How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)

0:00 Thirty percent of PMs that leave Falantier start a company. Just give us a picture of what it what the people are like. I feel like they screened really hard for a few traits in particular. One is like very independent minded people. Who weren't afraid to push back. Two is people with broader intellectual interests. What's the difference between, say, a PM at Pallinger versus a traditional PM? They were extremely careful about Only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployment engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way. There's two types of engineering patterns here. So there's one that works on the core products and they're a traditional software engineer. There was a different type of engineer which you sent into the field, right? You would spend maybe Monday to Thursday and you would actually go into the building where the customer worked and you would work alongside them, you would literally get a dustbow. And so that engineer became known as the full deployment. What's something that you believe that most other people don't. I think this is s somewhat contrary to view within tech.

0:58 Today, my guest is Nabiel Karechi. Nabiel is a founder, a writer, a researcher, and an engineer. He was recently a visiting scholar researching AI policy at the Mercat Center alongside Tyler Cohen. At one point he worked with the National Institute of Health and major clinical centers to create the largest medical data set in the world. He worked at the Bank of England for a bit. He was founding member and VP of business development at Go Cardless, one of Europe's biggest financial technology unicorns, and most related to the topic of this conversation, Nabil spent almost eight years at Palantir as a forward deployed engineer, working on public health projects with US federal agencies, including public health services during the Covet nineteen response. And applied AI in drug discovery.

1:38 Whether you are a fan of Palantir or hate everything that they do, they are an important And fast-growing company that is pumping out incredible product leaders, as you'll hear more than any other company in the world. So it is worth studying and understanding. I've never heard an in depth conversation digging into how they operate, build product, hire And we're able to scale from a primarily services business to a software business. So I am very excited to bring you this inside look. In our conversation, we go deep into what the heck does calendar even do?

2:07 Why getting good at managing lots of data? is an underappreciated secret to their success. A look at the unique forward deployed engineer role that they innovated and what other companies can borrow from their insights here, also how they hire and how they build amazing product leaders, plus a ton of advice on talking to customers, building products, and starting companies. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a bunch of amazing products for free for a year, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear, Perplexity.

2:40 Granola and more. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that. I bring you Nabiel. Kureshi.

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4:56 go to ATTIO.com slash Lenny to get fifteen percent off your first year. That's ATTIO.com slash Lenny. Nabiel, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Sunny. Glad to be here. In our chat today, I want to zero in on a post that you recently wrote where you shared your reflections on your time at Palantir.

5:21 You spent something maybe just under eight years there. The reason I'm really interested in Palantir is I've been doing a bunch of research recently looking into which companies hire the best product managers and create the best product managers and Pellinger just keeps coming up over and over in the work that I'm doing. So I'll share a few stats real quick.

5:38 So I looked at which companies produce the most Founders. Especially out of their PM team and Palantir is by far number one. Thirty percent of PM's the Leaf Palantir start a company and that's like And number two is number is eighteen percent and that's intercom.

5:53 So that's that's that I looked at which companies PMs that leave get immediately promoted in their next role. Palantir was number one. Of all companies in the world. I looked at which companies PMs become the first PM.

6:06 at another startup that they join. Pounds are number two in the world. And then I looked at which company's alumni PMs become head of heads of product down d later in their career. Pallinger is number three in the world.

6:19 Uh Also just the company is doing extremely well. It's worth I think something like two hundred billion dollars these days. So There's a lot to learn from Palantir. I actually want to start with a question that I imagine every employee to Palantir

6:30 Constantly gets. that and I still don't think people totally have a answer in their head. What is what does Palantir do? That's a great question. You started off with an easy one, Lenny. Um so Palenter is uh the way I describe it, right, is they um achieve outcomes for their customers.

6:48 Very tactically, the way they do that tends to be through uh data platforms. So They have what I consider to be the world's best best data platform. And I can go into what that means in a second. And then There's a couple different versions of this. So there's one that's optimized for intelligence and defense use cases. That one is called Gotham.

7:08 And then there's one that's more optimized for commercial use cases, and that one's called Foundry. And that's kind of the classic You know, explanation of what they do. So they sell a data platform. They typically work with very large customers is the other thing. So It's gonna be, you know, Fortune fifty, it's gonna be governments around the world. It's gonna be those kinds of uh customers. So that's the kind of

7:28 Capsule answer, but there's lots to unpack in that. Awesome. Okay. And we're gonna touch on a lot of this stuff, including the data piece. I wanna start with talking about just kinda the people And the culture of Palantir. You shared a bunch of really funny stories of what it's like to come to work and even even interview at Palantir. There's a story you shared where Because maybe the co founder you're walking by and he's chewing ice.

7:49 And you're and that's like some benefits of cognition. Just give us a picture of what what the people are like, especially early days, Palantir and the culture and See. Yeah, it's definitely.

8:00 It's an N one company. I I don't know how else you would start start this company if you were not somebody like Peter Thiel. Um in so far as it's It seems like, you know, there was a point at which they owned silly fraction of the office space in Palo Alto. So you'd walk around Palo Alto and it would just be, you know, power into hoodies, powered buildings everywhere and so on. Uh and so

8:22 I feel like what happened at some point is they raised a lot of money. And they resorted to all these really interesting ways of just getting top talent out of places like Stanford and other, you know, other top schools. and just people who knew the founders who tended to be very interesting intellectual people. And I feel like they screened really hard for

8:42 Uh a few a few traits in particular, right. So I would say one is like very independent minded people. People who weren't afraid to push back. Who you know questioned the frame of everything and thought for themselves. And had sort of strong convictions. Um Two is just like

8:57 People with broader intellectual interests. You know, Cop Cop just released a new book and Yeah, he's quoting Habermass and all these European intellectuals and just things you don't typically see a tech CEO. Do and so I think there's that intellectual strand in the company. And then yeah, I think three is just people who are

9:14 Very intensity intensely competitive. There's a there's a sort of win at all costs mentality to the company. And so I think Those were the kind of things. set of traits that

9:25 Well like this gravity while in California at a certain time, and so you just had a lot of really fascinating people joining the company at that time. The way they screened for this was interesting too, right? So for the longest time they had Everyone does this now, I think, but it's like at the time it was a little bit rarer as a founder had to interview you in order for you to receive an offer. And so a founder, it could have been Alex Cobb, it could have been

9:48 Stephen Code. earlier on it might have been somebody like Joe Lansdale, but it was always like one of these people. Um The interviews were pretty strange. Uh so You know, with with Stefan it would be you'd be chatting about philosophy for an hour and a half. And it would very much just be like he would pick a topic out of thin there it was impossible to prepare.

10:07 And then he would just go very, very deep and Try and test the limits of your understanding. But it would really just be a fun conversation and then You know, if you pass the vibe check you'd be in it. And so there was that strong selection mechanism. There was also the question of you know, I think it's it might have been T who mentioned this, but

10:24 He thinks that a lot of the best Recruiters in the world. Well like companies that attract talent they put out this kind of distinctive signal. And It has to turn some people off. That's kind of the key of a good bad signal, right? So I think in the present day

10:39 Open AI and anthropic, they're both sucking up like some of the best talent that you and I know. And I think one way they do do that, and they are sincere in this, but they do really attract people who are almost messianic about that. Potential of Artificial superintelligence, right? And who really believe this is the only thing that matters and it is gonna be the biggest thing in the world. I think Palenter's version of that was the

10:59 You know, they were quite Focus on Things like preserving the West, you know, there was a slogan of save the Shire, right? So there's there was they were talking about military defense and intelligence and the importance of that. Well before everybody else. And and bear in mind this was during the era when it was like social mobile local apps, right? Like you had Social media was on the rise. You had you know, the hot companies were like Facebook and

11:22 Interest and Things like that. And so this was at the time a very strange thing. And so I think to be drawn to that you had to look at the other options and say, Well This is fine, but what am I really doing in life, right? Whereas you had this other place that was like, Hey, come salt the hardest Messiest problems in the world with us.

11:39 And I think just at that time that really drew some really good Oh. We're gonna talk about the thing the reasons people don't necessarily like balance here and and kinda the moral question of what they do. But Uh when people look at a company that is like like I guess OpenAI is to your point is a good example where they're just like so turned off by maybe their approach.

11:57 you're what you're missing is that's potentially intentional because it actually draws in the people they really want. He makes me think about I was involved in the Creating the core values at R B and B. And something that we uh learned at going through that process is when you define the values for your company, it's really important to s

12:13 Clarify who this is not for. Exactly as you described. Which is feels unnatural. Like, oh we wanna be inclusive, we don't wanna make people feel like they don't belong the The whole idea is to be clear on he's who th will thrive here. And here's who's aligned with our mission.

12:27 And I and what I'm hearing is Gallen Turk, and these companies take it to the extreme. Hundred percent. Yeah, on my team at Power, one process that we followed, I could talk about this more if it's interesting, is um you had to when you started a new project, you basically had to organise what they called a murder board for it. I think this is originally an army top, right? So the idea is basically you write up kind of a two page plan for the project. you invite three or four smart folks you know who

12:52 don't know anything about the project. Their job is just to tear apart your plan. Right. And so you have to write Like here's the vision for this. Here are the Goals, their like tactics over the next three months. And one section was principles that you're following for this project. And

13:07 I remember giving this advice a lot was just like When people joined they would They would write principles such as, you know, move fast and I would always be like Everyone likes to move fast. Like it's not a good principle, actually, because nobody can really disagree with this reasonably, right? You need something that actually a lot of people are gonna go, Wait, why you Why are you picking this principle? This seems wrong to me. So you need something that people can disagree with.

13:29 I wanna come back to us uh the beginning of what you described of what they look for, what balancer looks for in people. You talked about independent minded. uh a a lot of interest, broad interest and cum competitive. First of all, I think a lot of people hearing that, especially the last part, be like I don't want to work there. Why does this work?'Cause this isn't yeah.

13:46 Naturally what you would think of as how you build the most amazing productive team. Yeah, I think it it just draws People who wanna win. Right. I think that's what was really important though. Um the other piece of it, I think, is that

14:01 There's actually and and This was much truer ten years ago, right? Is there was a lot of talent. that was a little bit outside of the tech ecosystem, but could easily have been very successful within it. So You know, people who got out of the military or one of the intelligence agencies, and they were doing, let's say, an MBA somewhere to transition into

14:21 corporate well and I think typically they would have taken a position at a kind of classic Fortune five hundred corporation and actually Palenter managed to get a bunch of that. Talent and at the time that was very undervalued. You know, the the people who succeed the most in the Marines or the special forces or whatever it is tend to be pretty smart people. They tend to have accomplished very difficult goals in very hostile environments. And it turns out that when you're

14:45 starting a somewhat chaotic tech company that's actually a very useful skill to have. Again, I think you know, more companies are doing this now, so scale AI, Andrew, et cetera, but At the time that was a very differentiated talent pool. And so I think having those Those values as opposed to Maybe the values that were more in fashion then.

15:03 Talking about you know how inclusive you are or You know, the sushi that you serve at lunch or whatever it is. Uh, it just drew a very different crowd and I think I think the game that was being played there was one, it's It's mission alignment. Right. Like you're doing a defense company. That's The kind of person you want to attract.

15:20 Uh but I think there's also two which is just What is the talent that maybe is a little bit undervalued now and how do you actually draw those People to you and I think that game is always Shifting. This this is definitely starting to explain why so many

15:34 pal and Jeremiah go on to start companies and become leaders at other companies. Like this is a These are leaders that you're hiring. So it feels like a lot of it is just the talent you hire people that are naturally Uh. Leaders.

15:45 I think you're right. Um and we can get more into it, but I think there's also There was also a very concrete set of ways where that place was a training ground for founders. Um I even think it turned a lot of people who might not have become founders into good founders uh because of just because of the way it works. So I think there was a selection effect there, but there is also um some sort of training effect to but that's kind of unique to the way the company works. And is that along the lines of the forward to play engineer stuff, or is that something else?

16:11 It is that. Okay, cool. We're gonna get to that. I love it. Okay, amazing. Before we do that, one last thing. is something I've seen is that you guys at Palantir don't have really have titles. Everyone's kinda the same level and just like generic titles for everyone. Yeah. Talk about that. Why do you think that was important? Why

16:26 Why was that useful? I don't know this for sure, but I do I do know that Till writes about this in Zero to One and h his take is just that as soon as you have these titles, you have a thing that people are competing for and you get these very Unproductive conflicts. You get people Optimizing to game the system, you get good heart's law everywhere, right? So it's like

16:45 You you have a metric and then people basically manage to the metrics. There's a lot of interesting I don't want to pick on any one company, but Um, if you take Google, for example, there's a lot of interesting posts by people who left Google and they cite this as a reason why they got a little bit disgruntled, is that There's a way to get promoted. Rather than like let's say improving an existing product, what you do is like you start a completely new product and that has your name attached to it. And then when it comes to promotion season you can say, Hey, like I did this new thing and then boom, you have a new Google product but

17:13 It's c it's maybe confusing to the end user. So I think they wanted to avoid all of these kinds of dynamics, right? And so the way that they did that was they said, Well, titles are not gonna be this sort of mimetic totem that everybody competes for. Instead everyone's just gonna have the same slightly meaningless title, which is for deployed engineer. And

17:31 The only people who did have titles were the CEO. And then there were six directors. And that was it. And and now I think, you know, it's a little bit more nuanced. There are different things. Teams. There are some people with

17:42 titles but Honestly, it was almost like um We used to joke about it, right? It's like people would leave the company. And then you'd see them update that LinkedIn and they would be like, Oh yeah, I was totally the S VP of you know, XYZ and it's like, No, you learn, you just you know, but then it's like I I totally understand it too, because when you leave the company, you have to make your experience legible to the next person.

18:04 And and so guess what? Things like S V P actually do matter, right. And so yeah, I think they didn't they they wanted to avoid this kind of entire c competition. There are downsides to doing this, right? Um so Maybe the competition isn't as explicit uh around a specific title, but instead what it becomes about is you know, there's a particular exact or something and you want to gain that favor and so it becomes more about like who can get in the inner circle of this person or whatever. And there were those dynamics too.

18:32 I actually am a big fan of this philosophy though, the the no titles one. I think what it did do is that It basically said you If you are in let's say you're in a role of you're leading a very important project. Which would happen.

18:46 What it said was it this is always fluid, so You are in this role. Because you're very good and so it's a meritocratic thing. But If

18:55 If you start performing well, it's actually very easy to shift that because there is no explicit like I am the GF of this top this uh project kind of title. And so you always had to kind of earn your place in the company. You always had to earn uh the right to work on what you were working on. I think that was a good side effect. Let's start talking about forward deployed engineers. What is a forward deployed engineer?

19:16 Yeah, so the way this originated was basically you can think of it as There's two types of engineering pounds here, right? So there's one that works on the core product. So they don't necessarily leave the building in Power Water or New York or the offices. They're very much working on the core products and they're a traditional software engineer. Because of the way the company works, where you had these very large engagements with these large entities

19:39 There's a different type of engineer which you sent into the field, right? So what that meant was you would spend maybe Monday to Thursday, and you would actually go into the building where the customer worked and you would work alongside them, you would literally get a desk there. And so that engineer became known as a forward deployed engineer. So within the company that that function is known as business development or B D, and then P D is

20:00 Product development. So it's about the product. And so within B D you had forward deployed engineers. There are actually two types. So there is one that is um sort of a more technical software engineer. So you you have to pass a software engineering interview and prove your chops there and you would typically have a C S degree, but there was actually a type of forward deployed engineer that didn't have that. So you would still

20:20 You would still get sort of a technical interview, but it would be less about, you know, do you know the specifics of this C plus plus algorithm? And it would be more about just like can you reason about data and the we we kind of didn't have that division originally, but Um it turns out that there's a lot of people who Uh you know, technical adjacent, shall we say, who you really need uh in the room when you're

20:44 working with these large organizations or these large companies because you know, translating what you're doing into language that would resonate with an executive or being able to kind of navigate the social dynamics in a room, all these are very valuable skills. And so The hiring criteria there were a little different, right? It was a bit more about like are you savvy as a human.

21:03 Um but you know, all of that was given the title of Floor the Float Engineer, and it's just an engineer who works with customers. Okay, so just to make this crystal clear for people,'cause a lot of people hear this idea of Pallantier having four deployed engineers, a few other companies have done this. Uh it's pretty radical. So as you described, you basically have a desk at a company. So you worked with Airbus and we'll talk about that. So just make it real.

21:25 So you have a desk and a computer and login access and all these things at Airbus. at your go to their office four times a week. You're sitting there with her Employees working like side by side. building a product for them.

21:38 Versus But most people do where they just talk to customers in quotes, where they do an interview once in a while, they do a zoom. They share mocks, things like that. This is like that on steroids. Is that roughly the s the the way to think about it? It is, yeah. And and so we would we would really be there a lot of the time. And so the the side effect of that was one, you learn to live and breathe the customers' problems.

22:02 And You learn to speak their language. Right. And eventually they saw you sort of as one of them. And so you develop these really close bonds with the customers. So uh but I would be at the factory where the p planes would produce and I or I'd be sitting next to, you know, people diagnosing. Issues with aircraft or whatever it was.

22:21 Um similarly later on I worked with the NIH which is part of the US government and I actually had a badge there and I would work with civil servants and biologists and clinicians and people who are working there. And so It's this it's this pretty radical thing, as you suggest. I think the

22:36 The key thing there from a business point of view, right, is the average kind of um deal that Power had was very large, right? It's in the many, many millions of dollars, which means that you I just pay for this as part of the thing that the customer got. And then It was sort of priced according to the value that the customer got, right? So

22:52 As a simple example, like if you're Abbas and you're Let's say that you have an issue with one of your planes and you need to fix it, and fixing that is worth You know A hundred billion dollars or something to you, that's how It would be priced. It would not be priced as hey, you're buying

23:08 data infrastructure and it's similar to Snowflake or Data Bricks or these other providers. It's much more anchored to here is the outcome. But then um the job of the full deployed engineer is not just to deploy software, it is not just to sell software. It is to actually solve the problem. And so you would have to be there, you would have to meet the key stakeholders who are actually in charge of Reporting to the CEO about the specific issue.

23:31 You would have to become their friend, you would have to gain that trust. And you would have to in some cases create new software such that it could actually solve the novel problem that was in front of you. Right. So I would have friends who worked with uh you know one of our energy company

23:46 customers and they would have to learn the ins and outs of how oil wells work. Right. And then out of that, it turns out that um having streaming data is actually very valuable for this use case. And so boom, suddenly there's a product that can handle streaming data, that becomes part of the core platform. But that would be the motion is you learn about the problem, you figure out what software would best address it. You build that software. You use it to accomplish the goal.

24:09 And then eventually that kind of gets folded into the broader product suite. And so you can start to see why this would be a good for fabrics, right? And and this was actually part of my thesis quite going in and joining was I said, Well Say I got five reps of this, which I got more more than that, right? But it's to say you get five reps of doing this in five disparate contexts. You actually become very good at this cycle of like, okay

24:32 Go into the building. gain the trust of the person, meet meet the people that, you know, are gonna become your users, talk to them about their problems, make sure you're building something that actually solves them and You know it's just a boondoggle. get really fast feedback and iteration loops, right? So every week you would have like a s uh a cadence where It's like Monday you go in, you do your meetings.

24:52 Monday night you build something, Tuesday you show it to somebody. Tuesday you get the feedback. Tuesday night you iterate on it. Wednesday you show it to somebody. Wednesday night you iterate on it. So you you get like four of these five of these cycles every single week. And you're moving incredibly. Six weeks in you've suddenly gotten to wow, this is really valuable and somebody's willing to pay you whatever, twenty million dollars for it. And like I think this is why

25:16 You get so many. Founders coming out of this same. Same process. It's becoming very clear why so many founders emerged out of Ballinger. Okay. So

25:25 Uh an important element of this, as you described, is that the idea here is build this as a one off solution to solve a real problem at say Airbus or Some government organization. And then the idea is you Create something out of that.

25:38 that then Palantir can sell to other companies. Uh what's extra cool about that is you they pay you to solve this problem for them and then that It's uh funding this other product that Pallantry can now sell to everyone. What a cool Mercal Business.

25:50 However. early days Palantir everyone thought it was just the services business. There just consultants building software for companies like Airbus, there's no way they can make this uh a platform that works for a lot of people. Clearly that's what's happening and it worked out.

26:06 This is kinda like the holy grail. Solve one customer's problem. And then sell it to everyone else, every every SAS. Business basically would love to do this. What what do you think allowed them to actually achieve this and be good at this? What are some principles that That worked.

26:21 Yeah, that's a great question. And and it's true. I think the From when I join until maybe till I BU and a little bit after You know, I was told, Hey, isn't this basically like a sparkling extension, right? Isn't it a consulting business kind of lopping as a product company.

26:38 And eventually it became undeniable, one because You know, I always laugh when people are like, What does Palanto do? It's like you can go onto YouTube and just search Palantir demo and you'll get plenty of demos of how the software looks. Not many people know about this, but you can go and sign up with a credit card right now and start using it. I can have a Palantir account. So uh it's not actually that mystical and there is a product, and if you look at the margins, they show that, right? So they have like eighteen percent plus Margins, which is not really what you would get if you were actually a consulting company would be closer to twenty or thirty percent.

27:13 So then your question was well, how did they actually achieve this? I think There was just Incredible talent in the product development organization. Um Like really top tier.

27:24 Incredible talent. And it it took somebody It took some really, really smart people. to take the set of internal tools that we were using at the time to create value at customers. And then

27:36 Uh What is the unified version of this? What is the thing that What would this look like if this were a product and out of that process that I saw came Foundry. I assume there was a similar process with Gotham a while back. But Basically it's like

27:50 The motion was that you would go in and you know, early on, you were basically armed with Jupiter notebooks and some Some kind of data integration stuff, but it was very it was very primitive. You had to create value that way. But you know, we we kept building tooling that was useful for forward deployed engineers. So we were our own first customers and At some point there was

28:11 This concept of Wait, what if we take our internal tools and we let our customers use them? And I remember at the time this is a really radical Idea and then um Yeah.

28:22 Sean Sankar is one is uh I think he's the CTO, maybe he's the president now. He just mandated like okay, every Every customer deployment, you have to have a customer using this within, you know, three months or whatever it is. And so And it was horrible at the time because these had been built for these, you know, nerdy Silicon Valley engineers and so they weren't particularly usable. They would crash all the time. You'd have to debug, you know, spark errors or whatever it was. But basically that process

28:48 For a lot more rigor to are thinking about the product and out of that kind of I would say three or four year process came the foundry product. And then there was a lot of focus around, you know, things like performance and Um reliability and so on. That was all really painful. And so Yeah, I think I think the answer was just talent and then there was this recognition that

29:10 We do We do know things that Most people do not know about how Data Works in large organizations. That was the other thing. We discovered a lot of, you know, quote unquote secrets.

29:22 in this process of living with customers for so long. The the basic one was just data integration is massively painful inside organizations. This is very hard to understand unless you've worked in a large organization, but it's actually impossible to even now to get access to a lot of your own internal data that you need to do your job. Right. So You'll hear stories of people being like, I'm trying to calculate our sales this quarter and

29:45 I had to wait six weeks for some other analytics team to get me this deliverable, right? And so Just the The knowing problems like that and being able to focus Our product efforts around those problems meant that we were able to build something. Generalizable.

30:00 Okay. There's a lot here. First of all You talk about Gotham and Foundry. I know that we'll link to videos of people checking these out, but just what's the simplest way to understand what these two products do? Yep, so Gotham is optimized for military and defence use cases, and Intel as well. I would say they both have some things in common. Uh they both have

30:20 I I would I would describe this almost as a pyramid where the bottom layer is data ingestion, the middle layer is data mapping, and then the top layer is anything that's user facing, so any UI component. Right. And then If you think of foundry for a second, right? There's there's different tools that allow you to ingest data to it. There's different tools that allow you to easily build data pipelines and clean up data. Which everybody has to do.

30:42 And then there's a bunch of tooling that allows you to build Compelling UIs on top. Do point and click analytics, do you know, notebook style workflows, whichever kind of however technical you are. It's a that's what I mean when it's a platform, it's a suite of things that has kind of a common data backing.

30:59 contains a bunch of different applications. And so I think that is somewhat true of Gotham as well. But you kind of when you log in, you see this unified interface, right? Um So what is the actual difference then? I would say with Gotham you're looking much more at workflows like That involve maps, for example, right. So when you're doing a military operation, like a lot of the time you are going to be looking at a map and you are going to be monitoring, you know, the movement of troops or tanks or whatever it is.

31:25 Another Big difference is the idea of graph based analysis. So um Gotham one of the kind of early use cases, right, was finding combing through networks of terrorists and basically finding the bad guys and so Being able to do um queries that are sort of graph based was important. Right. So it's like

31:45 Who is everybody that Lenny called the last week. Imagine like all the nodes kind of fanning out from there and then it's like, Okay, well this one looks interesting, let's zoom in on that. What is this person's you know location, right? And and so it's just like very graph based way of thinking. That also applies to things like fraud, and so Gotham has been deployed against fraud. But um

32:04 If you look at foundry, it doesn't actually emphasize that component so much because it turns out, you know, let's say you're a B to B SaaS company, you're probably not doing that much graph based analysis. You're doing things that look a lot more like uh classic SQL queries, tables, that kind of stuff. And so found these A lot more kind of traditional in that way. That was an amazing explanation. I th for the first time I

32:23 I'm starting to understand what these products do. Basically it's just suck in a bunch of data. Cleans it up so you can actually trust it and then helps you interact with it in various use cases, maps, graphs. Tables.

32:35 Yes. Okay. Amazing. The example you gave of what you worked on at Airbus, you described it as basically a sauna for making planes. Is that right? Yes, yes. So how much of that does become becomes like a part of this core product versus stays this one off thing? Like is it elements? Oh, that's a cool innovation, let's put that into foundry.

32:54 How does that work? This was a really interesting story, actually. Um the so the initial problem that we came into with Abbas was that they had a new aircraft called the A T fifty. Beautiful aircraft, by the way. If you got the I think if you fly. New York to Singapore, it's often the network three fifty. Really nice. Um and so it was a really relatively new aircraft at the time, and their mandate to us was okay, we need to ramp up production of this really fast.

33:19 Much faster than we've ever done it before. So it's like the numbers are very approximate, right? But it's like okay, we're producing Four this month. We need to do eight the next month, sixteen the month after, and so forth. And you're gonna help us do it. And so this goes back to what I was saying earlier is The mandate wasn't like, Hey, we need to upgrade our data infrastructure. We thought you guys would be met met the list of requirements. It was much more just like please help us accomplish this mission. This is like the big thing.

33:42 And so we went in Scoped out the problem. Um there are a bunch of different things that we could build that helped accelerate this, but one of the basic problems that we figured out was that um Without getting too much into the weeds, the way the factory would work is that there's a bunch of stations and you can think of the the plane as literally moving between each station and then each station would do a certain set of work. Right.

34:05 Initially it's literally like a big fuselage and the fuselage is sitting there and then People are doing a bunch of work orders against it. They need parts in order to do that work. And then at some point they say, Okay, this is ready to move to station thirty one. And the

34:19 Plane is physically moved to the next station and then station thirty one does its next thing. So in order for the next station to do its work properly, they need to know one, like what work was done at the previous station and what work is remaining. Two is just like if you think about this problem, like not all work is gonna get done on time and so things kind of um carry over, right? Uh to the next team, and the next team then has to kind of like Uh a and so when I'm describing this problem to you, you can kind of start to visualize like, Okay, maybe I need some sort of gap chart for this. And I the ability to click in and say, Okay, what did actually

34:51 What did station thirty do and what what work orders remain undone? And then it's like okay, for those work orders, what parts do I need and where the factory might they be? And so This was very, very hard to do as it is. A lot of it was just relying on People going and having conversations with other people on the factory floor. And

35:09 Yeah, coming from tech where it's maybe not as complicated as building aircraft. That is a phenomenally complicated process, but It is easy to see, like, okay, you can actually improve this problem with Right. They also um all all their data was stored in SAP and you know, SAP is like established software. It's good at what it does, but it's not the most user friendly necessarily, especially if you're not an expert in how it stores data. The table names are very hard to understand and read. And so

35:35 One of the things we figured out was just If you can pull in these Tab that may as well be written in completely alien language. Like the the table name would just be like S three F one underscore Z or something like that, right? And you'd have to know like okay, this is the table where the part ID is stored or something. Um if you could pull in those tables and Join them in the right ways and then just map them to human concepts that humans can understand. So things like

35:58 A part, a work order. And aircraft, et cetera. And basically build a kind of hierarchy or mapping between them. Then what you can do is for a user, a user can just log in and say, Okay Aircraft seventy nine, where is that? Okay, it's at station thirty one. All right, these are the work orders, et cetera. Right. And so you've translated it into a more human legible thing.

36:16 And so The thing we built, uh I mean I kind of slightly flippantly described it as a sauna. It's a little different, but basically that's what it did was it gave you a unified view of okay, this is what's going on inside the factory. This is the work that needs to be done on this particular plane. And then Me today going to my job at station thirty one, what work orders do I need to fulfill and where are the parts that I need to do that?

36:38 And so Did this directly become a part of Foundry? Not exactly because, you know, the way that other Companies work is not gonna be using this same set of concepts. But The Overall idea of taking uh

36:51 Bunch of tables. And then mapping them to human understandable concepts was a very powerful one. And so this actually resulted in a big piece of foundry now, which they call ontology. You probably heard this You know, time as you've seen. If you see palette presentations, they always talk about ontology, this is what they actually mean by that. Is it is a set of concepts that is

37:12 understandable to you as a human and you're not having to go and dig around and do SQL queries. You're just able to say like Where is the aircraft now and where is it going? Right. And so The ontology became a huge piece of foundry.

37:26 It was directly informed by the learnings that we had from building that application inside that factory. And I would say it's still a very big differentiated today. Like I don't think too many other companies Ship this kind of stuff, yeah. Wow.

37:41 I love how excited you still are about this,'cause I could see it being so fulfilling. To solve this big problem. I thought I saw stat that I think you've Forex their productivity. What was what was the number there? It was yeah, I I didn't recall the exact stat, but we did um ramp up production, I think at least four X that one yeah. Which I mean, obviously they did this and we just helped with it, but

38:01 Yeah, that CEO said that we played a Critical parts. Also you moved to France, I think, for this? That was like how forward deployed you were. You lived in France for how long? Yeah, I lived in France for about a year and a half. Um

38:13 The way they build their planes is they manufacture different components around Europe. So they build, you know, the tail in Spain and the fuselage in part of the UK and uh Germany and so forth, right? And so they basically ship everything to France to be assembled at the end. Which you can imagine this is a very messy process. And so I was mostly in France, but there would be weeks where I'd have to kind of fly between all these countries just to kind of Figure out where things were.

38:38 In your post you wrote about how just the life of Ford deployed engineers Pretty crazy. You just get a call sometimes like, Hey, you're flying to this random country tomorrow, get get ready. Uh is that just life as a forward deployed engineer? It is. Yeah. The the company had a very um I would say aggressive attitude towards travel in the sense of when you join you were basically told look you have to be okay with travel are you okay with

39:00 Right. The attitude, which again, I think is a very founder friendly one, is You need to be willing to just jump on a plane that night, if that's the best thing to do for this customer and if it's gonna Get us to where it needs to be to win. And so

39:14 There were many times when it would be like oh I need to take this cross continental flight tomorrow. For this particular thing. Because it will be

39:25 It will be useful. Right. And so I think that's one of the kind of takeaways for me was just like Being a person. is so so so valuable when you are working with some external party just going there for a For a few days and spending time with them, maybe going out for dinner, you build so much more trust than if you're trying to close a customer over Zoom or Do an engagement over Zoom. It's just

39:47 the vibe is completely different. And so yeah, getting on a plane was A really cool part of our job for a very long time. This obviously changed around twenty twenty because Covet happened. The company IPO'd and so there need to be a bit more internal controls around this, but I would say pre twenty twenty, this is like a very big part of the culture. I'm excited to have Andrew Luo joining us today. Andrew is CEO of One Schema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Welcome, Andrew. Thanks for having me, Lenny. Great to be here. So what is new with one schema? I know that you work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp and Banta and Watershed.

40:19 I heard you guys launched a new data intake product that automates the hours of manual work that teams spend importing and mapping and integrating CSV and Excel files. Yes? So we just launched the 2.0 of One Schema File Feeds. We've rebuilt it from the ground up with AI. We saw so many customers coming to us with teams of data engineers that struggled with the manual work required to clean messy spreadsheets. FileFeeds 2.0 allows non-technical teams to automate the process of transforming CSV and Excel files with just a simple prompt. We support all the trickiest file integrations, SFTP, S3, and even email.

40:55 I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this How nice would it be to take this off our roadmap and instead use something like one schema. Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of outages from even just a single bad record in transactions, employee files, purchase orders, you name it. Debugging these issues is often like finding a needle in a haystack. One schema stops any bad data from entering your system and automatically validates your files, generating error reports with the exact issues in all bad files.

41:23 I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me. If you want to learn more, head on over to onschema.co. That's oneschema.co. There's a lot of founders listening to this and A question that I'm thinking and they're probably thinking, and there's kind of two questions here. One is just when to go, like how hardcore to go.

41:48 Potentially with their own forward deployed sort of a operation. And then two is just how And a company I know is actually doing this. How far to go with one Company's problem.

41:58 and invest in just like we're gonna nail solving this one customer's problem. with the hope that this is something we can abstract and sell as a big platform. So let me actually let me start there. And you're you know, you're building a company. Any just I guess insights or advice and just how far to go down this road of we will solve customer one's problem.

42:17 And we bet that this is gonna be a big opportunity for a lot of other companies. So I would say on the on the full deployment Um my friend Barry McCartell, who's the CEO of Hex, uh the analytics company, he wrote a really good post about this actually. And his take was just like you probably don't need forward deployed engineers, it's very specific.

42:33 But I I think basically The The thing there is you have to be willing to be quite almost wasteful. Like you have to be willing to Invest a lot in Finding the thing.

42:45 And for that you just need a certain ticket size, right? So you need each customer's revenue to be probably in the millions of dollars. If it's below that, you're probably not looking at a traditional forward. And Jane Motion it's something a little bit. Right. And so you know, I think one thesis that a lot of people left

43:03 talented with and started companies around was there's a lot of Lot of customers that parent it won't serve because Yeah, maybe that's who you small a ticket size. And so actually you could go and Do something like Palentiple.

43:16 Companies. Um, but instead of charging them five million dollars, you're charging them two hundred and fifty K, yeah. And so in a scenario like that, you might still have forward deployed engines, but they're not really they're not going to France and spending five days a week at a factory. It's more like you'll have one person and they're looking after You know, five different customer accounts. It's more of that ratio in order to make the numbers work. And so

43:36 I think a lot of the principles can be Um can be abstracted from that experience, but it is a really specific sales motion that depends on a specific Way of doing this. Um I think to your other question.

43:50 Yeah, I think there's it's it's obviously one something that is very hard to give a General answer two. My main thing here is just that you can definitely tell When you are just doing consulting and when you are Closer to building a product. And I think the era that people make more often than not as they

44:11 Are actually too stuck on. They're in product vision. That's the mistake I've seen a little bit more, actually, than The other way around. Right. So

44:20 If you if you go to um I'm trying to give an example. Like if you go to an enterprise customer and let's say you you think you're doing analytics software, and it turns out they don't actually care about internal analytics this much. They actually have this other massive burning problem and they don't have a good solution to it yet. I think a lot of people are unwilling to go and pivot to the big problem because They're like, Well, we're analytics software and so maybe this customer is a fit for our thing.

44:43 And maybe that's the right call. In some scenarios that is the right call and you should go find a different customer where your thing resonates more. In other scenarios it's actually the right call to Hivot and go. Just put everything on that big problem instead and then go and find other customers for that thing. There's no hard and fast rule. I remember reading a really interesting post by I think it was David Sue from Retool.

45:03 Mm. had this exact thing. I think he worked at Power for a while too. And and he said that they had the Retool product and it wasn't getting any traction at all. And then He tried an outbound email campaign where he literally just changed the subject line to

45:19 Build internal tools easily. And then suddenly they started getting all these replies from CTOs who were just like, Oh yeah, this is actually a huge pain point for me. But the exact same solution, they were previously kind of framing it as Uh I think it was like supercharged XL or something like that and nobody was biting. Um and so they just changed the way they framed it, found a different set of buyers and

45:41 Succeeded that way. So yeah, no no hard and fast rule, but I think it's always you need to kind of have this matrix of options in your mind and be very deliberate about Which one you are going with and why. I think your piece of advice is really important there of

45:55 Uh Usually In your experience, you're saying people index too far too No like no, th what they're asking you to do is not kinda what I think they need or what customers will need. You're saying it's actually more likely they're right.

46:08 And that's maybe where you should be focusing more versus this kind of abstract vision and original idea you had. I think so. Yeah. I think it's very hard to Not be anchored to your own experience and your conceptions as a Problem and One thing I've seen in really strong founders is they're able to sort of drop a bunch of those assumptions and almost treat

46:27 Something a new opportunity as a completely black slate. And then just figure out how to reshape things so that you're taking advantage of that. And that's how you don't get stuck at a local maximum. Your other piece of advice is also really great. So people hear this and they're like, We don't we can't afford an engineer to sit at her one customer prospect's office and build stuff for them.

46:46 But your point is you can have one for five different customers. They're not there full time. They kind of bounce around, but they're kind of It's almost like sales engineering, just like Uh, what you call it sparkling sales. Where they help make it successful. I know Looker is a famous example. They I think they call them for deployed engineers.

47:02 Do you know any other companies, by the way, that Did some version of four deployed engineers? That's a lot. I mean I know that the AI labs are hiring forward deployed engineers now. They're building um for deployed engineering teams. And and you know, they could they could make it work, right? But I think there's gonna be

47:18 Key differences Right, like I I don't see Anthropic going into an enterprise customer and building some entirely from scratch solution for them. It's going to be something that leverages the Anthropic set of products. So There's a lot of companies that have this label now. But I think what's really confusing about it is just that it Means a few different

47:38 Thanks. There's another post by Ted Mabry who's I think the head of commercial at Palantir and that's a very good one. Point with this two. So say someone was uh w I want to try this sort of thing in my company. And

47:50 What would be like a few bullet points of things they should Yeah right. It you're describing kind of the spectrum of peop what people describe as for deployed engineers if they were to try to do this. What do you think? they need to most do correctly for it to be

48:03 successful. The key things that made our model work were one Um they were actually Real engineers who could build product themselves. That's a very big difference, right? I think a lot of the time companies will say this person's a forward deployed engineer.

48:19 But actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect, or they're not necessarily building anything to know. They're just listening and Trying to find a way of deploying the existing product that are not Empowered to do new product. And so The really radical thing Palence said was no. Like go in.

48:37 And If you need a completely new product to do this, you can go ahead and build it. And and I think that's really the key difference. The other stuff, you know, I've I've already mentioned the value of being in person and I think building close personal bonds with your customers, I do think the better founders do this anyway, right? Like they're on texting terms with Their buyers, they become friends with them outside of work and they see them as humans who they're trying to help. I think that's very motivating.

49:02 Gain a really deep understanding of the business that you're Uh your customers are in and knowing how those dynamics Fuck. So

49:12 Yeah, a simple example might be Uh, you know, like say hospitals in America, right? Like I think If you if you go into it, um It's very counterintuitive to think of a hospital as a business. People think of it as you know, it's it's a place where you get health care, right. But actually like

49:28 If you kinda view it the way a CO or CMO views it, it's going to look very, very different to As a very simple example, uh Sorry, this is a little bit dark, but you know how kind of restaurants want to turn over tables as fast as possible in order to kind of maximize their revenue for the day. Hospitals actually kinda want to do the same with patients, right? They would like to treat you and then get you out of a bed so they can free up the bed.

49:49 To get a new person in there and so That's not super intuitive unless you kind of think hard about how the Revenue for that hospital. What? But then once you think about it, you're like, Oh, this has a bunch of problems associated with it, right? And You start to go in really interesting directions.

50:05 There's just like the words and memes uh take you a long way working and understanding it. Okay, so essentially the things you want to get right, make sure it's in person. Make sure the person is technical. Make sure they have a deep understanding of the business and the problems they're having. The technical piece is interesting with AI tools these days, making everyone technical in some sense.

50:22 Uh you could argue this is gonna become more common. People Can just you know, open up Cursor, Windsurf, and just start adding features. I think this is a really interesting thesis you've just hit on, and I expect to see a lot more startups that take advantage of that insight. Basically makes forward to playing engineers cheaper. Exactly.

50:42 What is the current state of for deploy engineers at Pounter? Like how much has it changed over the past few years? Like if you join now, is this still something you can do? Yeah, of course. I mean I should I should obviously emphasize that one, I left the company in twenty twenty three, and so if this is just my personal view, I don't speak for them. Um I think that Yeah, if you think about it, right, uh the The thing that one of the kind of metrics that the company had to measure its own success was Essentially revenue per

51:07 And Right. The more kind of quote unquote product leverage you had, the higher that number was. So if you had to throw a lot of people at every marginal problem, then you weren't doing so well at that because you're basically building a

51:21 new thing every single time and you are in a fact a consulting business. If on the other hand, every time you encounter a new customer, the product turns out to be kind of relevant to them, then Then great. And so this product leverage metric was actually a very unique Sing and kind of a North Star for the company for the whole time I was there. If you reason that out, what that means is that in the early stage of the company you

51:41 We'll have A customer and then you might have five to ten Engineers working at back hustles. Right. And so Over time you want that ratio to change. So you want it to be

51:51 you know, each customer because the product is so powerful, maybe AI coding's gotten a lot better. Each customer, you're leaving two people. And then maybe you actually get to a point where you can have one person looking after multiple customers. And I I think that's how the job has changed is Now it's a little bit more about

52:08 You have multiple customers, maybe you're spending less like deep time with each individual one of them, but It's a lot clearer what problem you're solving across multiple customers and you have more of a kind of defined offering. Um and so I do think that has been a bit of a change, but Um the company remains a very

52:27 Interesting and dynamic place to be. Like in some sense the stories always starting, right? Because One one lens through which you can view this company is they spent twenty years Basically building the mother of all data foundations for every employment institution in the world. And

52:45 Guess what's very valuable now that AI models are out is proprietary data that isn't public. suddenly you have access to that and you are in a very privileged position to Help your customers deploy AI in a way that makes them successful and that solves real business problems. That is essentially the bull thesis for this company and why it's Probably gonna you know.

53:04 Hundred X again, right. Um and so it's still a really interesting time to join, but I do think the The kind of Nature of the Ratio of people to a customer for example is one big difference now. Not investment advice, but it might a hundred X.

53:18 Uh, that's uh I totally understand why that might happen. So let's talk about the data piece. You said that this might This was one of the secrets of Ballinger's success. There's early insight into the The power of Ingesting data, cleaning data, being able to

53:32 Analyze and work with it. What What more can you share there of just like what they figured out about why this is so valuable, why it's so hard, and how they achieved it. I think it's just very obvious as soon as you step into a corporation and spend a couple of days there, right? As you're like, all right, like let's suppose your job is to Increase sales. Okay. So the first thing you want to do is get a clear picture of what's going on.

53:53 Alright, so like let me go and query the sales database. Oh wait, where is the sales database? I can't get access to this. Uh okay, I need to file an access ticket. Alright, now I have to wait one week. Right. It's a every everywhere we went this was the Big pain point was We have to wait six to eight weeks just to get data access.

54:10 And then when you do get data access It's not like the data is an easily queryable. format. You actually really have to know what you're doing in order to get the right metrics out and so on and so forth. And so it turned out like okay It's it's this iceberg analogy where

54:26 The actual analysis is actually just the tip of the iceberg. It's kind of the last five or ten percent. And The ninety five percent before that is I am gaining access to the data, I am cleaning the data, I'm joining the data, I'm normalizing it. Putting it all in the same format. And so

54:43 Once once we spotted that, then it's like okay, there's actually a lot of product to be built there just to make that process easier. This is one way I think Palantir does people don't think of Palantir as this place where innovative new product and UX ideas come out, but I actually think it's been one of the most generative companies for that specifically in the last twenty years. It's just that most of that didn't see the light of day and so people don't know. But if you look at the The product primitives that they

55:09 developed in order to make the things I just mentioned a lot easier. They're actually really Valuable and interesting and could probably form the basis for this of of independent companies themselves. And so

55:22 Yeah, like it's It just took like every single step of that process. became much, much easier once there was a software solution around it, right? So If you talk about data ingestion, there's essentially a kind of universal data adapter that's part of Foundry. It can read Anything, so J D B C, S three buckets, whatever you want.

55:41 And it can pull that it can it it it allows you to kind of look into the data, maybe preview the first twenty rows. And then it allows you when you're ready to set up a schedule. And just pull it in on some cadence. That process alone for an aginetic Used to take a long time, especially pre vibe coding.

55:57 And and managing all those cron jobs and Doing this on a Linux VM somewhere inside the customers. And was a huge pain, right? And so You prioritise that piece. Then it's like okay, once you have the data, it's like how do you actually

56:10 Join it. What if you're non technical? Is there like a is there a way for a non technical user to be able to join tables and see what the result is? And so There's all these like very fascinating business problems that Because I think the access was very difficult to get and people hadn't really

56:26 Salt before and so There was a lot of white space to do some product innovation. So now I would say foundry's definitely the best data platform in the world just because it has all these different applications within it that solve these discrete parts and It's just it came out of this years of painful experience watching people have to

56:45 clean data and join it and figure out what this table name meant and so on and so forth. You shared in your post this kind of evocative story of Some people's jobs is just to kinda gatekeep the data, like they're the they're there to help you to give you access to this very valuable data within the organization. And how hard it is to get like that was a lot of this work.

57:03 Is just breaking through those political battles of like, okay, we need this data for the good of the company and Took a lot of work. I guess anything there you want to add? It is, yeah. I mean it's it's a

57:14 It's a huge pain and there are good reasons for it, right? Like it's not like folks are malicious here. It's it's if you're IT or if you're a inf infosec type person, then Your goal is to prevent data breaches and to make sure that sensitive information doesn't spread too wide. And so What's the easiest way to do that is to lock the data down? You know, be basically be a gatekeeper for access, right? I think where it got a little bit more interesting was

57:37 Um Where your skills are. Valuable and depend on you being the gatekeeper. So what I mean by that is like Let's say I'm the guy who I'm the only guy who understands the

57:48 the way the sales calculation pipeline works, right? And I write the sequel for it. All the requests from business SMEs come to me. I have a big queue of them. It takes me weeks to get through this queue. I have a great job. I have great job security. Um and people depend on me. Right. And so now along comes this company and they're like, Hey, actually we want to make sales data available to everyone and we wanna make it point and click. Suddenly you're like, Hey, like, hang on. Uh what am I gonna do? Right. And so

58:16 That's where I think there was a lot of Difficulty and and and I always say like you know people are like what are Pounter's competitors. I don't think it's the ones you would think of necessarily. Pounds' biggest competitor is a company rolling its own solution. Right. And so The biggest difference would just be a C a C S CIO saying I'm gonna build my own data infrastructure. I'm gonna own it. It's gonna be on top of one of the hyperscalers.

58:41 And we're all just gonna do our own analytics ourselves. And what we came along with was quite disruptive to this model was saying no actually All your data is gonna get ingested into this one platform and everybody in your company is gonna use it. The trade off is it's gonna be really, really easy for everyone to do things. But

58:57 As you can imagine, some people were a huge fan. Model. Feels like Glean is the biggest competitor to Balantier after I hear this. Do you know about that company? I think yeah, Clean is Clean looks

59:07 Amazing from the outside. I mean You know, it's so many so many differences there, I I can totally see why you would say this, um but Clearly a different use case, but uh but it feels like the reason they've been successful is they figured out a lot of the state ingestion permissions. Search stuff. And we thought of it that way.

59:24 Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I wanna talk about hiring. You talked a bit about this. You're starting a company again? What are some of the kind of the key lessons you've

59:33 learned from your time and panel and here when you are hiring people for your company. I don't know if you're actually hiring people yet. Maybe when he may. Start hiring. Yeah, we we have um we have six people at the moment, so really reasonably small team. Um

59:48 Yeah, I think Yeah. With hiring it's funny, man. Like there's so much hiring advice online and you read it and you're like, Yeah, this is super obvious and then when you live it, you're suddenly like, Ah this is why people say this, right? So A few simple examples are I think the thing that is really hard to find is somebody who really, really cares. A lot about

1:00:07 Doing the thing and We'll go that kind of extra twenty percent. Like I think I think when you hire out of especially Not to pick on them, but if I think if you hire out a fan, right, it's like people People want like a

1:00:21 four hundred K a year job, they would like to work a certain number of hours. They would like to ship some code and then go home like that's basically the model that you get accustomed to. Even if you don't intend to when you work at a big company. And so If you hire out of that for a really small startup, it can be really challenging because A lot of Your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like No, I'm

1:00:43 really gonna I'm gonna work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working and I'm not just gonna check my boxes, I'm actually gonna look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve. And Everything I'm saying is feels kind of obvious, but when you actually feel that difference between somebody who's just checking the boxes and somebody who's kind of an animal in this way, like they'll actually go and pursue and accomplish the end outcome. That that difference is Very, very big and it matters so much for your first twenty people, right?

1:01:09 And there's no science to finding these people. It's not like you can just put like somebody who cares about outcomes in your J D and then suddenly you'll get all these people applying. Uh and so then it's like okay, well How do you screen for that and how do you find those types of People. And so That's where it gets really interesting. I think that's where

1:01:27 the missile that comes in. And so you you do have to find people who For what you're doing. Have this extra Maybe private reason to care about it a little bit. than the average person. Right. So I think for Palanto, they did hire a lot of

1:01:44 Vets, for example, or maybe people who were a little bit more patriotic or pro America than the average tech employee. And that those people had an extra reason to join Power and an extra reason to try And so, you know, what I'm doing is a little bit more in the kind of medical and health space and so I think

1:02:03 People who Have themselves had experiences with The system have maybe had relatives, you know, go through difficult experiences with things like cancer or whatever it is. They're just that extra bit motivated to really care about the

1:02:18 thing you're trying to do and then work that little bit harder. And so I think aggressively filtering early on for things like mission fit. How much have you cared about stuff in the past and what's an example? You know, you ask questions like what's the hardest you've ever worked to get something done. Right. And that Like

1:02:34 Does differentiate a lot of people. A lot of people don't actually have a great answer to that. So I would say that's been A really big learning. It's it's less about testing for the right skills. Yes, that's important. Two, it's much more about just like who has that extra twenty percent. That is really interesting. As you just said, it's What all everything you've shared is essentially around motivation and drive and passion and

1:02:53 Kind of just like commitment to working on this. uh intently. And uh almost like let's almost like a second thought of just like also they're like really smart and skilled at stuff. Like it feels like that's just table stakes and this is actually what makes the difference in your experience.

1:03:08 Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's it's different for every business, right? So I think if you're in a space like B2B SaaS where Maybe it's a little harder to tell the story of like, oh, this is so mission critical, like whatever. There are other ways of getting at this thing, right? So for example, I know I know a lot of people again, it's a little played out now, but Um, I know a lot of people who for sales teams they will Explicitly go for people who are professional athletes or played sports in college, right. And it's like okay, what does that test for? It's like

1:03:33 You are very, very disciplined, you're very, very goals and numbers oriented and you're willing to just work really, really hard. And so there's all these kind of lateral ways of getting at these qualities that I think you just have to be kind of intentional about. As uh As a founder. Like as a personal example, I'm a runner and so

1:03:50 I actually love meeting fellow runners and I always like to I kinda joke like oh maybe I'll go higher from like run clubs or something like that. But It's just like same with, you know, I play a lot of chess, like I love I love meeting chess players. I'm not necessarily saying that's the right kind of hire for me, but I think having this This thing of Here are some

1:04:09 traits that seem uncorrelated, but which actually give you Good signal to this person's personality. That is actually really important. The last thing I'll say just as a funny illustration of that concept is Mm. I think Max Leftin tells the story of somebody interviewing at PayPal early on and he passed all the skill interviews.

1:04:28 And then it just got to the final round and he said something about liking to shoot. Like he liked to play basketball. And they were like instant reject. And it was just like the The the point here was just like if you're not like a

1:04:41 mega, you know, Linux nerd, hardcore computer person We don't want you here even if you actually passed all the tests just because you like to shoot boots. Now, whether that was the right call or the wrong call, I don't know, but Um that's an example of what I'm talking about. I think that's like a great echo back. Like people hearing this may be like, What the hell? How that's like How like how dare they do that?

1:05:01 But this is exactly what you said at the beginning of our conversation that If you're trying like an approach to building a generational business is to be very clear about who this is not for and that's okay. It's your company. Not everyone needs to work there. And it's almost saving them time because they may they'll they might realize this isn't for me. This isn't the people I wanna be around necessarily.

1:05:20 So I think it's important to see that side of it as like Your it's your business. It's important to be clear about who is a good fit for the company and who's not. Speaking of that, uh let's talk about product management for a bit. I know Palantir PMs are like not very not traditional product managers. Uh what what is like did the

1:05:38 I I imagine people have the title product manager, Palantir. Okay. So if so, what Mm. As far as you understand, how what's the difference between, say, a PM at Palantir versus a traditional PM say at a thing company? How'd it was

1:05:52 As far as I remember, quite N T P for a while, and eventually we did need them because we just got more serious about the classic story. Classic story story. The the big difference or one big difference I noticed was that they were extremely careful about Only making people PMs. Who had first proven themselves out as forward deployment engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other.

1:06:17 So um As an example, the uh when I mentioned earlier the The thing that we built for the plane factory. The person who was managing that deployment, she later became the PM for Onpology. And it was just because she'd kind of proven a metal in the field.

1:06:32 And you know, the reason for that's pretty simple, right? It's gonna be someone who understands who how customers work and has that customer empathy. And it's gonna be someone who has this drive to get things done because that's what B D selected for. I think the failure mode that they were very, very Of us to and

1:06:50 And traditional PMs. was this kind of Google Docs syndrome of like okay, I'm gonna write my product requirement documents. And I'm gonna kind of manage it in this like very s sort of sane rational way, I think. So the company was really rigorous about that. And so basically PMs were almost always internal promotions and they always came from

1:07:09 Um from B. It was not like I I'm not aware of a single case where we took somebody who was a PM at a place like Google, which produces many excellent PMs and hide them successfully in Paladins. But Um so I think that was one thing. You know, this is this is maybe more of a classic PM trait, right? But you just had to be either an engineer yourself or extremely good at working with engineers. And The ones I saw who

1:07:32 succeeded the most. We're just Best friends with the engineering team, right? And it the team would always just be like one Yeah, it was called the group PM and then it would be a lot of very, very good engineers and basically the success or failure mode was just like

1:07:46 Do the engine is like in thrust you. And I I mentioned before, like power has very kind of almost disagreeable personalities and so Uh if you didn't gain the trust of engineering team pretty fast, you didn't last very long. I think we've cracked the problem though. The question of why are Pallancher PM so successful?

1:08:03 First of all the hiring bar is just like basically hiring for leaders. in a lot of different ways to this like I don't know forge for Founders where they're working with a company solving a real problem, building a real product that makes money. And then those are the people that become the PMs that volunteer and that then they go on.

1:08:20 To leave and that's why thirty percent of them end up starting companies. I'm surprised it's not higher. Uh or become first PMs at other companies or heads of product. Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's it's crazy. I was part of a pretty small team within Pounter. I think it was twenty to twenty five people when I joined and I think at least six of them now are

1:08:39 Either unicorn or just pre unicorn founders. Um from from that like group of twenty five people, which is actually a crazy ratio. And then a bunch more have become founders recently at an earlier stage. So Yeah, there's all these little pockets of excellence and um It's been really interesting to see. I think the other thing that's driving that a little bit is

1:08:57 You know, when you leave, it's just such an interesting company to work at that um Yeah, I think the retention numbers were actually very high for that company, like People would often stay A lot longer than maybe the average average valley tenure and um So when you left it was really this decision of just like

1:09:13 something very specific is pulling you and you want to kind of play the next level of the game. And so It was very unusual for someone to leave and then join maybe a more traditional tech company. It's sort of like You're either gonna go become a founder or Why would you leave when there's so many interesting different things to work on? And I know that sounds a little culty, but that's just that's what everyone thinks.

1:09:34 I could totally see that. A lot of people that left Airbnb have never found something more meaningful. It's just hard, especially if you're early. There's a stat that I didn't share that I think is really interesting. Uh when you look at Y C founders and their where they've come from. I think you may be sharing this in your post that There's more Y C ex Palantir founders than there are ex Google founders.

1:09:55 In spite of Google being something like fifty times bigger. Sample size. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the the moral question of Palantir. A lot of people

1:10:06 probably seeing the title of this episode. Hearing this or will not be excited about Palantir being highlighted and promoted and a lot of people kinda disagree with what Council's doing. Yeah, builds products that

1:10:17 kill people in some ways. They work with governments they don't agree with. I know you wrote a really insightful uh way of Of how you approached this question when you decided to work at Palantir and how you see people tackle with this? Just talk about the kind of the framework that you landed on and how you thought about this yourself. Yeah, it's a really interesting topic. It's definitely very nuanced. I think

1:10:38 What I was trying to say in that post was a couple of things. One was the there was a lot of upside there, right? So You know, I worked on the US Covet response. I have friends who You know, worked on operational walk speed and Yeah. Th these are all things that I think saved a lot of lives and

1:10:56 I was pretty focused while I was working at NIH on cancer research. And so to me these are just obviously good things and you couldn't do them anywhere else. And so that was a loader reason. A Um D. The question I had in that post was well, okay, there are definitely gonna be other pieces of this that

1:11:12 People object to right. So during the kind of Twenty sixteen to twenty twenty era. It became a pretty common thing to go into work in New York and you'd have people protesting outside your office or Yeah. Do all kinds of things and so

1:11:26 There was this question of well, is this okay? And I think the point I was trying to make was I don't think that it's rare that disengagement is the correct Answer. And I think it's more recognized now, but especially it went a bit too. Uh. Right.

1:11:42 The famous example here is Google kind of Disengaging with a Pentagon. uh AI projects just because some people felt that working with the Pentagon was itself morally bad. I think that's way to sort of the left of what the median American would say. I think the median American would say it's fine to work. On defense stuff.

1:12:01 You know, within within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things. Uh and so There was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just like hang on like It's not like working on defense is inherently evil. It's actually a pretty interesting thing. And then there's this question of well Would you rather

1:12:18 B and the And making this that's her own. Uh. Right. And so I'm struggling with how much I can share, but like as a simple example.

1:12:27 If you're doing uh even a workflow which I think many people would not be super comfortable with, like let's say you're targeting somebody for Some kind of strike. If you compare what The way it's done now to maybe the way it was done in twenty ten, it's gonna be a lot more targeted, it's gonna be a lot more accurate. And so you've actually improved that process and reduce the chance of error. Maybe you should feel good about that, right?

1:12:49 Now, that is a bullet many people are not willing to buy. Um I I didn't work on the defense side of the company myself, but I think I think you have to be okay with These kinds of grade zones and and actually actively thinking about what you're Doing. And um

1:13:05 That doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do to work at a defence company, right? Maybe We go into a very dark future. We start being the bad guys in some ways, and then it's probably not a great idea to work at a defence company, right? Um So it's a it's a shifting landscape, but I think

1:13:21 I I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech Just Didn't want to think about this at Mm-hmm. Right. So

1:13:29 Like You have engineers now who are working on Optimizing short form videos for higher engagement. And You sort of want to say to them, like, Hey, are you thinking about what this is doing to the brains of young children? Or have you seen, you know, an eleven year old kind of scrolling something for five hours and do you think this is a good thing? And

1:13:47 I think people don't want to think about this stuff too much. I'm not saying I know the answer, but There was almost this refusal to look at what Tech was Doing from a political lens for a very long time. It was just like hey

1:14:01 Let us play with our toys, let us sit in Menlo Park and like don't bother us and we're just gonna build cool stuff and watch it. And Twenty twenty five we're in a very, very different State of the world. Right. You know, tech is involved in politics now and Politics basically came to tech, right? There's this famous image of Mark Zuckerberg because he's sitting in Congress and he kinda looks very pale and

1:14:23 It's like why why have they dragged me in here again? Right. But I think I think Tech went through this journey of Oh, we're suddenly becoming Important now. Oh really, really important now. Oh, we better stop playing this game of politics. And so I think what I'm saying now is a lot more consensus than it was Ten years ago, but at the time the feeling was just like look, we are doing it's political, so you better engage.

1:14:44 I think uh when this became really real for a lot of people is with the Ukraine war. Like the government's running out of certain vehicles and and ammunition were just like not able to produce it. And then we're like, Oh, thank God for a company like Andrew and all these other tech companies that are actually ahead and keeping us ahead. Like I think the only reason the US is ahead of the of China and the space race is'cause SpaceX is just the one company that just has been doing this for a long time.

1:15:09 So I think a lot of people have kinda realized, okay, maybe maybe we need these things. Right, yeah. Uh Uh and I I would make this argument as well. It's like people are like, Well, you know, how can you feel good about working in defense? And it's like, Well You're not gonna feel great if China bites. I want actually. I I think you're probably also not gonna like that outcome, so

1:15:28 We do just live in this world where you do need to build up the turrets to these things and they better be good. So to me it didn't feel That difficult of a question. They can be very difficult questions, and there have been a bunch of those in the last couple of years. But Yeah, again, disengagement isn't the answer. Yeah. And again, it's not for everyone. I think that's an important kind of theme through this.

1:15:50 Conversation is Some companies uh like to build sometimes to build a generational really successful company to You need to turn some people off because Uh That's what brings in the best talent oftentimes.

1:16:03 Okay. Just a few more questions. Uh Kind of like stepping back a little bit. You're building a company again. What are What are kind of like a few core pieces of advice

1:16:12 That you're bringing to your new Startup. that will inform how you build this company from your experience of Palantir. We talked about a lot of stuff. There anything, I don't know if there are like three things that you think are like I'm definitely gonna do these things this way because it worked really well with Palanter. One thing is probably just

1:16:28 Really fast iteration cycles. Uh so placing a lot of bets. And then Being really rigorous about it. Just going through that cycle very soon. I have this I have this article principle, but one of the things on there is basically saying like

1:16:43 Yo P successes goes up the more bets you make and it's sort of a function of how many bets you make at the probability of success of individual. That's right. One easy way to almost guarantee that you'll hit something is just to make a lot of bets.

1:16:57 And then just kind of like cycle through them very quickly, now. Obviously this is Difficult this often this question of well Is this bet actually failing or like are we quitting too soon, kind of thing? But That's that's kind of one.

1:17:10 principle I take it's just Test this thing very early. You know, like the classic Y C Y C thing is just When you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money and if they say no, then Find a new problem. Like don't don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does'cause you don't have that kind of time. I do think the importance of just like

1:17:31 having a really tight distinctive internal culture and Um Building a strong feeling of trust within a team.

1:17:41 As Really important. And and kind of like you mentioned with A B and B and you know, people people definitely felt this up out. So there was this feeling of like while you worked here, you must be good, I trust you and and all of that. And I think It's so important to create that and you kind of know that feeling. That's what

1:17:59 Like people ask me, you know Should I go work at Place X or should I just go be a founder straight away? I don't know the answer for everyone, but I will say one of the benefits of working at a place like that is you just have all these internal benchmarks now for okay, this is what this should feel like. And if it doesn't feel like that, we're off. And I I can't imagine not having those benchmarks and just kind of having to Figure.

1:18:21 See, I think that thing two is just like distinctive internal strong Team culture. Um and then I think I think for me thing three is just like Working with a really messy um part of the real world. So you know, I kind of joked when I left like

1:18:37 Uh I'm excited to just do pure software. I'm excited to I don't know, I wanna build an IDE or something and just like Not have a support email even and all of that, but Uh it turned out like my look my comparative advantage in a lot of ways was Yeah, the networks I built and the experience I'd had in engaging with the messy parts of the world and

1:18:57 They do need technology a lot, right? Like there is this There's this horrifying thought I have sometimes of just like maybe we'll get ATI in the next two years. And you know, the healthcare sector will still be broken and it will still be impossible to afford rent in New York City and build houses and all these things. Uh that may well become true.

1:19:16 And so I think it's important to engage with those parts of the world too, even though they're really, really Challenging. And I think the really nice thing about LLMs is that actually Uh there's so many workflows now that are accessible to you as a tech founder. And people are somehow more open to working with tech companies than they ever were before. Like selling into this sectors of the economy in twenty fifteen.

1:19:37 Incredibly hard. I think now post the chat GPT moment. People are willing to give chances to small startups that they want. Willing to do previously. As you mentioned earlier, the cost of Doing things like forward deployed engineering has fallen by maybe five to ten X now at least.

1:19:55 Um and so there's a lot of new possibilities and I'm excited to engage with the best. Wow, that is some alpha right there that you're finding that some of these very large organizations are more open to working with startups. Because you know. Uh classically investors don't want to invest in

1:20:10 Companies that are going after healthcare companies and governments and things like that. So it is really interesting actually to hear. Uh I'm gonna We're back with the tips you just shared, and there's actually like a secondary tip that I think is the more interesting piece, so

1:20:22 The first thing you're taking away is iterate quickly. But I love your tip of ask for lots of money. Quickly. Early. to see if it's an actual idea that people will pay lots of money for.

1:20:32 And if not, move on. I love that. Uh the other is uh build a very distinct culture. But the piece you share there that I love even more is this idea of knowing what a high bar looks like. Knowing what awesome.

1:20:45 A plus people look like And you need to work at a company like Palantir to actually see that. So The advice there I feel is they're just like work at a company that is amazing first with the best talent.

1:20:57 to understand what that should look like. Plus you build a network of those folks. So I think that's really interesting. And then the other pieces uh of advice you're pulling away has worked on like really hard, messy problems,'cause that's where the biggest opportunities are and it's Sounding like this is the easiest time to actually do that.

1:21:12 Amazing. Okay. I'm gonna take us uh to a recurring theme on this podcast called AI Corner. And what we do in AI corner is uh Is we share some way that you and this is you sharing. Some way that you've

1:21:25 found AI to be useful in your day. Day day day to day, either in life or in work. Is there any way you found some tool in a some AI tool? Useful. That

1:21:36 Uh you can check. Oh my gosh, there are so many. Um I'll give you a few examples. So I use Whisperflow quite a bit. So this is the um talk to your Keyboard and it will transcribe. For you. Uh.

1:21:49 Very good. Uh it's just great when you're iterating very quickly with An LLM and you Sometimes you have to do these paragraph long Prompt and it's just easier to speak into them. Right. So with the flow I like

1:22:01 Just if a double down on that, there's like is like you press a button and you start talking and it's Writing out what you're saying. Yeah. Cool. And that like there have been these products for a long time, Dragon Dictate and all these guys. Is the difference now, these are just like very, very good now at actually transcribing what you're saying?

1:22:17 I think that's right. Yeah, the the you know, they use they use a really good model and so it rarely makes mistakes even when I think it's quite challenging. And then yeah, the UX I think they just nailed. So that's a really good one. I love clawed code for developing even though I have my complaints about it. There's something just very addictive about just telling it what to do and it can it's basically something that you run within the terminal. Of your computer and so you just claw it's a clawed interface. It's very cute. It's very beautifully designed. And You just tell it what to do, and it actually operates on the file system directly. So if you're like

1:22:47 Hey, create a bunch of these files that'll just do it and you don't need to Go and walk around. Inside Finder yourself. And then it'll do these really complicated Pull requests and it'll basically execute.

1:22:59 Well so To me, this is like a very exciting kind of preview of AI agents. That's what I was gonna ask. So this is essentially like an AI agent engineer. Uh I didn't know that's what Clock Code did. Very cool.

1:23:10 Oh yeah. It's it's sort of a guided agent. But yeah, it's it is really sweet. Um and then yeah, I'm I'm just enjoying You know, every week there's like a new

1:23:20 Wonderful new thing to play with. Last seven days I've been testing Gemini Pro two point five. Excellent model. Um I don't love Google UX sometimes, but Uh I was playing with that and I use LLMs every day for all kinds of things. The other day I was doing taxes and I needed to classify a bunch of

1:23:37 transactions based on some metadata and so I just Wrote a script on the I love just like the smile on your face as you're describing all these AI tools. I think a lot of people are just like, Holy shit, I'm just overwhelmed with all the things I need to be paying attention to, all these things I'm here, all these tools I gotta try. And I love just this vibe of just like this is incredible and so fun.

1:24:00 We need more of that. Okay. I'm gonna take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. You're gonna get a double whammy. Uh Contrarian corner. So here's the question, what's something that you believe that most other people don't?

1:24:12 I think go going to college is great. I think this is a somewhat contrary to you within tech, maybe not in the broader economy, but you know, I I I often see people saying just like, Oh, if you can just drop out when you're eighteen and just start working, why would you go to college? And I think this is Five percent of the population who probably would have been teal fellows anyway. But College is one of the few times when you can Just

1:24:36 make really, really deep friendships. You are in, you know, typically a nice campus, uh If you're in North America, you You get to spend all of your time just thinking and writing papers and reading books and hanging out with your friends and It's actually very precious and it's very hard to find that kind of time after you turn twenty one,'cause You know, you gotta pay your rent.

1:24:57 Well, I gotta do all this stuff. Even you know, let's say you make a bunch of money, you take a career break, it's still like All your friends are working and Uh there's you always feel like there's a there's a ticking timer on top of your head or something and so Just taking those three or four years at the very beginning and Going really deep on lots of different

1:25:17 intellectual topics and being able to try different things and discover more about yourself. I'm a big college fan. I can't comment on the ROI or whatever. I I personally think the ROI is great, even though the seas are kind of high in the US, but That's probably my kind of contrarian within tech views. Don't drop out of college unless you have a really good reason.

1:25:35 It's so funny that that is contrarian and it does sound contrarian. Uh I had a great time in college. Here, here. Okay. Is there anything else, Nabille, that you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

1:25:47 No, I think it's just it's it's a really exciting time in the world, right? Uh You know, I think AI can be exhausting, but it does really just open up the possibility of building a better world in all these ways and so I think Reassess what you're doing.

1:26:02 Every couple of months and make sure that it's aligned with Where I think AI is Going and make sure that you are Working on something that you feel has very high potential

1:26:15 If it succeeds. I think that's more important than ever now just because The amount of leverage we have with technology is at the highest point. Let me double click on that real quick. So for people that want to do what you're describing. What helps you understand where AI is heading and just kinda like align with it. Is there are there like places of

1:26:33 information and news you find useful? Is it Just play with it kind of thing. What would you recommend? This is the big question. Uh I use X a lot to keep on top of AI, so I just recommend finding a good Twitter list and maybe following people off of that. There's some good newsletters, so I really like Latent Space. Um

1:26:51 I I know his X handle is Swix S W Y X. I I can't remember his actual name, but That one is very good and it's it's pretty technical. I would recommend trying to stick to the more technical newsletters if possible. Like I think there's a lot of kind of Philosophy about AI or like AI policy type stuff. And I think that's good if that's your area, but Um

1:27:10 Yeah, it's it's an area where it's very easy to have a lot of takes on it. It's not you're not necessarily learning a lot by reading those. Um But I I think it's just important to Know what's going on and Make sure you are revisiting your own workflows as often as as possible and just making sure that like the the people who win here are gonna be the kind of hybrid cyborgs who

1:27:30 Fuse with the AIs. Right. Um This actually played out in If I can take a slight detour as Um the chess players who succeeded the most in the mid twenty tens especially were the ones who were really early adopters of neural network based challenges.

1:27:46 Um so when um you know Deep Mind did that thing There was very quickly an open source version of it called Lila, and you find basically like The very top players like Magnes Carlson, Fabiano, they they were the ones who kind of mind melded the most with Lila and learned how it played and then kind of started copying its moves. And so I think this like becoming a cyborg to the extent that you can.

1:28:08 And then Uh I think there's this barbell thing of like it's also important to just leave everything at GoTot's grass just for your own mental mental sanity. Excellent advice. And with that Nabiel, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

1:28:23 Yes. Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? The first one that comes to mind is uh Impro by Keith Johnston. Um this is actually I wrote about it in that essay. It's one of the books that how they used to send to people. I just think it's a really interesting book. So normally speaking it's about improvational theatre, which

1:28:43 Um, I believe this guy was a pioneer of he was uh a British guy Keith John Stone. active between the sixties and the eighties, I think. And Impo is just this really interesting book about creativity and how social behavior works and basically just what he taught his improv students.

1:29:01 It's a very weird book. It's full of these unbelievably strange ideas. Like there's a lot of very tactical tells you to do in the first chapter, for example, just to break out of your own mental frameworks.

1:29:14 Um Like really just wild stuff. Like he'll tell you to Walk backwards while counting down from a hundred and like think about some problem that you're struggling with. And there's all these kind of odd things, but The the number of ideas per page I've found on that book is Extremely high.

1:29:30 The Concepts about how social interaction works and how things like status and so on play into your social behavior are Super important and they made every kind of for deployed engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you kind of read people better and interact with them better and Um become more conscious of how you are coming across and just modulate.

1:29:51 What is what is the title again? In pro. In pro. Okay, cool. We'll link to it in the show notes. Yeah so Empro is number one.

1:29:59 I think Just to go a little more highbrow, uh maybe Shakespeare's uh history plays. Uh there's a there's a set of them called the Henriad. Um so like Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, Henry the Sixth. I find most people don't read these so you know, they'll read Hamlet or Macbeth or whatever, but The handry on is absolutely incredible. You don't have to be interested in British monarchy or British history in order to enjoy them. They're actually some of the most interesting and insightful books I've read about power and how power works and

1:30:25 Politics and kind of what The sacrifices that you might have to make if you want to be, you know, a successful king in that case, but it transfers over. I think it just Okay.

1:30:37 It's worth thinking really hard about. I think especially in a world where Everything is kind of organized around these prominent figures and personalities. Now, right? Like when you think about the current administration, Trump, Elon. Well like when you think about AI, you think of Sam Dario, right? And so I think it's important to understand like how do you think about these personalities and

1:30:59 Yeah, the kind of game that they're playing at Henry is actually the Henry add is an incredible kind of set of books around that. They're also like easy to read. Which sounds hilarious when I say it, but You can read a Shakespeare play in a day. They're they're sort of I don't know, they're like fifty pages long? It's not that bad. So You you have to get used to the language, yes, but I I would recommend that for sure.

1:31:20 Uh I guess he also two to three I love uh High Output Management by Andy Grove. I just think that's a great business book and People sort of tend to read summaries of it on the internet more than they actually read the book. But the actual book has a lot of really interesting

1:31:35 stories and explanations about Like I th I think the most powerful thing about that book is actually how Andy Grove thinks. Unless any of the specific tactics there, and I think you don't get that unless you read like how he came up with it. Thanks. Your first two books were uh extremely out there versus what other people have recommended and the

1:31:53 Third book was the most recommended book on this podcast. So I love that spectrum that we just went on. Perfect. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or T V show that you've just really enjoyed? The last movie I really loved was uh Decision to Leave. It's a Korean movie. It's by the director of Old Boy, which Maybe some people have heard of um.

1:32:14 It's a great movie, I think I think it was released a couple of years ago and the basic premise is There's a detective who is investigating A woman who's accused of killing her husband and he Gradually starts falling for her, it starts to Just judgment called these ways.

1:32:28 Just like a really fascinating Kind of psychological thriller with a sort of romantic element to it. Visually very beautiful. Um yeah, I think a lot of the most interesting movies nowadays come from Abroad actually. So East Asia, South Asia, places like that.

1:32:43 Um T V I Don't watch so much. Yeah, it's been a while. Totally understandable for a founder. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you just really love? It could be an app, could be some physical Could be a water bottle.

1:32:58 I don't have a good answer to that one. I guess I don't buy enough stuff. Yeah. There's no wrong answers in the lightning round. Uh, moving on, do you have a favorite life motto that you often find useful in work or in life that you share with your s that you come back to

1:33:12 They share with friends and family. So so there's this architect called Christopher Alexander who wrote these beautiful books um that are about, you know, beauty and kind of more than architecture, right? And he He was a teacher at U C Berkeley and he got really frustrated with his students'cause he just felt like they were always turning in kind of like average work. And so he would always tell them every week, like Imagine the there's a gothic cathedral in France called Charge.

1:33:38 And um He would say you have to aim for charge. Like you have to make something that is better And That That should be your goal.

1:33:46 Not just to like turn in something but That's sort of, you know, what you feel is good enough. You actually have to try and be better than the very, very best that ever did it. And I find myself just like repeating this a lot to myself. It's just like aim for Aim for that. Like really try and do that. Otherwise it's a very easy to anchor on. Something right in the middle. And you just you do this unconsciously all the time.

1:34:09 So is that the uh is that the motto just aim for charge. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love that most people have no idea what that would be. Yeah, but the with the context is quite powerful. Final question.

1:34:20 What's a classic novel that would you think would be most valuable for product builders? I just my favorite novel is Caronilla. And I recommend that everyone read Eric. I'm reading that right now. I've never read it before.

1:34:35 No way. Yeah, so it's by by Leo Tolstoy, as you know. It's this epic, like nineteenth century Russian novel that follows A set of character across society. And I think it's just extraordinary because

1:34:49 What's what's amazing about him is he's just able to imagine himself into the brain of anybody. And so Even like um He will briefly just go into the consciousness of I don't know, the the servant who's bringing the meal to the table or something like that. He'll just tell you a page of what they were thinking. And then he'll just flip back into his main character's head and I think that is

1:35:09 the most impressive demonstration of this kind of skill I've ever seen. And I think Like to connect it to your question, this is what you have to do if you're gonna be really good at product is you have to really think yourself into the other person's head and you have to be uh really seeing it the way that they do. And it's so hard, especially as a founder or product person Not to just get stuck on your own way of seeing the problem, right?

1:35:30 It's like You wrote up this dog, you made these blocks. You're like, this is gonna be great. And then You take it somebody, they don't care that much. You really have to like

1:35:38 Exercise your empathy and understand why they see it that way. What a beautiful way to bring it all together. Uh let me also add while I'm reading the book, something a tip here is people talk about Uh having chat GPT voice mode just kinda sitting there next to you. I found that extremely helpful with this book where I just ask, like what the hell does this thing mean? Like there's all these Russian

1:35:58 Dances and balls in etiquette I You just ask and you're like, I'm reading Anacrana. What does this mean? And it just tells you. So there's another cool tip for AI. Okay, with that, Nabil. This was incredible.

1:36:08 Two final questions case people want to look you up. Where can they find you online? And how can listeners be useful to you? Find me online my website is Nab Oh. And uh my ex handle is the BLQU.

1:36:23 I'm Probably most active one. That's Um but yeah, my website has all the links. Uh You know, a bunch of essays and interesting stuff. Um How can you help me? I would say send me an email. My email's on my website. Introduce yourself, say hi, I love meeting people.

1:36:38 Um, I don't always have time for coffee nowadays or things like that, but I genuinely do get a lot of energy from just receiving emails from interesting people. So Please do reach out. Awesome. Definitely check out uh Nabiel's uh Principles. Is that the tur is that the name of that post? Yeah. Great. Okay. That's one to start with, and then also there's the Palantir post that we just talked through.

1:36:57 Okay. Nabiel, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, appreciate, Lenny. Everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:37:18 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show. at Lenny's podcast dot com. See you in the next episode.

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