Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir: Exclusive Interview Inside PLTR Office

We've anti-aged. You've reached anti-aging. We've reached anti-aging inside. Why do you think age of company is directly correlated with the rate of age or anti-aging is directly correlated with the layers of hierarchy? Our company is 20 years old and feels like it's has scale of a 20 year company, but the vibe of a four or five year old company, meaning we know what we're doing. We have a way of doing things. It's very tribal. We stick to our tribal knowledge, but it's. You know, like, for example, you know, we put the whole companies, we bet on the U.S. military and on the U.S. commercial sector, and we pivoted the whole company to both, basically.

I mean, we still have a massive presence outside of America, but we've been, and like, we can do, we can make these decisions, like, in, like, somebody, we last this marriage meritocracy thing, which is basically to give people who are tired of being discriminated against an application process a chance to come and learn something useful. And the people always say, well, how long did it take to launch that? And I was like, yeah, I don't know. Three minutes. Three minutes. Yeah. It's like decision. I don't know. Like, like a lot of, like I was, we were talking about this before, but like, it's hard to be fair to the total bereft of common sense and in practice, this not particularly honest analyst expert class, not because they're wrong the first time, but primarily because they can't admit they were wrong the first time when they're wrong the 10th time. But if you want to be slightly fair to them, this company runs on like a much more artistic, it's more, much more artistic than science. So where does that come from?

You know, I obviously primarily from my mom was a professional and world-class artist. and again everyone says they're an artist but then there's a very big difference between a glacial difference between like my mom is a above one rule of 100 artists like you know it's like in a very different sphere and then on my father's side they were heavily involved in commercial art and like textiles for like a thousand years so like and what what people always think of like the lay person thinks of art is you just doodle something but i know it's crazy but uh you're from like an artistic family yeah that's what people think but actually art is you you tap into something very very deep that is not understood about the period of time you're in and does not become understood until like 20 30 years later and that art captures something in the zeitgeist that is so special, but then the depth also transmutes to something more universal.

Do you think that's how Palantir is being viewed right now? Well, no. I mean, I think one of the crazy things about our society is people who are more on the front line, like soldiers, workers, vocational workers, what we call retail investors, they're actually looking at the frontline data in an unfiltered way. And then almost everybody else has outsourced value assessment and quantitative metrics to experts. But the experts in general, or even generalization, I can't think of any expert class that's been right about anything substantive in the last 20 years. And then, so at this point, when you're like when the experts call the experts, the analysts in this case, or journalists, or I don't know, you're a financial analyst for a paper, a hedge fund, like you are actually a medium and it's your job to transfer the reality on the ground into a reality you can understand. Yeah, but the reality you can understand is not reality. And like, but then because there's like, it's like a super unique uh bubble they can't quite allow themselves to say yeah but and so but one of the greatest trends is like i mean at the end of the day what makes one of the things that makes a great artist great is they have a vision of what they see in the world and they stick to that vision

although everybody in the world said but you can't paint like that you can't write like that you can't you can't picture photography that way uh because it doesn't i don't know and then by the way most great artists like my mother end up with no money yeah and uh i mean that's the book has like a lot of tds in it but i mean it is true we were not economically privileged but you could look at it as like but why were we not economically privileged because like my parents had these super high level of intellect yeah but it's also because they kind of stuck to the guns of how they saw the world. And that's where the experts are like, you know, like this isn't safe because in almost all cases, this doesn't work.

Yeah, they're right. But in the one case where you change the world, it's the only way it can work. Is this why you're so committed to the American worker? And even in the recent earnings call, you called out you're giving venture returns to retail investors. You've created a really amazing cult behind wall street bets and a lot of retail so how do you feel about well i think you know i always think there's the economic and there's a psychological and really powerful things are aligned so like you know i i in no way like i hate these victimhood bs things and and honestly when you're almost everyone who believes in that is a mark whether they realize it or not but i I mean, like they may not realize it, but you are the mark.

And that's frustrating because a lot of these people who believe in that really deserve better. But it's hard to give better if you believe in an ideology that can't work. But I did come from an environment where it was not expected that I would be co-founder and have a but-for role in building arguably one of the greatest companies ever built. And I don't mean that even like in like the half trillion dollar market cap or whatever it is, or I just mean in terms of how it's changed the lives primarily of Americans on the battlefield as investors and also, you know, on the factory floor. But the thing is, if you come from nothing and you're this amorphous, racially dyslexic person from a very specific kind of culture, not even Jewish culture, it's like super acribic, Germanic, left-wing culture, you assume the world may not work out for you and is definitely not looking out for you.

Okay, so what other group of people in this culture have exactly the same vibe?

Alex KarpYeah. Soldiers, people on the factory floor. Who does the dying and bleeding for us? Soldiers, people on the factory floor. Who gets killed because somehow constitutional legal scholars only read the Constitution so it's expansive to protect their rights?

So their right to be happy, their right to be go to Yale, their right to be wealthy, their right to be safe. But somehow the Constitution cannot be read to stop the reality of like in the last two years, more people have died of fentanyl than every single person who's died as a soldier since World War II. But they can't. And part of it is like they have a lot of intellectual reasons, but the real reason is they don't see themselves as having had the same fate. But if you're me, you look at those people. And then, quite frankly, look at the U.S. Army. Look who fought and died for our rights today. By the way, it was mostly working class people from what the elite calls flyover states. It still is.

and then look at the U.S. military. It integrated, first to integrate, first to bring meritocracy. It still fights for meritocracy. It's the first major institution in the world to say, I don't care where you're from. And they did it way before American society. So that's that version. Then there's the economic stability version. My version of what, and by the way, a fair thing to ask people is, what were you saying 10 years ago? So one of the most amazing things about Palantir. And you know this, but you go online and people who are like, you know, whatever, some people don't like my vast words of wisdom. And they're like, he's saying this now. What did he say 10 years ago? It's like, we're saying this, we've been saying this for 20 years. Close the border, get rid of the identity politics, victimhood bullshit. It's especially bad for people who need it. Have a strong military, make that military the strongest in the world. Give an unfair advantage to America. Do not treat all cultures as equal. Simultaneously, do not get on the whole neo- con, make the whole world like America thing, because it doesn't work, be skeptical of immigration, built technology will be the determinant variable in who runs the world. All this stuff you're

learning at Berkeley about people are just going to inherently absorb American values is really just downtrend from our military superiority. You don't know that, but our adversaries absolutely know that. We've been saying this for 20 years. And the only difference now is people who are skeptical of us are forced to realize we could be right, which is why they run to short sellers and analysts who still can't rock where we're at. There was a part in the book where you had just won the Dwight Eisenhower Award. And this was a little bit of a surprise to your employees, but you got a little choked up because of the impact of what that is to troops. And so could you just explain what that experience was like for you? Well, first of all, Eisenhower has this German name. He's from a German religious minority family. He was a pivotal figure at gunpoint in desegregation. He helped win the war, or pivotal. But the main thing is, you know, I lived in Germany for a lot of my adult life, which was a phenomenal experience, which maybe they went into in too much graphic detail uh what are you talking about yeah we gotta know it's like uh it was um i went for the right reasons and i may have stayed for the wrong reasons

but it's okay i uh and i so i have um a lot of uh i mean deep understanding and and i'll get to this and deep appreciation for the german culture i think one of the craziest things is you have this whole thing online where people like like laud the nazis like i spent a lot of time talking to nazis like real nazis and like understanding what made them tick and what made them i mean part of the crazy thing about people a lot the nazis nowadays is there's not a single nazi that would ever have included them in their movement and would have shipped them off to the camps and quicker maybe than they shipped me off to the camps uh but um and uh and it's like it's uh but The thing that is crazy unique about America, whether it's, you know, somebody from Montana, Iowa, going over to fight because they believed in America and they believed in the greater good.

And there really was this was a primarily moral. It's like honestly, it's like Lincoln. this guy fought to end slavery it was not economic it was moral like what other culture actually engaged in civil war just because it was wrong what was happening in the south that was the primary i'm not like the modern way of reading is like economics it's like maybe but the primary reason why americans fought and died was moral primary reason why americans fought and died in world war ii was moral and it would they had no tethering like when you're a soldier from the north dying to fight slavery it's not that you have i don't know black relatives and friends it's because you think this is wrong when you were over uh fighting uh the nazis or imperial japan you were doing it because you thought America was a superior way of living.

and this wasn't wrong now you can and like and then whatever one thinks about these things no other culture does this it's the same thing of how did we get meritocracy until recently in america meritocracy is a like one of the things that we don't often value enough like even now in europe like like in europe if when i was involved in hiring at uh this institute i worked at and one of the biggest problems was i was always like of course we need to hire the best person. That's not the way it works in Germany or Norway. Like the best person doesn't get hired ever. And so like, you know, like at our institutions, like at our elite institutions, we embrace meritocracy, we embrace the higher good, and we fought and died for that. Like one of, and then the fact that Pallinger can bring that kind of person home more safely and arguably whether people believe this or not, we can, you know, the primary purpose of Pallinger is to be so dominant that those people don't have to fight and die because everyone knows you're going to die 10 times more if you attack America. You want to sleep at night. You want to

Alex Karpmake sure our soldiers don't have to fight and die. Make sure the adversary knows they are going to get totally effed up if they screw with us. And that's like a really noble purpose.

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For more information, visit carta.com slash sorcery. That's C-A-R-T-A dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. one thing that was apparent through the narrative of the book was you're self-made but you're not self-made in an economic sense you're self-made and maybe a morals and values sense so how did you become alex cart well I mean, you know, there's the there's all these variables, very smart parents, highly educated, crappy school, which I never would have done. Like, you know, it's like and so you learn like the world is violent. Dyslexia, meaning there's no playbook I could possibly follow. I think some of the reasons why dyslexics are so outperformant now is that we're in a non-playbook world and the playbook's not that valuable.

But if you're dyslexic, you can't can't follow the playbook or only in the third rate way. so you invent new and generative things. Look, I've never been accused of false ill modesty. I think in the end, to do something important, whether it's me or like Eliana or look at all these people here, like these are among the best and most talented people in the world. at a certain level of accomplishment you're in an artistic space where it's very hard to explain why you have your insights and it goes way beyond experiences that of course all also influence them but like i just have artistic impulses and they shape my life and i've allowed myself or i've been forced to allow myself the freedom to live that way and in there's one country in the world where you know you get rewarded for that because in america if you deliver you can be you you know like you're your own boss right you decide you want to talk to you decide you don't want to talk to you have ideas of things you'd like to you know advance on um and the i think one of the biggest variables in my life is just simply i live in a culture where if you deliver in this case, economically. And by the way, at 18, for most investors, we were failing for

at least 15 years. Many would say 18 years. Honestly, some would say until two years ago, right? And still, this is a culture where the FDE, ontology, superior over the West, extreme meritocracy, the fact that I would just tell people basically, yeah, the financials are going to show up. That's only possible in this culture. And I guess maybe because I lived abroad so long, it's easier for me to accept and rely on that. I think sometimes people who've lived here their whole life don't always exactly understand this is a maximal freedom culture. It's the only culture like this in the world. And it'll allow you to self-express. And if you self-express, that self-expression, because it's not playbook, creates an environment that is exceedingly hard to compete with and will piss off all the right people. How is a value creation for Palantir different than traditional SaaS companies? Well, first of all, it's important to remember, we are valued. We drive our whole business based on a set of beliefs that are like America superiority and so on. But then, interestingly, that's tethered to the value creation argument you're asking, which is at the end of the day, if you believe your client is noble,

like I believe our US government clients are not only noble, but they're no more noble than I am. And I'm happy with myself, but they're doing missions that will change world history for the better. Okay. So if you know that the thing that's going to happen downstream from that is you're going to resist building parasitic products right because like i don't want a product that will make me despite what anyone but like anyone who's been a palantir will know this to be true we i did we did not the audacity of just saying we're going to build a product in pg that's going to make you safer let's go away from the ambient noise uh um that will make you uh safer and more protected is audacious in a weird way that we didn't realize the most audacious part of that was

Alex Karpsaying we're going to build a product that's actually what the client needs because what you're supposed to be doing software is build the client that the client gets addicted to

not the one they need and like this is like and this is absolutely a truism in in in software development of any kind and so the like the again the most radical thing we ever did was say yeah The client, or in this case, partner that we look up to has these needs. We didn't even give them what they asked for. We gave them what they ought to ask for, which, again, is very artistic. It's like any rational business would have said, I don't know, client A, B, C, D wants to be, at the very least, you just give them what they want. That's kind of what integrators do. And then what very successful software companies do is say, oh, they think they want X.

We'll fake give them X, but we'll give them this thing that they can't get rid of. And then nothing else will work, but they'll just have to pay. And then I can hire 50,000 salespeople and get these wonderful economics. And then every single decision, like, again, the FDE thing, now everyone copies it. But it was the most radical, like, you had everyone making fun of this for 20 years because that meant you were going to get a one multiple. But there was no way to extend PG. like essentially PG, you can think of PG as like a precursor to AIP because you have text, free text that a computer could not understand. The NLP technology was primitive. The only way to extend that product to like the bounds of technology now was to have people doing the impulse. And then the only way to build the next product or deepen that product was to understand what the customer ought to want tomorrow and build that into the product today. And so like Like that value creation, by the way, it ends up being very, very protective because and and then because the customer partner actually becomes they may not like you.

Like some of our best clients globally, both in government and in commercial, we're like, I don't really like these guys. Yeah. But you know what? When you bring someone home safely, they learn to love you. And so and then that allows us to have this privileged position that we now have. And now when we're launching, you know, when we, again, there's example, the most recent example that people will be more familiar with would be launching AIP. Okay. When we launched AIP, or I launched it in like an artistic, I don't know if you know this story. But in any case, I launched AIP in like the darkness of night.

The darkness of night. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. On like pre-Easter holiday because it would have been massively resisted. And I would say, as one of my favorite people said in any other company, the whole head of whatever part of the product that was going to be involved in this would have quit because it was just launched. Completely artistic, like this is where the world is going. We have all the components. We had ontology of foundry. But the components need to be brought together. Okay. The thing is, if you're working back from what will sell, you would have said, well, wait a minute. Everyone's saying LLMs are going to solve all these problems.

but I believed and it turns out that LLMs are commodity products and orchestration would be much more valuable than the product themselves and you need both we need the LLMs but in reality and that's part of the reason we have these numbers because it turns out we're right but like if you were working back from what experts think and what customers are asking for you do not launch that you launch something else okay You can ask as many questions as you need. I have one more question. So it's Eliano. Okay. Eliano, she's the boss. How many questions would you like? 72. Okay. Okay. Why not? Yeah.

So on AIP, it seemed like that was a big pivotal moment for the company and getting into this next round. of AI, which is something in transformation that you've embraced full, wholeheartedly versus maybe some other people to the extent that you go into different corporations and then you make the products for them. On top of our current products or we build new ones. Yeah, that's true. Would you say that that was a major component to why sales cycles have compressed and why it's been easier to sell? You know, it's a really good question. It is that, but also the zeitgeist has changed. Although there have been a lot of projects in AI that haven't worked, most leaders in the corporate world and government know of projects that have worked.

A great portion of those are in Palantir. So in the government, there's a deep understanding of the government side of Maven and other things, Hivemind. And then on the commercial context, we have all these very public customers and people begin to see their unit economics changing. And particularly important, they're able to change them while being in the public sphere. So you can do what you had to do in private. But you used to have to buy the company, take it offline for like five years and then scrap the costs and we sell. And then you could do this while remaining public. And there's lots of economic advantages to that.

And so you can also do it in private context.

Alex KarpAnd so the thing that you see as a common through line in AI on the positive side is it used to be no one believed the software would work. Now everyone believes it should work.

And they wonder, well, if mine isn't working, where can I find something that is? And more and more and more people, honestly, in the U.S., it's not true in Europe. In Europe, they're still like, it doesn't work, but hopefully this will fail because it's all American products. But in this country, people are like, I know this should work. I turned on TV and there was someone I know or someone I've talked to at a conference and said, yeah, OK, good. It is a little weird when they show up. The person showing up is going to be carp. That's not everyone's cup of tea. And someone who's like looks 18, but is actually 25.

And it'll work. I mean, I think that's what's like going around the country. and that means both like from introduction to sale it's quicker and as importantly from sell to actual output we have a lot more authority like we used to basically get in these enterprises and i have to spend a half my day explaining to people look i know the person down the hall is your tech person but they used to be a school teacher in music this is actual real example Okay. Yeah. And what, you know, I like the idea of a music, but it's like, and what they're saying about the tech stack, you know, and then you could do five years or you could do at the prime, I used to say five years versus nine months. Now it's like five years versus three months or two months. And there's actually much more of a, please just tell us how to do this. Not always.

Yeah. And I would say, interestingly, our newer partners, customers are much more wanting to hear, OK, I know this works. It's gone from I'm not sure this works, but my wife is on the line in commercial and government like five years ago to I know this. I've heard and know this will work. How do I do this optimally? And then, you know, the bottlenecking we have currently means like, you know, I mean, I tell I'm telling governments all over the world. look, we're not showing up to do a sales call for Maven. You know it works. We know it works. Show up at my office, explain to us how you're going to make this easy for us because we don't have huge bandwidth. I mean, I'm not talking about the US government. That's a completely different thing there. We will bend over backwards and do whatever it takes. But like allied countries in Europe was like, yeah, you know, they're like, oh, we need five sales meetings and a PowerPoint.

We're like, great. I can recommend some other company. It won't work, but you'll get all the sales reps. All that cycle, all the forms, everything you want. And I was the other day talking to a very important European leader. I was like, look, you have an intel service, you have a military. They should evaluate what works. They're going to tell you this works. Nothing else really does. You can buy, you want the thing that doesn't work but sounds good. They'll do lots of meetings with you. We can't do them. We just can't. And in commercial, it's not quite like that in the US, but there's a sense that the demand is greater than what we can supply. And then we're just telling an older customer, look, the way you're doing it will not allow us to create value. We're not a normal software company.

If you're not creating value, how are we going to get paid? And by the way, you're going to want to get rid of us at some point. So the whole thing makes no sense. We're not selling you steak dinner. we're not selling you our charm we're selling you significant value creation in in ridiculously short times a period and value creation on top end and buy it and like basically you know and and then another thing by the way i tell people is you know all the time it's like look i get to have an opinion because of our financials do you want to have an opinion again you got to have financials like this a lot of people want to be able to have an opinion again in public Mm-hmm. You have VC returns for retail investors, and now you're having PE outcomes for large companies. What's next? Just being very, very focused on the US, growing the US, growing the quality of the UX. There's a lot more, interestingly, when we're talking externally, of course, people want to know the financial metrics, like these rule of 114, the 77, all these things that are crazy valuable. But internally, it's like really back to the, like, how do we make sure this implementation is the best?

How do we make sure the product is advancing? How do we make sure we're building the products of tomorrow? How are we in the U.S. government closest to the things that will give America a strategic advantage? And it's just not just now, but for decades. How do we, on the commercial side, how do we make sure that, oh, it's just Palantir. People are roving around, no hierarchy. This is just the Palantir thing. You're like, what are you doing here? Get out, I'm working. I have no time. CEO, move out of the way. Yeah, it's the other thing at Palantir. You know, we value our work. Like, he can have any opinion he wants.

He can come in here and like do it. You get to, you perform here, you get to be you, not just me. You know, this concept of worker available GDP. Yeah. You know, you're going to participate in the AI revolution. He's going to participate in the air relation. We're building it here. The person on the factory floor right now wonders, are we going to get rich and are they going to get poorer? And is that, that will not work for our society. Yeah, no. So what's Palantir's role in re-industrialization? Making sure workers, I mean, first of all, there's like, how do you manufacture at scale? How do you manufacture in addition to this way?

How do you bring – if you bring – let's say you bring Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean manufacturing to America. The interesting thing, people always think manufacturing is manufacturing. You actually have to manufacture their building the way you would do it in those countries because that's – then you have to scale American workers. So, like, for example, we have American workers working at factories, like Japanese factories especially, and, like, they're American workers.

Alex KarpThey're not Japanese workers, but we can get, we can use foundry and ontology to bring out the advantages of American worker and give them the capacity to roughly work like a Japanese engineer.

And so like, and honestly, at this point, we're really just showing rather than telling because you really have to show people the narrative working. And now. U.S. military, that's going gangbusters because most of the people who actually do the work are domain expertise-specific individuals, and they're seeing, oh, wow, I can, like, like in special operations, as an example, people using our product are using our product. yeah it's not like there's not the like highly elite uh yale grad i think he actually is a yale grad something like that yeah yeah something here we have like even more elite like we have the person creating the real value is someone who joined the military and they're just crushing it we have some fun questions okay great okay i saved some fun ones okay so there was a heartwarming part in this book yeah i wasn't expecting it um there was a point in time in not my social life no well as your family life so can you tell me about rosita yeah um so uh when my parents there's a phase where my parents it was like the thing is when you are outside the norm and in a family there's a warmth in the family yeah so it's like like if you're like our family like total freak show and all variables so the outside is kind of like the freak show i'm sure when my

parents came over people had to be warned kind of thing uh and like you know you may not be okay with this setup and then but on the inside because of that it was an exceedingly intellectual vibrant warm environment and then when we we when i was a little kid and we had moved we had moved from new york uh an incredible city which is large it was about to get the most horrifically and all likelihood ridiculous mayor um uh more than you want to hear from me um my parents decided to get a dog obviously we wanted it so if you're like in my family background of course the only place you're going to get a dog is in the pound because you know you wouldn't get a fancy and the dog of course you know so we went there and we went and then we come to the pound and the i even like in my mind's eye i remember remembering it but it might just be i've heard this story a thousand times but you know uh and then there's this dog that is and the person's screaming i hate this dog i hate this dog uh and then my mom said well why do you hate the dog it was like because the dog there's a lock that you know a human could understand but a dog shouldn't be able to and Rosita was breaking out of the lock.

And then Rosita, that's not why she, like the warden, you know, it's basically a warden of death because they're like, they were going to put her to sleep the next day. And the warden's like, I can't wait till tomorrow. We're going to put, they became Rosita to sleep. And I was like, well, why do you hate the dogs? It's just like, well, he's breaking out all the time. She's breaking out all the time. And mom said, well, okay, that's one thing. And even worse than that, Rosita would go back and break open the other locks for other people. Yeah. And then my mom was like, that's our dog. And then Rosita played a tremendous role in our life.

It was more like she's very, very high IQ. It was honestly more like a human than a dog. And yeah, that's Rosita. And later on, you exhumed Rosita through me. Yeah, there's a lot in the book I probably wouldn't have told. But yeah, so one of the crazy things about having resources is you can do things that mean a lot to you. that, you know, so I, through all sorts of ways, got in touch with the person who bought the house that was forced sold during the divorce. And the person was very generous and for lots of reasons agreed to have me exhume their whole yard. And then I took Rosita and now I'm, yeah, I have her burial site near my house. That's really sweet. Rosita was the best. Really? No. Okay. Well, if you were a cupcake what kind of cupcake would you be i don't want to be a cupcake because i don't want to get eaten i'm resisting being a cupcake but what's your favorite cup no i actually don't eat them that but i actually recently in dc there's these very fancy i just it all comes down with the icing it's just the icing i don't know why people eat the cupcake it's just the icing makes no sense yeah it makes no sense why even have it there well no you have it there's like a i don't know the same way transportation well yeah you have like a vehicle for the coffee

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it comes down like there's really, I mean, a lot of places have good cupcakes, but very few people have great cupcakes. Okay. Well, before we head too far back into the office, thank you so much, Alex. Thank you. Very nice. Very nice to meet you. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, Sorcery.VC, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.