Reflections on Palantir

I suspect the tone here — largely laudatory, abd looking up to people like Peter Thiel and Paul Graham — will rub most of my readers the wrong way.

Look past that, and pay attention to the notes on what makes Palentir work. I completely agree with a lot of the conclusions about how important being embedded with real customers is. It happens also to be the model that I saw working at 18F and USDS!

Palentir is for sure a deeply weird place but it didn’t become successful by accident. There are some real useful lessons here.