YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Simler

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62
first
2016-11-22
most recent
2016-11-22
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Comes from is it's slippery and it's hard what's the magic formula? I don't know if there is one, but that has got to be part of the factors of success.”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Plenty of competitors and the team that wins is the team that works best together. Yeah, so I'm a big believer in that the culture as an asset within a company. I mean, it comes from some of my reading, but it comes mostly from firsthand experience where that was what kept people at Palantir happy working hard with their coworkers, loving it, working late, and motivated to really do their best. The reason I was motivated was, again, not because I was particularly passionate about building finance software, but because I was surrounded by these great people. And in a culture that just worked, and I felt like the culture rewarded me for doing the right things, like morally and ethically, and also doing the right things. Whatever I put into it, Palantir rewarded that in a certain way. And that's the culture where that...”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Certainly, some combination. If you're thinking about what differentiates startup culture from the culture of the old world traditional businesses, I think you have to look to the conditions of the ecosystem and the main condition there is the potential for 100x growth. If you are looking within the startup world and you're asking why do some companies win and some companies lose, I think certainly culture plays a role. And it's not determinative. There are plenty of businesses that just had the right formula at the right time and they had engineers that were capable of executing on that and it just took them to the moon. But for every one of those, you have a few other companies where they're”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, which I guess it speaks to wanting to have people passionate about what they're doing. And if you don't have that, if your mind isn't attracted and fascinated by the domain of the problem that you're trying to solve, you won't be solving it in the optimal way.”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, well, that was the thesis I often describe the central thesis and hubris of Palantir as our founder's belief that you just get enough smart people in a room together and they will do the right thing and make the right things happen. And that has been responsible for all the success of Palantir and also all of the ways that we got things wrong was through that. So yeah, we just had a bunch of mostly Stanford computer science grads working on this product. No one really cared about finance. And we were building and trying to sell this in the financial markets and everyone just thought, oh, we would trivialize the financial problems because no one was in the trenches dealing with the minutiae that actually caused problems in the day-to-day work of a financial analyst. We were just like, oh, theoretically it should work this way. And so we built this tool.”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It was much more the former where we were building something that we expected would be useful. And it was useful and clients paid us for it and we're happy with it for many years. We hit some ceiling and getting new clients on that product. And that product itself, we wanted to bring it to the, we were building it before the web and bringing it to the web, then we just, it's sort of a rolling process. It wasn't like we ever scrapped the product. We just, it evolved into something else and it evolved into something that was much less financy. Those of us who were building it were never really from finance natively. We were just computer scientists and programmers and data people. And so we were always building it with an eye to being a really generic product. And that was a trade-off that made it less useful for people in finance.”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “With larger data sets, and let you have a lot more degrees of freedom and to explore the financial universe in the way that you as an analyst”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “This is bringing me back to my days when I would go try to recruit college students. Yeah, so Palantir is... A big data analytics company, they build products that help other groups analyze their data. So Palantir doesn't do any of the analysis themselves. They don't have any of the data themselves. They just build platforms that help government, different divisions within the government, Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, whoever it is. If they have a bunch of data that they're trying to make sense of, they use Palantir's products. So when I was there, this was 2007, 2006, 2013, I think. We were building a product for the financial markets. I believe that product is no longer, it's still out there a little bit, but it's not kind of evolved into a whole bunch of other things and fractured into different pieces that are still out there. So I was building. Sometimes I try to describe it as like Excel on steroids. So Excel is a completely flexible platform that lets you do data analysis in any way you want. We were also building that. It was just let you deal with”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And also, what does it look like when the tide's going out and everything's coming down, that everyone just behaves differently there? So my experience was how people behave when the trajectory is up and to the right. And I think that does really affect the kind of culture that develops because you get a pass on a lot of things. You don't have to have all those hard conversations and make all those zero-sum trade-offs. And it gives you leeway to just have a fun time. You can just enjoy your coworkers without having to worry that they're going to stab you in the back.”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think My guess is that as long as there's an economic frontier somewhere, our institutions will continue functioning as they have been, whether that's if space colonization were a huge economic possibility, that would suffice if tech is the big new thing that we have to go out and kind of domesticate all these technologies and then spread them around and there's just so much value to unlock there that suffices. But I wonder what it's like to be, so this is my experience at Palenter was just one of pure growth. I think it was like employee number 20 and by the time I left there was a thousand employees and the revenue was growing comparably and so everything was just up and up and up into the right and I think as someone who strives to understand how organizations work, I have this huge blind spot which is the static trajectory how does that feel over the long term?”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's going to be bigger is for me, it was a huge part of my experience. And I think it is part of everyone's experience who does a startup. And so I wonder about these smaller companies that don't have that, even if it's just a story, a story of how they're going to be 10 times, 100 times bigger someday, we need all of these different parts of the economy. I also wonder, you know, I think Peter Thiel has some thesis about how democracy only works as long as the economy is growing, because as soon as something becomes like a zero-sum situation, all of our institutions start to break down.”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In my mind, and this may not be true, but the frontier is, if not synonymous with growth, at least highly implicative of growth. The reason you go out to the frontier, the American frontier especially, was new opportunities. You were probably constrained in some way back home on the East Coast, so you head out and it's expansive and it's open, full of possibility. So there's that growth mindset, I think, inherent in exploring the frontier. Certainly there must be some frontiers where, I mean, but the reason you go to it is to grow. No one would choose to go to the frontier unless they were hoping to get more than where they came from. So I wonder about that, the potential for growth as a determining factor in what is startup culture and that optimism and that feeling that you're at the beginning of some”

    2016-11-22 · Invest Like the Best · Kevin Simler – Exploring the Frontier - [Invest Like the Best, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source