YouSaid · the spoken record

Shyam Sankar

lines on the record: 90
first: 2026-03-10
most recent: 2026-03-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Two things I just want to put down that will make this make more sense. The first is that we want to make software that makes you more different, not more similar. We think about it as alpha not beta. The second thing is that we are a wildly inductive company. We would never show up to a customer with some preconceived notion of this is the aerospace ontology. I'm going to pick an aerospace example in a second here. It's rather all the values and understanding what makes your aerospace company different than all the others. How do I make you more different there? That's the differentiation you're competing on. When we first came to Airbus, Airbus was in the midst of ramping the A350. The A380 was a wonderful plain, structurally unprofitable program. So the A350 was this bet that the whole company was effectively writing on in 2015. The first time you make an airplane, you're always going to have issues. There's a learning curve to the production. And one of the most important things to figure out as quickly as possible is what is an issue that is just a non-conformity that”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can use to build applications that manage your value chain from the hand of your supplier to the hand of your customer. You can call it a value chain. You can also call that a decision chain. Your whole business almost, if you just squint at it, is just a series of decisions you're making. Every one of those decisions you want to have an OODA loop, I want to make the best possible decision I can have today. More importantly, I want the first derivative to be good. I want to learn tomorrow how to make a better decision than the one I had today.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is actually like the hardest question in the world for me. We have built an enterprise operating system where our core thesis is what makes this stuff really valuable is decisions not data. It goes to John Boyd's Oodeloop. What we're really providing is an operating system that allows you to bring all of your enterprise data together. It solves for the impedance mismatch between like, yeah, look, all this data I've collected, it was collected and stored in a way that makes sense to the underlying transactional system or makes sense to some part of my institution, but doesn't actually represent how the humans of my institution think about the problems that we're facing. So that we represent in what we call the ontology, which is not just a model of the data, it's also a model of the actions. We call that the kinetics. If you're going to make a decision, you might be allocating inventory. How do you do that? So this ontology layer almost becomes like an API layer for the business. It makes the business programmable. And that changes the rate at which you can compound on top of it. So now you have this abstraction layer that...”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other part is that your ambition extends beyond a linear box. We always struggled when we came into the commercial world where you had the gartners of the world and they have this sort of box. This is my enterprise architecture. I've broken them up in all these boxes. What box do you fit in? The answer for us is, well, we don't fit in any box. We fit in all the boxes. It's some sort of heterogs thing. You're solving for all the problems in the seams. Like you're basically solving for the fact that architecture diagram was made by some mid-level product marketing manager. It's never been used or validated in anger. It's never actually solved a problem in the real world. But the cargo cult of the IT buyer just keeps believing they should buy it. I think if you fit into that, doing forward deploy engineering would be crazy. Why would you do that? But if you're like us and you don't fit into it, you need some way of just scraping and clawing to deliver enough value that the institution has to confront. But even though it's heterodox, even though it's heresy to my enterprise architecture,”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say this, you have to believe that you're going to be able to capture meaningful value for the problems you're solving. So, your problems you're solving are really big and therefore imply there's a lot of value behind them. And if you can solve them in a deep way, you'll be able to capture that. A lot of the problems we're solving, like to get at bat, you weren't going to get paid a lot up front. You're actually going to invest a huge amount into the customer to go do that. But you would do that.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Secrets for that part of 15 years, our software has been used to make things in the world. The one thing you could not tell anyone before COVID is that their manufacturing software doesn't work. People would point at their ERP system and be like, look how great it is. I spent $5 billion, $10 billion doing it. But as a Ford-Eployed Engineer, when I would go to the final assembly line on the factory floor, everyone's using Excel. There's a contradiction here that no one is somehow forced to reconcile with, which is really what they're saying is this software is so ill fit for what I'm trying to do. I hit the eject button, I pull the data out to Excel and I'm like hand rolling my own solution. That should be an obvious sign that something's not working.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about your customers existing of some sort of power law in terms of how useful the next marginal thing they're going to be asking for is in terms of the overall development of the product, if it's a Gaussian, you should just survey all your customers and average it out and figure out what to build. That's like a traditional product development process. If on the other hand, you think some percentage of my customers are living in the future. Yes, only they or only a handful of people have this problem today, but I can assess that this is actually a really valuable thing to solve that no one else has solved. We should solve it now and effectively have a monopoly on the capability to do that. We'll be five years ahead of everyone else if we lean into this problem. You can only surface that in this sort of forward-to-ploint engineering way. The other thing about forward-to-ploint engineers, that's worth saying in the T-Lian sense is the importance of secrets. Peter talks about the importance of secrets. If you're going to do something really impactful, there has to be something true about the world that you believe that other people disagree with you on. Orbital speed is born out of one of those.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should be appreciated. And I think about this like vector math. So the four deployed engineers skew towards this hacker mentality, the product engineers skew towards this artist mentality. And you have an unstable equilibrium where you're trying to align these vectors in a way that you're going to go upwind. If either side dominates, you don't really have a business. And that's why that scene between them, you actually need a dictator-like figure to manage and decide. And many of the outcomes, particularly, I think this model is super valuable.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out there whose job is to try to like ring up the sale. You're sending someone out there who is obsessed with whether it's going to generate an impact in the world or not and is willing to continuously solve backward and is technical enough to understand the full stack. How would we take the specific and learn how to generalize it over time in terms of the product? One way of thinking about this is there really are two types of engineers. There are people who know how to build the right thing and there are people who know how to build it the right way. And their dopamine hits comes out of different things. The people who know how to build the right thing, they're more like MacGyver. Their high in life is I solved the problem in their mind solving the right problem is 80% of the work. On the other hand, you have engineers who are more like artists in the traditional sense. Don't you see how beautiful the thing I built is the architectural elegance, the scalability of it, that's what gives them the high. Never mind that doesn't solve the problem anyone cares about. It's art on its own.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could start by maybe thinking about my critique of the conventional software industrial complex, which is that you're sitting, let's just say in Palo Alto and you're building this piece of software and your essential feedback loop on is this software valuable is can I sell it? And if someone's willing to pay for it, it must be valuable. That's an okay feedback loop. There's a stronger feedback loop, which is, is the software valuable? Did it deliver the outcome? The only way you can assess that is actually in the field with the end user on the factory floor, in the foxhole. So in our case, it wasn't going to be enough. You have this weird division between the IT buyer and the operator. The validation is going to come from the operator. The idea was really almost to like build software through backpropagation. Hey, how do you go to the person who has the problem? You're showing up with your best thesis of what you've built in the metaphorical Palo Alto. But then you are not just sending a sales engine.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they'll say, This is the bug of it, and I got to get out of here, and it's not going to work. The critique I take most seriously because I think with a little bit of help, a lot more people can make that hump. And that's the future of the business, those people.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have a structure like this, you don't get to spend nearly as much time with people as you'd want. The rate of radiation is very heterogeneous. There's some sort of like bimodal distribution for how long do people stay at Palantir. The probability that you'll stay for a decade plus if you've stayed three years is incredibly high. But roughly around the three-year mark, everyone faces this crucible where they look around and they say, this place is so fucked up and crazy. And they have to understand, oh, but that's the feature of it. And then they'll stay.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value and that has to be consistent. And I think if we can protect that and promote that, promulgate that culture in the future generations, we're going to keep winning.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All value creations downstream of the culture continuing to be an environment where a new person can come in and just have huge responsibility, be in charge of people who've been here 10 years or not, it's like that org structure. I call it a quantum org structure. I don't think flat org structure is optimal. That doesn't actually work. I think what you want is an org structure that can crystallize is the right structure to solve the problem as it exists today and is able to reform as the problem manipulates tomorrow. And you can see the pathology of big companies as they go through some sort of big reorg every five years, even if you just steel man it. Probably most of them are wrong, even that inception. But if you just steal man and say, hey, they just reorg, this is the right org structure for this company today. Every day the entropy is against them. And every day it's slightly more wrong than it was before. If you're so ossified and committed to your structure that you have to wait until it's totally broken before you reorganize it again, that's a fundamental weakness. So that plasticity and how your commitment to working backwards from the problems, that is how we generate.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some point it becomes a lizard brain, you get enough reps in doing it, but early on, I think the early indicators would be first derivative, proof of some sort of sui generis. Do they create anything from zero to one? And then expression of agency and initiative, here's the simplest way I'd say it. If I give this person an inch, can they turn it into a mile? And the worst sort of bet to make is I gave this person a mile and somehow they turned into an inch.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think this is the conspiracy of the people around you who give you that chance. I don't know why Kevin Hart me as some Stanford grad student coming to talk to him. But the fact that he took the bet and just threw me out there, that was the first time I got to jump off the deep end in many ways. So I really think how can you find it? You're assessing the people who are hiring you as much as they're assessing you. Is this an environment that I think is going to bet on me? Or is this an environment that wants me to be a veal cow? Are they going to be able to tolerate my eccentricities or are they going to try to squash that”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The article talks about the deployment at the COIC. I think that was a seminal one where it was leading the deployment. It was all on me. And it was never obvious until basically the last second whether it was going to work or not. And it allowed me to learn a lot of the lessons along the way, which is really where I internalized, oh, success looks like a lot of pave. That instinct to figure out how to reduce the pain, like how do I do this the next time with less pain is exactly the wrong instinct.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“after problems you're frankly not qualified to go after, but there is some belief you have the raw potential to do. You turn into a superhero. I think that's actually why Powntra is a founder factory.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason this model is really valuable is that I think the alternative model, you have to judge it by the counterfactual, the alternative model doesn't actually work. So this structured career ladder with progressions, it's perfectly designed to make you feel comfortable that you are growing. It gives you some belief that there's a linear path to follow and you'll learn these things, but actually it's all fake. On the other hand, if you're willing to just suspend disbelief, throw yourself off the deep end, the maximal rate of learning will be coincident with your maximum ability to tolerate pain. So now you're in over your head, you're working on a problem, you don't even know this is the environment that you're going to learn at the fastest possible rate. You're only limited by your motivation and ability to endure through the discomfort of getting there. Then you will find that if you look back retrospectively, you're like, holy shit, I grew in all these ways. I learned all these things. None of what you could have predicted specifically ex ante. And then if you just are willing to do that serially, just keep jumping off the deep end.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me start with an analogy. How did Bruce Banner become the Incredible Hulk? It wasn't progressive overload. It's not like he lifted a little bit more weight every week. It was a near fatal dose of gamma rays. 50% chance he died, 50% chance he turns into big green monster. And there's absolutely an element where we're taking people and just irradiating them. Prospectively, you're not sure if they're going to come out the other end, but you have some belief that they have the raw talent and potential. And then you want to create an environment that has enough transparency and flow of information and exhaust that if you see that this thing is really going off the rails without them having to seek you out, you're able to push in and help them. Then a lot of environments don't have that by default, actually. You would have to like manage them. You have them do reports or check-ins or whatever. You got to create an environment where it's okay to ask for help.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's actually a narrow sliver, if you thought about it in the Pounder context, the intersection of four deployed engineering and product interface there. One inch on both sides of that interface, owning that almost as a dictator, that's my superpower.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember doing something that I really screwed up once that had consequences for the company, and I sheepishly went into Alex and was just completely honest. And I didn't realize at the time there was no grand strategy behind this other than my commitment to just always being honest. He was very appreciative. He was also in pain as he internalized what this was going to mean. But he valued the fact that I wouldn't try to hide it. And I took away from that how important that environment was going to be and how do I scale that to the organization.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the artist, what is your process of accepting that? How do we help you accept? How do we help you understand actually at the point of acceptance, you become more valuable? And we're going to be able to unleash you further to be able to do things. And then you have to create an environment that supports them through that because the discovery of kryptonite usually involves you being exposed to it. You're going to make some sort of really bad mistake that probably will have real consequences. Hopefully you learn from that mistake. It may take more than one time to get there, but you don't want to create a culture which is like you fuck this up. I got to fire you. Oh, I'm so glad you learned that this is not what you do for that. Fuck this up. Yeah, exactly.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Superpowers are effortless. In some sense, it's almost like not even rewarding to exercise your superpower. My analogy for this is Superman could fly, he could see through walls, but that wasn't some sort of arduous thing for him to do. It's just something he could do. That's usually something you learn comparatively. You're like, oh, this thing that's lizard brain effortless, almost thoughtless for me. Other people were really smart, can't seem to do, or I do just way better and embracing that is the first step. Helping them understand like, hey, all of your contributions to the world are going to come from your superpower. Everything else is basically a waste of time. So how do you figure out how to get into that configuration? So there's some releasing of ego around that as well, is understanding that, okay, this is what I need to focus on. The other part of this is kryptonite. There are some set of weaknesses you have that aren't just I'm kind of average or maybe a standard de below average. It's like you're like six dives below average. It's not like something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could just start with the precept of how we think about the talent to begin with. So, really talented people are highly uneven. They're very good at some things. They're okay at another set of things and they're really bad at some other set of things. And usually the trick is.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to have a structural personality where you're not threatened by other people's successes. You actually relish in the other people's successes. And that's the parallel between Alex and my father.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obvious one to me is Alex Carp, his ability to really manage and unlock talent is something like I've never seen before. Those are some of the most profound lessons I've really learned about Palantry from the very early days, he modeled our entire company as an artist colony. We have more in common with the Hollywood talent agency than we do with a typical software company in terms of our approach to looking at humans. And this first principled approach to the individual and how do you grow this deep resistance to a cargo cult-like process and every manner or fashion that corrodes all the things that actually create value. And I think that's important because if you drive that to the extreme, you actually get something that looks more like the Soviet Union on the other end of this. It's how do you maximize the potential of the people in front of you? And you're advocating for their growth and their ability, which also involves a lot of”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An aspiration that's substantially bigger than oneself, the focus of American greatness is on American prosperity and the American worker. How can we go do things that are actually enriching our civilization, our people, raising their own aspirations, inspiring them to go on and do great things? There's this unstable equilibrium in civilization that pulls you towards nihilism. And greatness is the antidote. It's the countervailing force to saying, no, actually it's worth investing in our institutions. It's worth going through this painful journey because what we're going to get on the other end is something better, something that we all aspire for, something that you will be proud to pass down to your children.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Belief in exceptionalism and greatness. No army that lost its morale ever won the war. And so believing in yourself, believing that greatness is possible is a precondition to being able to express it and realize it. And a lot of cultures don't have that. The other thing, which I know sounds really simple, but is a complete plasticity of God. Culturally, America is a place where people do change their minds. Hey, this isn't working. Let's do something different. Or I observed that thing working, even though it goes against the orthodoxy of everything I've learned, we're moving. We're pivoting. In Europe, people start arguing about shit that happened 300 years ago. And some of these cultures are so rooted in the past that they can't update their priors. And so a culture that's capable of learning, you can call it plasticity, first derivative of learning, but how can you make progress without that?”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pieces of his personality that I said always stuck with me every spare moment this man had, even though he was so busy and he was just grinding, he would be on the phone trying to help someone. I had this weird memory of someone who almost had this sort of engineering autism that I think a lot of us have, but he met someone who had totally disfigured teeth. And he just had the actually profound kindness to tell him like, you should get cosmetic surgery. And that guy is so profoundly thankful that no one else has the balls to say that. This actually changed his job prospects. It changed his life. And so he's just one of these people you clearly can see the positive sumness in him. Like, hey, I'm just going to keep paying it forward.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Gulf War One, where the US destroyed the fourth largest army in the world. It's hard to think about now because we think about it as almost a foregone conclusion. But leading up to it, there was a lot of uncertainty that worldview is centered in understanding, look, I think the U.S. is the greatest force of good that exists in the world, that as a country, we understand that there's something special about founders. There's a reason we call them the founding fathers. If you think about just empirically, Europe has created zero companies worth more than 100 billion euro from scratch in the last 50 years. Almost an astonishingly bad track record. We've created all of our trillion dollar companies from scratch in the last 50 years. The primacy of people and being in a culture and an environment that allows that to happen, that doesn't subjugate the human, doesn't snuff out human flourishing, that allows you to pursue these things. That may seem trivial, but the heretics are all aversion of that. It's not like Pollyanish, where there's no resistance to these creatives. It's like, despite the resistance, you can succeed.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard, but having that rooting experience that created a graciousness and perspective in him, he was always so thankful for the opportunity. I took a lot away from that over time, especially as I grew up and understand and that awareness of what was happening. The second thing I think is really important is growing up in Orlando in the 80s and 90s, there was this profoundly optimistic period. You could say it was probably pretty optimistic everywhere, but in the shadow of the space coast, you were bombarded with this idea that technology was going to make the world better, that there was a structural positive some view of everything. And it was so motivating. People had ambition around these things. So I think that set a frame for me for how I thought about things and how do I want to spend my life and energy. I think that's really it. It's this commitment to building. Part of what's interesting about the heretics that I'm drawn to is that they're all builders of some sort. The conversion from heresy to heroism is a result of an empirical thing they built. John Boyd was alive to see the success of his innovation.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's no singular event. I think there's a combination of family history, the environment that I grew up in. Starting with the family history part, we fled violence in Nigeria where my father, we frankly almost died to settle in the US. And that happened pretty young in my father's life in his early mid-30s. It's a pretty jarring experience where it gives you a whole new lease on life after that point where you think about you have a deep amount of gratitude and perspective on the trials and tribulations that may come ahead. But it also grounds you in a profound understanding of the counterfactual, what makes this country so special, sometimes it'd be unmooring not to have those experiences actually because it's easy to take for granted. It's easy to become cynical. But that's a really powerful routing in preview because my father didn't have the classic immigrant story where he came here and became successful, which I think is the great thing if it happens to you, but it's also a facile journey. It's easy to appreciate. Dad started businesses that went bankrupt.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surfaces in certain ways, as CARP would say, I'm not everyone's cup of tea, or you can very clearly see it in the early days of Palantir, you'd be dealing with the government, and it's easy to think about as a monolith, but you have operators who want to use your software but are not in charge of buying it, and you have the IT people or the program who's in charge of building what you would be building. So you're a structural threat to them. The advice is to go along and get along. Those guys are the people paying you. Why don't you just do what they want? The problem is if I did what they want, it wouldn't work. And so that's where the disagreeableness comes in. It's being ordinary about, no, I'm going to deliver the thing that actually works for the operator. I'm going to piss off literally everyone along the way. They are knives out going to try to kill you. We have to sue the army to compete at some point. And I think in that vein of being truly committed to is the product excellent, what else could it be doing? You can think of the whole OODA loop of four deployed engineering is that, it's this continuous.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World, but one of his legacies, he was an admiral for 30 years. And even as an admiral, he was very difficult. Zumwalt, who was the chief of naval operations for a while, he said, the Navy has three enemies. The Soviet Union, the Air Force, and Hyman Rickover”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you grind through the pain? And he created a really unique culture in naval reactors, which is alive today. So I think part of what's really cool is that our nuclear submarine force is one of our last remaining asymmetric advantages against the Chinese. And we built it in the 50s. What a legacy for this guy to have built. And then the engineering culture that he created, he was in this unique role of both being a human who would invent the technology and therefore was qualified to think about how to regulate it. So whereas the Russian submariners, it would spend roughly six months at sea and then six months in Sochi recovering so their white blood cells could regenerate because the radiation feeling sucked. We've had no deaths due to nuclear incidents in our submarine force. And he designed it to a standard. He's like, I'm designing this thing. So my son could be in it. It's 100 times safer than what we believe the minimum standard to be. And that obsession, it's not a manager's view of the world. It is a founder's view.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He observed the vestiges of the Manhattan Project, and he had this idea we could build nuclear power submarines. And he'd had this experience on diesel-powered submarines, which suck. There are basically surface ships that happened to go underwater for like an hour. This became this thing that he was obsessed with. Talk about Hutzboat. Oppenheimer himself thought this idea was going to fail. So you have Oppi telling you you're stupid and this isn't going to work. And you're just going to go forward. So he started on this project and he built the first nuclear submarine in seven years, start to finish. The Navy aided him so much that his first office for this project was literally the women's restaurant. They're like, what can we do to humiliate this guy into quitting? But he just kept going. And if you actually look at his personal memoirs, you can see that the humiliation got to him, but in a way that he could channel it to be like motivating. It wasn't like he was somehow inured to the pain of it all, but he could push through it. And I think recognizing every major project you do is going to push you in these sorts of ways. How do you dig deep?”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd probably pick Rickovers. So I'm in Rickover born in a shuttle in Poland, came to the US when he was six, had one of these near miss moments where in those days when you landed at Lis Island, you had 10 days for someone to come pick you up. His mother gave someone money to go send a telegram to the father who had already been here. And that guy just pocketed the money. On the 10th day, there was another guy who arrived at Ellis Island who bought them one more day, who knew them. And then he like ran out, got the father. So it's like this near miss where this guy almost didn't even end up here who would have been sent back to Poland. But he was this feisty character. I think it was five foot two, very short. He went to the Naval Academy. He was so unlikable that in the yearbook in the Naval Academy, they torn out his picture. He's just one of these difficult people. In World War II, he drove a coal ship. He was not some exceptionally high performing senior military officer commanding a destroyer or carrier or anything like that. But after the war, he went to Oak Ridge.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just fascinated with what motivates these folks to keep doing this. And I guess I relish a little bit in their rebellion and the victory that the rebellion brings about”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they're really founders. They're founder figures. They get upsessed with delivering something that it makes no sense because they're fighting, particularly in the military context, you're like fighting the bureaucracy. You're going to end your career. You pay extreme prices for it. So there's almost like a pathological obsession with winning, which I really relate to both personally, but also that's what I see in great founders. In the present moment, it's really important to like encourage the hidden heretics who are in the military today to recognize your heresy matters. And frankly, if you look back at history, the only shit that ever worked, the things that helped us win all the wars were the things that the heretics actually did. Nothing that went through the machine delivered anything. I think all change comes from these heretics. And they only later become heroes. If you think about Billy Mitchell, who invented the Air Force, he was court-martialed and died penniless and depressed, not only after his death did we invent the Air Force based on his original heritage.”
2026-03-10 · Invest Like the Best · Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source