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Nabeel S. Qureshi

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-05-11
most recent: 2025-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Find me online. My website is Nabioku.co. My Xhandle is Nabioku. I'm probably most active on X. But yeah, my website has all the links and a bunch of essays and interesting stuff. How can you help me? I would say send me an email. My email is on my website. Introduce yourself. Say hi. I love meeting people. I don't always have time for coffees 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.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like you wrote up this dog, you made these blocks, you're like, this is going to be great. And then you take it to somebody, they don't care that much. You really have to exercise your empathy and understand why they see it that way and what they actually care about.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No way. Yeah, so it's by Leo Tolstoy, as you know, it's this epic 19th century Russian novel that follows a set of characters across society. And I think it's just extraordinary because what's amazing about him is he's just able to imagine himself into the brain of anybody. And so even he will briefly just go into the consciousness of, I don't know, the servant who's bringing the meal to the table or something like that. And 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 the most oppressive demonstration of this kind of skill I've ever seen. And I think to connect it to your question, this is what you have to do if you're going to be really good at product is you have to really think yourself into the other person's head and you have to be really seeing it the way that they do. And it's so hard, especially as a founder or a product person, not to just get stuck on your own way of seeing the problem, right?”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's this architect called Christopher Alexander who wrote these beautiful books that are about beauty and kind of more than architecture. And he was a teacher at UC Berkeley and he got really frustrated with the students because he just felt like they were always turning in kind of like average work. And so he would always tell them every week, imagine there's a gothic cathedral in France called Charch. And he would say you have to aim for Charge. Like you have to make something that is better than that. That should be your goal, not just to turn in something that's sort of 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 repeating this a lot to myself. It's just like aim for that, like really try and do that. Otherwise, it's very easy to anchor on something right in the middle. And you just do this unconsciously all the time.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last movie I really loved was Decision to Leave. It's a Korean movie. It's by the director of Old Boy, which maybe some people have heard of. It's a great movie. I think it was released a couple 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, which starts to affect his judgment all these ways. Just like a really fascinating kind of psychological thriller with a sort of romantic element to it, visually very beautiful. Yeah, I think a lot of the most interesting movies nowadays come from abroad actually. So East Asia, South Asia, places like that. TV, I don't watch so much. Yeah, it's been a while.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About, 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 how he came up with all these things.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything is kind of organized around these prominent figures and personalities now, right? Like when you think about the current administration, you think Trump, Elon, or like when you think about AI, you think of Sam Dario, right? And so I think it's important to understand how do you think about these personalities and the kind of game that they're playing? Henry is actually, the Henrietta is an incredible kind of set of books around that. They're also easy to read, which sounds hilarious when I say it, but you can read a Shakespeare play in a day. They're sort of, I don't know, they're like 50 pages long. It's not that bad. So you have to get used to the language, yes, but I would recommend that for sure. I guess you ask for two to three. I love 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 stories and explanations.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in pros number one, I think just to go a little more eyebrow, maybe Shakespeare's history plays, there's a set of them called the Henriad, so like Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI. I find most people don't read these. So, you know, they'll read Hamlin or Macbeth or whatever. But the Henrietta 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 politics and kind of what the sacrifices that you”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the number of ideas per page I've found on that book is extremely high. 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 forward 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 become more conscious of how you are coming across and just modulate that.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First one that comes to mind is Emperor by Keith Johnston. This is actually, I wrote about it in that essay. It's one of the books that Paolta used to send to people. I just think it's a really interesting book. So nominally speaking, it's about improvisational theatre, which I believe this guy was a pioneer of. He was a British guy, Keith John Stone, active between the 60s and the 80s, I think. Impro is just this really interesting book about creativity and how social behavior works and basically just what he taught his improv students. It's a very weird book. It's full of these unbelievably strange ideas. For example, just to break out of your own mental frameworks, like really just wild stuff. He'll tell you to walk backwards while counting down from 100 and like think about some problem that you're struggling with. And there's all these kind of odd things.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I can take a slight detour is the chess players who succeeded the most in the mid 2010s especially were the ones who were really early adopters of a neural network based chess engines so when you know DeepMind did their thing there was very quickly an open source version of it called Leela and you find basically like the very top players like Aglas Carlson Fabiano, they were the ones who kind of mind melded the most with Leela 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. And then I think there's this barbell thing of like it's also important to just leave everything and go touch grass just for your own mental sanity.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the big question. 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. I know who's X handle is Swix S-W-Y-X. I can't remember his actual name, but that one is very good, and it's pretty technical. I would recommend try to stick to the more technical newsletters if possible. I think there's a lot of kind of philosophy about AI or AI policy type stuff. And I think that's good if that's your area. It's an area where it's very easy to have a lot of takes on it. You're not necessarily learning a lot by reading those. But I think it's just important to know what's going on and make sure you are revisiting your own workflows as often as possible and just making sure that the people who win here are going to be the kind of hybrid cyborgs who fuse with their AIs, right? This actually played out in”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's just a really exciting time in the world, right? 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 just reassess what you're doing 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 if it succeeds. And I think that's more important than ever now just because the amount of leverage we have with technology is at the highest point in history.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiber 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 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 personally think the ROI is great, even though the fees 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.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think going to college is great. I think this is somewhat contrary within TAG, maybe not in the broader economy. But I often see people saying just like, oh, if you can just drop out when you're 18 and just start working, why would you go to college? And I think this is completely wrong. But maybe it's good advice for 5% of the population who probably would have been to your fellows anyway. But college is one of the few times when you can just make really, really deep friendships, you are in typically a nice campus if you're in North America. 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 21 because, you know, you got to pay your rent, you've got to work, you got to 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 you almost feel like there's a ticking.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of a guided agent, but yeah, it is really sweet. And then, yeah, I'm just enjoying, you know, every week there's a new wonderful new thing to play with. Last seven days I've been testing Gemini Pro 2.5. Excellent model. I don't love Google's UX sometimes, but I was playing with that. And I use LLMs every day for all kinds of things. The other day I was doing taxes that I needed to classify a bunch of transactions based on some metadata. And so I just wrote a script up really quickly and it did that.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's right. Yeah, 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 Claude 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 type Claude, it opens up a Claude interface. It's very cute. It's very beautifully designed. You just tell it what to do and it actually operates on the file system directly. So if you're like, hey, create a bunch of these files that'll just do it and you don't need to go and mock around inside Finder yourself. And then it'll do these really complicated pull requests and it'll basically execute them quite well.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh, there are so many. I'll give you a few examples. So I use Whisperflow quite a bit. So this is the talk to your keyboard and it will transcribe for you app. Very good. It's just great when you're iterating very quickly with an LLM and you sometimes you have to do these paragraph long prompts and it's just easier to speak into them. So with the flow, I like.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“City and built houses and all these things. And that may well become true. 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 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. Selling into the sectors of the economy in 2015, incredibly hard. I think now post the chat GPT moment, people are willing to give chances to small startups that they weren't willing to do previously. As you mentioned earlier, the cost of doing things like forward-deployed engineering has fallen by maybe five to 10x now at least. And so there's a lot of new possibilities and I'm excited to engage with the best.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not having those benchmarks and just kind of having to figure it all out. So, yeah, I think that thing too is just distinctive internal strong team culture. And then I think for me, think three is just like working with a really messy part of the real world. So, you know, I kind of joked when I left, I'm excited to just do pure software. I'm excited to, I don't know, I want to build an ID or something and just not have a support email even and all of that. It turned out like my comparative advantage in a lot of ways was the networks I built and the experience I'd had in engaging with the messy parts of the world. And they do need technology a lot, right? Like there is this horrifying thought I have sometimes of just like maybe we'll get ATI in the next two years and the healthcare sector will still be broken and it will still be impossible to afford rent in New York.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then find a new problem. Don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does because you don't have that kind of time. I do think the importance of just having a really tight, distinctive internal culture and building a strong feeling of trust within a team is really important. And kind of like you mentioned with Airbnb and people definitely felt this at Palancer, there was this feeling of like while you worked here, you must be good. I trust you and all of that. And I think it's so important to create that. And you kind of know that feeling. That's what 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 can't imagine.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing is probably just really fast iteration cycles. So placing a lot of bets and then being really rigorous about just going through that cycle very soon. I have this article principle that one of the things on there is basically saying EOP successes goes up the ball bets you make and it's sort of a function of how many bets you make and the probability of success of those individual bets, right? And so one easy way to almost guarantee that you'll hit something is just to make a lot of bets and then just kind of like cycle through them very quickly. Now, obviously this is difficult. There's often this question of, well, is this bet actually failing or like are we quitting too soon kind of thing? But that's kind of one principle I take is just test this thing very early. You know, like the classic YC thing is just when you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. 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 going to feel great if China invades Taiwan, actually. You're not going to, I think you're probably also not going to like that outcome. So we do just live in this world where you do.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In politics now, and politics basically came to tech, right? There's this famous image of Mark Zuckerberg sitting in Congress and he kind of looks very pale. And he's like, why have they dragged me in here again? But I think tech went through this journey of, oh, we're suddenly becoming important now. Oh, we're really, really important now. Oh, we better start playing this game of politics. And so I think what I'm saying now is a lot more consensus than it was 10 years ago. But at the time, the feeling was just like, look, we are doing, so you better engage with that.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a shifting landscape, but I think I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech just didn't want to think about this at all. 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 an 11-year-old kind of scrolling something for five hours and do you think this is a good thing? And 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, let us play with our toys. Let us sit in Menlo Park and don't bother us. And we're just going to build cool stuff and launch it. And 2025, we're in a very, very different state of the world, right? You know, tech is involved.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Struggling with how much I can share here, but like as a simple example, if you're doing 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 the way it's done now to maybe the way it was done in 2010, it's going to be a lot more targeted. It's going to be a lot more accurate. And so you've actually improved that process and reduced the chance of error. Maybe you should feel good about that, right? Now, that is a bullet many people are not willing to bite. I didn't work on the defense side of the company myself, but I think you have to be okay with these kinds of gray zones and actually actively thinking about what you are doing. And that doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do to work on a defense company, right? Maybe we go into a very dark future and we start being the bad guys in some ways. And then it's probably not a great idea to work at a defense company, right?”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the point I was trying to make was I don't think that it's rather disengagement is the correct answer. And I think it's more recognized now, but especially then, it went a bit too far, right? So the famous example here is Google kind of disengaging with a Pentagon AI project just because some people felt that working with a Pentagon was itself morally bad. I think that's way too sort of the left of what the media an American would say. I think the median American would say it's fine to work on defense stuff within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things. 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 defenses inherently evil. It's actually a pretty interesting thing. And then there's this question of, well, would you rather be in the room and making that sort or not? And so”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really interesting topic. It's definitely very nuanced. I think what I was trying to say in that post was a couple of things. One was that there was a lot of upside there, right? So, you know, I worked on the US COVID response. I have friends who worked on Operation Warp speed and these are all things that I think saved a lot of lives. And 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 load of reason to stay. The question I had in that post was, well, okay, there are definitely going to be other pieces of this that people object to, right? So during the kind of 2016 to 2020 era, it became a pretty common thing to go into work in New York and you'd have people protesting outside your office or all kinds of things. And so there was this question of, well, is this okay?”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of like you're either going to go become a founder or why would you leave when there's so many interesting different things to work on here? And I know that sounds a little culty, but that's just what everyone thinks.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's crazy. I was part of a pretty small team within Palenter. I think it was 20 to 25 people when I joined. And I think at least six of them now are either unicorn or just pre-unicorn founders from that group of 25 people, which is actually a crazy ratio. And then a bunch more have become founders recently, I don't know, earlier stage. So yeah, there's all these little pockets of excellence. And it's been really interesting to see. I think the other thing that's driving that a little bit is when you leave, it's just such an interesting company to work at that retention numbers were actually very high for that company. People would often stay a lot longer than maybe the average value tenure. And so when you left it, it was really this decision of just like 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.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How it's very kind of almost disagreeable personalities. And so if you didn't gain the trust of engineering team pretty fast, you didn't last very long.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to write my product requirement documents. I'm going to kind of manage it in this very sane rational way. I think the company was really rigorous about that. And so basically PMs were almost always internal promotions and they always came from BE. It was not like 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 into Palente, just a very different vibe. So I think that was one thing. 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 succeeded the most were just best friends with their engineering team, right? And the team would always just be like one, you know, it was called a group PM and then it would be a lot of very, very good engineers. And basically the successful failure mode was just like do the engineers like and trust you. And I mentioned before.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classics many companies. 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 way. So as an example, when I mentioned earlier the thing that we built for the plane factory, the person who was managing that deployment, she later became the PM4 onthology. And it was just because she'd kind of proven her metal in the field. And the reason for that's pretty simple, right? It's going to be someone who understand how customers worked and has that customer empathy. And it's going to be someone who has this drive to get things done because that's what BB selected for. I think the failure mode that they were very, very averse to in traditional PMs was this kind of Google Docs syndrome of, okay,”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hence it was, as far as I remember, quite NTPM for a while, and eventually we did need them because we just got more serious about production. Classic story.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the right kind of hire for me. But I think having this thing of here are some traits that seem uncorrelated but which actually give you good signal to this person's personality, those are actually really important. The last thing I'll say just as a funny illustration of that concept is I think Max Levin tells the story of somebody interviewing at PayPal early on and he passed all the skill interviews and then it just got to the final round and he said something about liking to shoot hoops like he liked to play basketball and they were like instant retext and it was just like the biodiver was just like if you're not like a mega you know Linux nerd hardcore computer person then we don't want you here even if you actually passed all the tests just because you like to shoot hoops 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”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's different for every business, right? So I think if you're in a space like B2B SaaS, 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 a lot of people, again, it's a little played out now, but I know a lot of people who have a sales team, 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 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 a founder. Like as a personal example, I'm a runner. And so I actually love meeting fellow runners and I always like to, I kind of joke like, oh, maybe I'll go higher from run clubs or something like that. But it's just like, same with, you know, I play a lot of chess. I love meeting chess players. I'm not necessarily saying.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's an example? You ask questions like what's the hardest you've ever worked to get something done and why, right? And that 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 is it's less about testing for the right skills. Yes, that's important too. It's much more about just like who has that extra 20%.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doing have this extra, maybe private reason to care about it a little bit more than the average person, right? So I think for Palento, they did hire a lot of vets, for example, or maybe people who were a little bit more patriotic or pro-America than the average tech employee. And those people had an extra reason to join Palentin, an extra reason to try that little bit harder. 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 people who have themselves had experiences with this system have maybe had relatives go through difficult experiences with things like cancer or whatever it is. They're just that extra bit motivated to really care about the thing you're trying to do and then work that little bit farther. And so I think aggressively filtering early on for things like mission fit, how much have you cared about stuff in the past?”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like, no, I'm really going to work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working and I'm not just going to check my boxes. I'm actually going to look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve. And everything I'm saying 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 difference is very, very big and it matters so much for your first 20 people, right? And there's no science to finding these people. It's not like you can just put somebody who cares about outcomes in your JD and then suddenly you'll get all these people applying. 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 the mission alignment comes in. And so you do have to find people who for what you”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we have six people at the moment, so a reasonably small team. You know, I think with hiring, it's funny, man. 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 doing the thing and will go that kind of extra 20%. Like, I think when you hire out of, especially not to pick on them, but I think if you hire out a fan, right, it's like people. People want like a 400K job. They would like to work a certain number of hours. They would like to ship some code and then go home. That's basically the model that you get accustomed to, even if you don't intend to.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, yeah. Clean looks amazing from the outside. I mean, so many differences there, right? I can totally see why you would stay this, but...”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, hey, actually, we want to make sales data available to everyone, and we want to make it point and click. Suddenly, you're like, hey, hang on, what am I going to do? That's where I think there was a lot of difficulty. And I always say people are like, what a pound is competitors. I don't think it's the ones you would think of necessarily. Pound is biggest competitor is a company rolling its own solution, right? And so the biggest difference would just be a CIO saying I'm going to build my own data infrastructure, I'm going to own it. It's going to be on top of one of the hyperscalers. And we're all just going to 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 going to get ingested into this one platform and everybody in your company is going to use it. The trade-off is it's going to be really, really easy for everyone to do things. But as you can imagine, some people weren't a huge fan of that model.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yeah. I mean, it's a huge pain, and there are good reasons for it, right? Like, it's not like folks are malicious here. If you're IT or if you're an 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 and basically be a gatekeeper for access, right? I think where it got a little bit more interesting was 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 way the sales calculation pipeline works, right? And I write this equal 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. And people depend on me, right? And so now along comes this company.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solved before, and so there was a lot of white space to do some product innovation. So now I would say Foundry is 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 clean data and join it and figure out what this table name meant and so on and so forth.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 JDBC, S3 buckets, whatever you want, and it can, it allows you to kind of look into the data, maybe preview the first 20 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 engineer used to take a long time, especially pre-vibe coding and managing all those cron jobs. doing this on a Linux VM somewhere inside the customer's tenant was a huge pain, right? And so you productize that piece. Then it's like, okay, once you have the data, it's like, how do you actually 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 very fascinating business problems that because I think the access was very difficult to gain, people hadn't really.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am cleaning the data. I'm joining the data. I'm normalizing it, putting it all in the same format. And so 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 Palent does, people don't think of Palentir 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 20 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 product primitives that they 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 of independent companies themselves. And so, yeah, it just took like every single step of that process became much, much easier once there was a software solution around it, right?”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just very obvious as soon as you step into a corporation and spend a couple of days there, right? Is you're like, all right, let's suppose your job is to increase sales. So the first thing you want to do is get a clear picture of what's going on. All right. So let me go and query the sales database. Oh, wait, where is the sales database? I can't get access to this. Okay, I need to file an access ticket. All right. Now I have to wait one week, right? So everywhere we went, this was the big pain point was we have to wait six, eight weeks just to get data access. And then when you do get data access, it's not like the data isn't 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 this iceberg analogy where the actual analysis is actually just the tip of the iceberg. It's kind of the last five or ten percent. And the 95% before that is I am gaining access to the data.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all data foundations for every important institution in the world. Guess what's very valuable now that AI models are out 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. It's still a really interesting time to join, but I do think the kind of nature of the ratio of people to a customer, for example, is one big difference now.”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 10 engine it's working at that customer, right? And so over time, you want that ratio to change. So you want it to be each customer, because the product is so powerful, maybe AI coding's gotten a lot better, each customer, you only need two people. And then maybe you actually get to a point where you can have one person looking after multiple customers. And I think that's how the job has changed is now it's a little bit more about 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. And so I do think that has been a bit of a change, but the company remains a very interesting and dynamic place to be. In some sense, the stories are really starting, right? Because one lens through which you can view this company is they spent 20 years basically building the”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. I mean, I should obviously emphasize that one, I left the company in 2023, and so this is just my personal view. I don't speak for them. I think that, you know, if you think about it, right, the thing that one of the kind of metrics that the company had to measure its own success was essentially revenue per engine, right? And so 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 new thing every single time and you are in effect 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 thing and kind of a north style for the company for the whole time i was there if you reasoned that out what that means is that in the early stage of the company you will have a customer and then you might have”
2025-05-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source