PicoBlog

Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, released an exceptional article today on the culture at Palantir and how they initially began. For any long term bull, it is a must read, primarily because it gives you a glimpse into the culture your money is funding as an investor.

A culture of winning.

Shyam’s tweet on this article:

So in this tweet, Shyam Sankar previews what he is going to say in his article. He explains that Palantir’s culture is simply a culture of winning, and in order to have that culture…you need to be mission focused.

Here’s some parts of the article I enjoyed:

It’s funny when people say “Palantir investors are in a cult.” The literal CTO of the company is explaining how they started the company with a cult-first philosophy.

The reality is, cults get things done. Here, Shyam speaks on how hard it was to get the initial early engineers. When they gave equity, those engineers wanted cash. Instead, Palantir just decided to go with engineers who wanted equity and actually had skin in the game over just cash, which actually made those engineers aligned with working to see the company eventually succeed.

They wanted missionaries, not mercenaries.

Here, Shyam speaks to the dedication of what it means to work at Palantir. Essentially, his argument is to get things done, there is no balance.

For people that have ever built anything, you probably relate to this. If you are investing in Palantir, you are investing in people that care less about balance and more about results. The example Shyam gives about making sure Palantir was available on a mission in Iraq exemplifies how the company thinks about their clients: provide value, that value drives trust, that trust eventually leads to business results.

It’s just the right way to win over customers and partners for the long term.

This part was one of my favorites in the article. Shyam Sankar was Palantir’s first forward deployed engineer — he even came up with the name!

The story about the French restaurant was one I did not know. It makes sense Karp used that analogy to get Shyam on board and philosophically aligned with what Palantir could ultimately become.

When Shyam says “We didn’t look like the other SaaS businesses,” to me that is indicative of everything we have been analyzing around Palantir for years.

The company is nothing like other SaaS companies because those companies focus on selling whereas Palantir focuses on winning. Winning means you need the best product, and the best product eventually leads to the best sales if you can provide the most value.

Palantir’s product moat along with bootcamp go-to-market strategy is what is leading to them truly becoming a one of a kind SaaS company.

Short float on Palantir has once again decreased, going down .43% over the past two weeks.

Again, it seems that the shorts realize shorting Palantir is not a smart idea — the company can announce a random deal one day with Oracle or a new government contract like TITAN and completely ruin a short. With shorting, your losses are unlimited until you cover, so I think the shorts are just leaving Palantir alone since it’s not worth the risk.

This is great for longs because that means there’s less manipulation in the stock and if the company executes, they can be rewarded for that without the short float dragging it down.

Great post on X today around AIP bootcamps continuing to scale — this time in the city of fashion: Milan, Italy.

We had two international bootcamps around AIP for insurance in March for Zurich and London.

We had another one in December in combination with Accenture all the way in India.

Now, we have the first one in Italy. It really seems like the AIP bootcamps are scaling at a strong level — this bootcamp being done in combination with PWC, another consulting firm Palantir has a strong relationship with.

I don’t expect this bootcamp to be big for business results or customer conversion, but rather to get it in the books so that PWC and Palantir both have a feel of how they want to conduct bootcamps in Italy. It’s a different clientele base, different culture, etc. Being able to get this one done will hopefully lead to many more bootcamps in Italy and across the world.

More bootcamps, more customers, more top line revenue growth.

Thank you for reading — I’ll see you tomorrow in your inbox!

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