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

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, joins Molly O’Shea for a rare look inside Palantir (physically, inside their office). We go deep into their values, vision, and the moral foundation of technology in the AI era. Fresh off Palantir’s record-breaking earnings, nearly hitting a $500 billion market-cap milestone, and the release of a new biography The Philosopher in the Valley, this episode explores how Palantir evolved from an outsider idea into one of the world’s most influential software companies. Karp breaks down how Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has become the operating system for the AI era – shortening sales cycles and giving companies premium analytical and decision-making capabilities. Today, AIP is helping U. S. defense, industrial, manufacturing, and commercial enterprises compete to win the global AI race. Reflecting on the artistry behind innovation, Karp also describes how creating products at Palantir mirrors the creative process itself.. tapping into ideas ahead of their time, resisting conformity, and building with conviction over consensus. He explains how his lifelong dyslexia shaped a non-linear approach to thinking, decision-making, and leadership, allowing him to build a company that thrives on meritocracy, intuition, and rapid iteration instead of rigid hierarchy. And more importantly, amid a severely unpredictable AI boom, Karp argues that Palantir’s purpose is bigger than software. It’s about helping Americans win, from empowering soldiers and engineers to giving “venture-style returns to retail investors” and “private-equity outcomes to enterprise clients.” The conversation connects philosophy and business, revealing how Palantir’s DNA: equal parts artistry, pragmatism, and moral clarity, has produced one of the most resilient and valuable companies of the 21st century. Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ ⁠Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠ https://x.com/sourceryvc 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 ⁠⁠Brex⁠⁠ https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. ⁠⁠https://brex.com/sourcery⁠⁠ https://brex.com/sourcery ⁠⁠Turing⁠⁠ https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. ⁠⁠https://turing.com/sourcery⁠⁠ https://turing.com/sourcery ⁠⁠Carta⁠⁠ https://carta.com/sourcery—Carta connects founders, investors, and limited partners through software purpose-built for private capital. Trusted by 65,000+ companies in 160+ countries, Carta’s platform of software & services lays the groundwork so you can build, invest, and scale with confidence. ⁠⁠https://carta.com/sourcery⁠⁠ https://carta.com/sourcery ⁠⁠Kalshi⁠⁠ https://kalshi.com/sourcery—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: ⁠⁠https://kalshi.com/sourcery⁠⁠ https://kalshi.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! ⁠⁠https://www.sourcery.vc/⁠ https://www.sourcery.vc/ 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Inside Palantir with Alex Karp (00:01) Early days & Palantir’s outsider beginnings (02:16) Building without hierarchy — the anti-playbook culture (05:00) Artistry & conviction in product creation (06:45) Ignoring consensus & betting on vision (08:45) Helping Americans win — soldiers, workers, investors (11:00) Moral conviction & the foundation of Palantir (13:00) Meritocracy, realism, & Western values (15:41) The Eisenhower Award & moral leadership (19:45) Dyslexia, intuition, & leading through instinct (22:38) Value creation vs. hype in the AI boom (26:19) Launching AIP — Palantir’s turning point (28:30) AIP as the operating system for the AI era (33:15) Rosita — family, grounding, & perspective (39:55) Cupcake

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  We were the freak show. And we spent 20 years for this moment. We're doing it. We're doing it. And I'm sure you're enjoying this as much as I am.

• 0:15Molly O'Shea?

  If you were a cupcake, what kind of cupcake would you be?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  I don't want to be a cupcake because I don't want to get eaten.

• 0:27Molly O'Shea?

  Alex Karp, welcome to Sorcery.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  I'm happy to be here.

• 0:31Molly O'Shea?

  Well, we're fresh off of earnings. Palantir has hit $500 billion. Recently just released a new biography. How are you feeling?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  I feel really good. You know, look, we started the company with a lot of ideas that were really exceedingly controversial until about two years ago. FDEs, everyone thought that would destroy your company. Being fully meritocratic, everyone thought you're not supposed to do that. Low hierarchy, almost no one does that. So like, like Eleanu and I were only separated by one layer, which is fictional because like we talk and it's a very, very flat hierarchy. We were, we thought we should give America an unfair advantage in government first and then in commercial.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  We built these products more like artistic things years before anyone thought their relevance. PGA, the anti-terror product. Gaia, the product that most special operations use in the world. Foundry, Ontology, Apollo, Maven. And we're still a freak show. And you know, if you walk around here, like the crazy thing about Palantir is, you know, I get invited to, like I meet lots of companies and we, you know, big companies, small companies, private companies, commercial companies, the most famous people in the world, some people should be famous, but luckily for them aren't. And I would say Palantir like feels like if you walk around here, it's like a kind

• 2:05Speaker 00

  of a startup vibe. I mean, but, but, but with scale. And the thing that's special about Palantir, I mean, my version externally is we gave venture returns, not just venture returns, we gave venture returns as if you're like, you know, I don't know, you're like Peter Thiel, Sequoia, Costola returns.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  To the average person who is willing to do their own work and stand up against kind of tried but not true ideas like playbooks. So we're like the anti-playbook company. And then, you know, I mean, you know, I'm currently in a battle with, you know, short sellers primarily because they could go short some carcinogenic company, but they have to short arguably the best company in this country and in the world by any metric. And by the way, judges by our enemies. Look who hates us. Like, I mean, like, go online. I mean, I guess people here have gone on X like just forget any, you don't need to know anything else. Just look at like who hates Palate here and look who hates me. And then judges by that standard. What should our market cap be based on that standard?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  So, um, I don't know. I'm very proud of where we are. I believe I know it's the way beginning. You know, internally, we're kind of a very young company. I mean, I don't mean just in terms of age, which is also true, but it's just a young, fresh vibe. We've anti-aged.

• 3:30Molly O'Shea?

  You've reached anti-aging.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  We've reached anti-aging inside. Well, I do 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're, 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 US military and on the US commercial sector, and we pivoted the whole company to both, basically. I mean, that we still have a massive presence outside of America, but we've been, and like,

• 4:16Speaker 00

  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 are, so how long did it take to launch that? And I was like, yeah, I don't know. Three minutes.

• 4:38Molly O'Shea?

  Three minutes.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like decision, I don't know, like a lot of, like, we were talking about this before, but like, it's hard to be fair to the total bereft of common sense and in practice, 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.

• 5:09Molly O'Shea?

  Where does that come from?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  You know, 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 1,000 years. So like, and what, what people always think of, like, the layperson thinks of art is you just doodle something. But I know, it's crazy, but you're from like an artistic family, like, that's

• 5:52Speaker 00

  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 like something more universal.

• 6:20Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think that's how Palantir is being viewed right now?

• 6:23Speaker 00

  Well, no, I mean, I think people, like, I think, I think one of the, 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, but we're talking about generalization, I can't think of any expert class that's been right about anything substantive in the last 20 years.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  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 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

• 7:48Speaker 00

  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, because it doesn't, I don't know, and then, by the way, most great artists, like my mother, end up with no money.

• 8:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  And, 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 their 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.

• 8:39Molly O'Shea?

  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 retail?

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Well, I think, you know, I always think there's the economic and there's the psychological. And really powerful things are aligned. So like, you know, I, in no way, like, I hate these victimhood BS things. And honestly, when you're, almost everyone who believes in that is a mark, whether they realize it or not. But, I mean, like, they may not realize it, but you are the mark. And like, uh, 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, um, I did come from an environment and where it was not expected

• 9:37Speaker 00

  that I would be co-founder and have a butt 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, um, you know, um, on the, on the, 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 acrylic, Germanic, left-wing culture. You assume the world may not work out for you.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  And it's definitely not looking out for you. Okay, so what other group of people in this culture have exactly the same vibe? Yeah, 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 in, as a soldier since World War II. But they, they can't, and, and part of it is like, they have a lot of intellectual reasons.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  But the real reason is they don't see themselves as having had the same fate. But if you're me, you, you look at those people and then, quite frankly, look, look at the US Army. Look who fought and died for our rights today. By the way, and it was like, and it was mostly working class people from what the elite calls flyover states, it still is. And then look at the US military, integrated, first to integrate, first to bring meritocracy, it still fights for meritocracy. 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

• 11:50Speaker 00

  version. My version of what, by the way, a fair thing to ask people is, what were you saying 10 years ago? Right? So, one of the most amazing things about Palantir, like, is, and you know this, but like, you go online, and people who were 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 the, 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 neocon, make the whole world like, America thing,

• 12:32Speaker 00

  because it doesn't work. Be skeptical of immigration. Bill, 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 downtreamed 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.

• 13:04Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 13:21Speaker 00

  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 traffic detail. What are you talking about? I was like, we gotta know. It's like, I went for the right reasons and I may have stayed for the wrong reasons. But it's okay. And so I have a lot of, a deep understanding and, and I'll get to this,

• 14:06Speaker 00

  and deep appreciation for the German culture. I think one of the craziest things is, you have this whole thing online where people, 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 lauding 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 quicker, maybe, than they shipped me off to the camps. But, and it's like, but the thing that is crazy, unique about America, whether it's, you know, somebody from Montana, Iowa,

• 14:51Speaker 00

  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?

• 15:21Speaker 00

  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 economist. 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, 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 fighting 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,

• 16:05Speaker 00

  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 we, I was involved in hiring at 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.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Like, one of, and, and then, the fact that Palantir 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 Palantir is to be so dominant that those people don't have to fight and die. Because everyone knows, you're gonna die 10 times more if you attack America. You wanna sleep at night, you wanna make sure our soldiers don't have to fight and die, make sure the adversary knows they are gonna get totally effed up if they, if they screw with us. And that's, that's like a really noble purpose. And it's not, it's not any less noble than when we started the company. In fact, it's more noble.

• 17:21Molly O'Shea?

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• 19:44Molly O'Shea?

  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 in maybe a morals and values sense. So how did you become Alex Cart?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Dyslexia, meaning there's no playbook I could possibly follow. I think some of the reasons why dyslexics are so outperforming 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 a third rate way, so you, you invent new and generative things. I,

• 20:38Speaker 00

  I, look, I've never been accused of false so modesty. I think in the end, for, to do something important, whether it's me or like, Elianu, 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.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  You know, like, you're your own boss, right? You decide who you want to talk to, you decide who you don't want to talk to. You have ideas of things you'd like to, you know, advance on. 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, I like, like, 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, superiority over the West, extreme meritocracy, the fact that I would just tell people, basically, yeah, the financials are going to show up.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  You know, that's only possible in this culture. And I guess maybe because I lived abroad so long, I was 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.

• 22:38Molly O'Shea?

  How is a value creation for Palantir different than traditional SaaS companies?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Well, here, okay, so, well, first of all, it's important to remember, we are valued. Like, we drive our whole business based on a set of beliefs that are like America, superiority and so on that. 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 more noble than I am. And I'm happy with myself, but they're doing missions that are, 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?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Because, like, I don't want a product that will make me, despite what anyone, but like, anyone who's been at 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 PGA that's going to make you safer," or let's go away from the ambient noise, "that will make you safer and more protected," is audacious in a weird way that we didn't realize. The most audacious part of that was saying, "We're going to build a product that's actually what the client needs." Because what you're supposed to be doing in 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

• 24:14Speaker 00

  in software development of any kind. And so, like, again, the most radical thing we ever did was say, "Yeah, 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, like any rational business would have said, you know, I don't know, client A, B, C, D wants B. 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.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  And what, 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 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.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  And so like that value creation, by the way, it ends up being very, very protective because and, and then because the customer partner actually becomes to, they may not like you. Like some of our best clients globally, both in government and in commercial were 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 was 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

• 26:24Speaker 00

  this story, but any case, I launched AIP in like the darkness of night.

• 26:29Molly O'Shea?

  The darkness of night.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:31Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. On like a pre Easter holiday because it would have been massively resisted. And, and I would say it's one of my favorite people said in any other company, every, 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. It 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.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  The thing is, if you're working back from what will sell, you would have said, well, wait a minute. Everyone is 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. 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.

• 27:21Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  But if you were working back from what experts think and what customers are asking for, you do not launch that. You launch something else.

• 27:35Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  You can ask as many questions as you want.

• 27:39Molly O'Shea?

  I have one more question, says Eliano.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  You can. Eliano, she's the boss. How many questions would you like?

• 27:48Molly O'Shea?

  Seventy-two.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Why not? Yeah.

• 27:53Molly O'Shea?

  So on AIP, it seems like that was a big pivotal moment for the company and getting into this next realm 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.

• 28:13Speaker 00

  On top of our current products? Or are we building new ones? Yeah, that's true.

• 28:16Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. Would you say that that was a major component to why sales cycles have compressed and why it's been easier to sell?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  You know, it's a really good question. It is that, but also the zeitgeist has changed. Like, although there have been a lot of projects in AI that haven't worked.

• 28:34Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  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, Hive Mind. 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. 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.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  And so you can also do it in private context. But and so. The thing that you see as a common through line that 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, especially honestly in the US. 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 a someone I know or someone I've talked to at a conference said, yeah, okay, good. It is a little weird when they show up.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  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, 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 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 which, you know, I like the idea of a music, but it's like, and what they're saying

• 30:43Speaker 00

  about the tech stack, you know, and then, and 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, okay, I know this works. It's gone from, I'm not sure this is works, but my life 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,

• 31:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Show up in my office, explain to us how you're gonna 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, it's 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 like, you know, I was just on the, I was the other day talking to a very important European leader, I was like, look,

• 32:10Speaker 00

  you have an intel service, you have a military. They should evaluate what works. They're gonna 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, you know, there's a sense that the demand is greater than what we can supply. And, you know, and then we want, and then we, I was just, we were 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 gonna get paid?

• 32:48Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  And by the way, you're gonna wanna get rid of us at some point, so the whole thing makes no sense. Like, we're not selling you steak dinner, we're not selling you our charm. We're selling you significant value creation in ridiculously short times of period, and value creation on top end and bottom end, like basically, you know, 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.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Do you wanna have an opinion again? You gotta have financials like this. A lot of people wanna be able to have an opinion again in public.

• 33:21Molly O'Shea?

  You have VC returns for retail investors, and now you're having PE outcomes for large companies. What's next?

• 33:30Speaker 00

  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, you know, like these rule of 114, the 70s, 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 US 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.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  This is just, this is 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 have, we value our work, like, he can have any opinion he wants. He can come in here and like, do so, you get to, you perform here, you get to be you, not just me. You know, this concept of worker available GDP.

• 34:40Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  You know, you're going to participate in the AI revolution. He's going to participate in the AI revolution. 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 poor? Is that, that will not work for our society.

• 34:58Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, no. So what's Palantir's role in reindustrialization?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Making sure worker, workers, I mean, first of all, there's like, how do you manufacture at scale? How do you manufacture in a indigenous way? How do you bring, how do, 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. They're not Japanese workers, but we can get, we can use foundry ontology to bring out the advantages of American worker

• 35:47Speaker 00

  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 in the US 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.

• 36:19Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  It's not like, there's not the like, highly elite 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.

• 36:38Molly O'Shea?

  We have some fun questions.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Okay, great.

• 36:40Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, I saved some fun ones.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:42Molly O'Shea?

  So there was a heartwarming part in this book.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:45Molly O'Shea?

  I wasn't expecting it.

• 36:48Molly O'Shea?

  There was a point in time in.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Not my social life.

• 36:51Molly O'Shea?

  No, well, it's family life. So can you tell me about Rosita?

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, so 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.

• 37:11Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  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. And like, you know, you may not be okay with this setup. And then, but on the inside, because of that, it was exceedingly intellectual, vibrant, warm environment. And then when we, when I was a little kid and we had moved, we had moved from New York, an incredible city, which is large, it was about to get the most horrifically, in all likelihood, ridiculous mayor. More than you want to hear from me.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  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 wouldn't get a fancy and a dog, of course. So we went there and we went and then we come to the pound and 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. And then there's this dog that is and the person screaming, I hate this dog. I hate this dog. And then my mom said, well, why do you hate the dog? And it's 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.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  And the words 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 others? It's like, well, he's breaking out all the time. She's breaking out all the time. And I said, well, okay, that's one thing. And even worse than that, Rosita would go back and break open their locks for other people. Yeah. And then my mom was like, that's our dog. And yeah, and so that's and then Rosita played a tremendous role in our life. It was more like she's very, very high IQ. Like it was honestly more like a human like than a dog. And yeah, and yeah, that's Rosita.

• 39:11Molly O'Shea?

  And later on, you exhumed Rosita's roommate.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a lot in the book I probably wouldn't have told, but like, 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 threw all sorts of ways. Got in touch with the person who bought the house that was for sold during the divorce. And 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.

• 39:45Molly O'Shea?

  That's really sweet.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Rosita was the best.

• 39:47Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 39:49Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:50Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, well, if you were a cupcake, what kind of cupcake would you be?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  I don't want to be a cupcake because I don't want to get eaten. I'm resisting being a cupcake.

• 39:57Molly O'Shea?

  What's your favorite cupcake?

• 40:00Speaker 00

  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 to the icing.

• 40:07Molly O'Shea?

  It's just the icing.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  I don't know why people eat the cupcake. It's just the icing.

• 40:10Molly O'Shea?

  Makes no sense.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it makes no sense.

• 40:12Molly O'Shea?

  Why even have it there?

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Well, no, you have it, there's like a, I don't know, the same way.

• 40:16Molly O'Shea?

  Transportation.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you have like a.

• 40:18Molly O'Shea?

  Vehicle for icing.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  For the coffee.

• 40:20Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:21Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  So it comes down like there's really, I mean, a lot of places have good cupcakes, but very few people have great cupcakes.

• 40:27Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, well, before we head too far back into the office, thank you so much, Alex.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Thank you. Very nice, very nice to meet you.

• 40:33Molly O'Shea?

  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 podcasts on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.