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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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“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.”
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
“Hard about how the revenue for that hospital works. 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.”
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
“Them as humans, so they're trying to help. I think that's very motivating. Gaining a really deep understanding of the business that your customers are in and knowing how those dynamics work. So a simple example might be hospitals in America, right? Like I think if you go into it, it's very counterintuitive to think of a hospital as a business. People think of it as, you know, it's a place where you get healthcare, right? But actually, if you kind of view it the way a CEO or CMO views it, it's going to look very, very different to you as a very simple example. 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 kind of 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 to get a new person in there. And so that's not super intuitive unless you kind of think.”
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 key things that made our model work well, one, 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 class is a full-deployed engineer, but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect. They're not necessarily building anything de novo. They're just listening and trying to find a way of deploying the existing product. They're not empowered to do new product. And so the really radical thing, Palanta said, was, no, like go in. And if you need a completely new product to do this, you can go ahead and build it. And I think that's really the key difference. The other stuff, you know, 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.”
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 a lot. I mean, I know that the AI labs are hiring forward deployed engineers now. They're building forward deployed engineering teams. And they could make it work, right? But I think there's going to be Key differences, right? Like, 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 things. There's another post by Ted Maybury, who's, I think, the head of commercial at Palentin. That's a very good one to point with this 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 think so. Yeah, I think it's very hard to not be anchored to your own experience and your conceptions of 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 something, a new opportunity as a completely blank 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 in a local maximum.”
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
“Thing and I think he worked at Palinzo for a while too. 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 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 So, yeah, 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”
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
“Are actually too stuck on their own product vision. That's the mistake I've seen a little bit more, actually, than the other way around, right? So if you go to, I'm trying to give an example, like if you go to an enterprise customer and let's say 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. And maybe that's the right call. In some scenarios, that is the right call. You should go find a different customer where your thing resonates more. In other scenarios, it's actually the right call to pivot 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 who had this exact”
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
“There's companies, but instead of charging them $5 million, you're charging them $250K a year. And so in a scenario like that, you might still have four deployed engineers, but they're not really, they're not going to France and spending five days a week in a factory. It's more like you'll have one person and they're looking after five different customer accounts. It's more of that ratio in order to make the numbers work. And so I think a lot of the principles can be abstracted from that experience, but it is a really specific sales motion that depends on a specific way of doing business. I think to your other question, yeah, I think it's obviously something that is very hard to give a general answer to. 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 error that people make more often than not is they...”
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, I would say on the forward deployed piece, my friend Barry McCardle, who's the CEO of HEX, the Analytics Company, he wrote a really good post about this, actually. And his take was just like, you probably don't need full deployed engineers. It's very specific. But I think basically the thing there is you have to be willing to be quite almost wasteful. You have to be willing to invest a lot in finding the thing. 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 deployed engineer motion. It's something a little bit different. And so, you know, I think one thesis that a lot of people left Palentin with and started companies around was there's a lot of customers that Palentin won't serve because maybe they're too small a ticket size. And so actually you could go and do something like Palatine for”
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
“Engagement over Zoom, it's just the divide 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 2020 because COVID happened. The company IPO'd. And so there needed to be a bit more internal controls around this. But I would say pre-2020, this was like a very big part of the culture.”
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. The company had a very, 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 that? And 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 going to get us to where it needs to be to win. And so there are 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 useful. 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 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 doing a”
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 lived in France for about a year and a half. The way they built that planes is they manufacture different components around Europe. So they build the tail in Spain and the fuselage in part of the UK and 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.”
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 was, yeah, I don't recall the exact stat, but we did ramp up production, I think at least four X that one year, which, I mean, obviously they did the last end.”
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
“Inside that factory, and I would say it's still a very big differentiator today. Like I don't think too many other companies ship this kind of stuff yet.”
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
“Need to fulfill, and where are the parts that I need to do that? And so did this directly become a part of Foundry? Not exactly because the way that other companies work is not going to be using this same set of concepts, but the overall idea of taking a 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 term, 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 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, where is the aircraft now and where is it going next, right? And so the ontology became a huge piece of foundry. It was directly informed by the learnings that we had from building that application.”
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
“Completely alien language. The table name would just be like S3, F1, underscore Z or something like that, right? And you'd have to know, okay, this is the table where the part ID is stored or something. 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 a part, a work order, an 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 79, where is that? Okay, it's at station 31. All right, these are the work orders, et cetera, right? And so you've translated it into a more human legible thing. And so the thing we built, I mean, I kind of slightly flippantly describe it asana. 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 in this particular plane. And then me today going to my job at station 31, what work orders do I”
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
“Okay, maybe I need some sort of Gant chart for this, and I need the ability to click in and say, okay, what did actually do and what work orders remained undone? And then it's like, okay, for those work orders, what parts do I need and where in the factory might they be? And so this was very, very hard to do as is. A lot of it was just relying on people going and having conversations with other people in the factory floor. And coming from tech where it's maybe not as complicated as building aircraft, that is a phenomenally complicated process. It is easy to see like, okay, you can actually improve this problem with software. All their data was stored in SAP and 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 one of the things we figured out was just if you can pull in these tables that may as well be written 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
“Basic problems that we figured out was that without going 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 plane as literally moving between each station and that each station would do a certain set of work on it. So 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 31. plane is physically moved to the next station and then station 31 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 going to get done on time and so things kind of carry over right to the next team and the next team then has to kind of like and so what I'm describing this problem to you you can kind of start to visualize”
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 was a really interesting story, actually. So the initial problem that we came into with Abbas was that they had a new aircraft called the A350, beautiful aircraft, by the way. If you get to, I think if you fly New York to Singapore, it's often an Air A350. Really nice. And so it was a relatively new aircraft at the time. And their mandate to us was, okay, we need to ramp up production of this really fast, 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 for this month. We need to do eight the next month, 16 the month after and so forth. And you're going to 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 the list of requirements. It was much more just like, please help us accomplish this mission. This is like the big thing. And so we went in, scoped out the problem. There were a bunch of different things that we could build that helped accelerate this.”
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 looks interesting. Let's zoom in on that. What is this person's location? 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 if you look at Foundry, it doesn't actually emphasize that component so much because it turns out, let's say you're a B2B SaaS company, you're probably not doing that much graph-based analysis. You're doing things that look a lot more like classic SQL queries, tables, that kind of stuff. And so foundry's a lot more kind of traditional in that way.”
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
“Has kind of a common data backing, but 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. 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, a lot of the time you are going to be looking at a map and you are going to be monitoring the movement of troops or tanks or whatever it is. big difference is the idea of graph-based analysis. So Gotham, one of the kind of early use cases was finding, combing through networks of terrorists and basically finding the bad guys. And so being able to do queries that are sort of graph-based was important. So it's like, who is everybody that Lenny called in the last week? Imagine all the nodes kind of fanning out from there. And then it's like, okay, 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
“Gotham is optimized for military and defense use cases. An entaller as well. I would say they both have some things in common, right? So they both have, 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?”
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 quarter, and I had to wait six weeks for some other analytics team to get me this deliverable, right? And so just 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 there.”
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
“Brought a lot more rigor to our 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 things like performance and reliability and so on. That was all really painful. And so, yeah, I think the answer was just talent. And then there was this recognition that 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 quote-unquote secrets in this process of living with customers for so long. 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 is 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.”
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
“Go in, and you know, early on, you were basically armed with Jupyter notebooks and some kind of data integration stuff. But it was very primitive. You had to create value that way. But we kept building tooling that was useful for forward deployed engineers. So we were our own first customers. And at some point, there was 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 Sham Sankarg is one of his, I think he's a CTO, maybe he's the president now. He just mandated like, okay, every customer deployment, you have to have a customer using this within three months or whatever it is. And so it was horrible at the time because these had been built for these nerdy Silicon Valley engineers. And so they weren't particularly usable. They would crash all the time. You'd have to debug spark errors or whatever it was. But basically that process.”
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 called AIP now. So 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 80% plus margins, which is not really what you would get if you were actually a consulting company, it would be closer to 20 or 30%. So then your question was, well, how do they actually achieve this? I think there was just incredible talent in the product development organization, like really top tier, incredible talent. And it took somebody 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 go, what is it unified version of this? What is the thing that would this look like if this were a product? And out of that process that I saw came foundry. I assumed there was a similar process with Gotham a while back. But basically it's like the motion was that you would”
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, that's a great question. And it's true. I think that from when I joined until maybe till IPO and a little bit after, I was told, hey, isn't this basically a sparkling accenture, right? Isn't it a consulting business kind of lopping as a product company? And eventually it became undeniable, one, because I always laugh when people are like, what does Palanto do? It's like you can go onto YouTube and just search Palento 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.”
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
“Meetings 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 get like four of these, five of these cycles every single week, and you're moving incredibly fast. So six weeks in, you suddenly got into, wow, this is really valuable and somebody's willing to pay you whatever $20 million for it. And boom, like I think this is why you get so many kind of founders coming out of this same process.”
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
“Suddenly, there's a product that can handle streaming data that becomes part of the core platform. But that would be the motion 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. 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 forage for the founders, right? And this was actually part of my thesis going in and joining was I said, well, say I got five reps of this, which I got more than that, right? But say you get five reps of doing this in five disparate contexts, you actually become very good at this cycle of like, okay, go into the building, gain the trust of the person, meet the people that, you know, are going to become your users, talk to them about their problems, make sure you're building something that actually solves them. And it's just a boondoggle. Get really fast feedback and iteration loops, right? So every week you would have a cadence where it's like Monday you go in, you do your”
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
“$100 billion or something to you, that's how it would be priced. It would not be priced as, hey, you're buying data infrastructure and it's similar to Snowflake or Dabricks or one of these other providers. It's much more anchored to here is the outcome. But then the job of the four deployed engineers 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 this specific issue. You would have to become their friend. You would have to gain their 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. So I would have friends who worked with one of our energy company 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 having streaming data is actually very valuable for this use case. And so, boom.”
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 customer got. And then it was sort of priced according to the value that the customer got, right? So as a simple example, like if your Airbus and your, let's say that you have an issue with one of your planes and you need to fix it and fix it.”
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, and so we would really be there a lot of the time. And so the side effect of that was, one, you learned to live and breathe the customer's problems and you learned 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 Airbus, I would be at the factory where the planes would produce. Or I'd be sitting next to people diagnosing issues with aircraft or whatever it was. 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 were working there. And so it's this pretty radical thing, as you suggest. I think the key thing there from a business point of view, right, is the average kind of deal that Palentina had was right large, right? So in the many, many millions of dollars, which means that you could kind of pay for this as part of the thing 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
“And prove your chops there, and you would typically have a CS degree. But there was actually a type before deployed engineer that didn't have that. So 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++ algorithm? And it would be more about just like, can you reason about data? We kind of didn't have that division originally, but it turns out that there's a lot of people who are technical adjacent, shall we say, who you really need in the room when you're working with these large organizations or these large companies because 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 of 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? But all of that was given the title of flaw deployed engineering.”
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 the way this originated was basically, you can think of it as there's two types of engineer patterned, right? So there's one that works on the core product. So they don't necessarily leave the building in Palo Alto or New York where the offices. They're very much working on the core product 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 that was 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 function is known as business development or BD and then PD is product development. So it's where the product is made. And so within BD, you had forward deployed engineers. There were actually two types. So there is one that is sort of a more technical software engineer. So you have to pass the software engineering into.”
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
“As explicit around a specific title, but instead what it becomes about is, you know, there's a particular exec or something and you want to gain that favor. And so it becomes more about who can get in the inner circle of this person or whatever it is. And there were those dynamics too. I actually am a big fan of this philosophy, though, the no titles one. I think what it did do is that it basically said if you are in, let's say you're in a role of you're leading a very important project, right? Which would happen. What it said was this is always fluid. So you are in this role because you're very good. And so it's a meritocratic thing. But if you stop performing well, it's actually very easy to shift that because there is no explicit like I am the GM of this project kind of title. And so you always had to kind of earn your place in the company. You always had to earn the right to work on what you were working on. I think that was a good side effect.”
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
“Going to be this sort of memetic totem that everybody competes or instead everyone's just going to have the same slightly meaningless title, which is for an engineer. And the only people who did have titles were the CEO. And then there were six directors. And that was it. And now I think it's a little bit more nuanced. There are different teams. There are some people with titles. But honestly, it was almost like we used to joke about it, right? It's like people would leave the company and then you'd see them update their LinkedIn and they would be like, oh yeah, it was totally the SVP of XYZ. And it's like, no, you learn. You just, you know, but then it's like, I totally understand it too, because when you leave the company, you have to make your experience legible to the next person. And so guess what? Things like SVP actually do matter, right? And so, yeah, I think they wanted to avoid this kind of Intel competition. There are downsides to doing this, right? So maybe the competition is...”
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 don't know this for sure, but I do know that TO writes about this in zero to one, and his take is just that as soon as you have these titles, you have a thing that people are competing for, and then 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 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 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, I did this new thing. And then boom, you have a new Google product that is 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.”
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 you're right, and we can get more to it, but I think there was also a very concrete set of ways where that place was a training ground for founders. I even think it turned a lot of people who might not have become founders into good founders because of the way it works. So I think there was a selection effect there, but there is also some sort of training effect that's kind of unique to the way the company works.”
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
“Chaotic tech company that's actually a very useful skill to have. Again, I think more companies are doing this now, so scale AI under, et cetera. But at the time, that was a very differentiated talent pool. And so I think having those values as opposed to maybe the values that were more in fashion then. So talking about how inclusive you are or the sushi that you serve at lunch or whatever it is, it just drew a very different crowd. I think the game that was being played there was one, it's mission alignment, right? Like you're doing a defense company. That's the kind of person you want to attract. 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.”
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 think it just draws people who want to win. I think that's what was really important though. The other piece of it, I think, is that there's actually, and this was much true 10 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 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 the corporate world. And I think typically they would have taken a position at a kind of classic Fortune 500 corporation and actually Palenza managed to get a bunch of that talent. And at the time, that was very undervalued. 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 starting a somewhat”
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
“100%. On my team at Pounds, one process that we followed, I could talk about this more if it's interesting is you had to, when you started a new project, you basically had to organize what they called a murder board for it. I think this is originally an army tub, 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 don't know anything about the project. And their job is just to tear apart your plan, right? And so you have to write like, here's a vision for this, here are the goals, here are the like tactics over the next three months. And one section with principles that you're following for this project. And I remember giving this advice a lot was just like when people joined, they would write principles such as, you know, move fast. And I would always be like, everyone likes move fast. 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 going to go, why are you ticking this person?”
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
“They were quite focused on things like preserving the West. There was a slogan of Save the Shire, right? So they were talking about military and defense and intelligence and the importance of that well before everybody else. 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 Pinterest 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 solve the hardest, messiest problems in the world with us. And I think just at that time, that really drew some really good people.”
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 one way they do do do do that, and they are sincere in this, but they do really attract people who are almost messianic about the potential of artificial superintelligence, right? And who really believe this is the only thing that matters and it is going to be the biggest thing in the world. I think Palanz's version of that was 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
“Earlier on, it might have been somebody like Joe Lansdale, but it was always like one of these people. And the interviews were pretty strange. So, you know, 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 air. It was impossible to prepare for. 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, he'd be in. And so there was that strong selection mechanism. There was also the question of, you know, I think it might have been Teal who mentioned this, but he thinks that a lot of the best recruiters in the world or like companies that attract talent, they put out this kind of distinctive bat signal. And it has to turn some people off that's kind of the key of a good bat signal, right? So I think in the present day, open AI anthropic, they're both sucking up some of the best talent that you and I know.”
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
“Sort of strong convictions. Two is just like people with broader intellectual interests. COP just released a new book and he's quoting Habermas 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 very intensely competitive. There's a sort of winner-all cost mentality to the company. And so I think those were the kind of set of traits that were like this gravity while in California 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 Carb, it could have been Stephan Cohen.”
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 an edit one company. I don't know how else you would start this company if you were not somebody like Peter Thiel. And so far as it seems like, you know, there was a point at which they owned a silly fraction of the office space in Palo Alto. So you'd walk around Palo Alto and it would just be palanted hoodies, palanta buildings everywhere and so on. And so 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 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 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 questioned the frame of everything and thought for themselves and had”
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 a great question. You started off with an easy one, Lenny. Palinter is, the way I describe it, right, is they achieve outcomes for their customers very tactically. The way they do that tends to be through data platforms. So they have what I consider to be the world's 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, 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 going to be Fortune 50, it's going to be governments around the world, it's going to be those kinds of customers. So that's the kind of capsule answer, but there's lots to unpack in 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
“We were extremely half full 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 engineer pounds here. So there's one that works on the core products and there are traditional software engineering. 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 desk and so that engineer became known as the forward deploy engineer.”
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
“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.”
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