've been in a room like this.

9. 7:00

   And the people in the chairs that don't roll are junior and usually incredibly ambitious with ideas and opinions. And the people in the rolling chairs are focused on not breaking any rules. They're the ones that are saying, like, let's go around and introduce ourselves. And it's like, you know, my name is John. I've been here 10 years. Here are the projects that I've worked on. Thank you for convening this conversation.

10. 7:24

    It's really important that we have this discussion. Here's the agenda. At the end of the meeting, I want to, like, requisition a white paper. And then you move on to the next person. They do the same thing. Hour-long meeting, 40 minutes in, the rolling chair people are still introducing each other. And the last 20 minutes, it's just like this mad rush to like, okay, now what is the white paper that we need to write?

11. 7:48

    And that was infuriating for 23-year-old Trey. I couldn't do that. And so going into Palantir, you know, I'd be chatting with someone and they'd be like, okay. you have to see this. And they would go over, they'd open up their IDE, they would show me something, they would make a change, they would launch it in the product, they would show me like how this thing worked in the product and how we were thinking about changing it.

12. 8:12

    And it was just that for an entire day. And I'm like, oh my gosh, these people, like they do things. Like they're literally just doing the things that they're talking about. And then having this conversation with Dr. Karp, who was clearly insane, like just, I love him, but he's a wacky dude. He's a wacky dude. I was just totally blown away by this idea that there are these band of renegades, sort of like the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, that they're just fully committed to breaking the bureaucracy.

13. 8:43

    And after spending two and a half years working in the government, I believed nothing more than that the bureaucracy needed to be broken. Yeah, very interesting.