Palantir Has a $20B Valuation and a Bigger Problem: It Keeps Losing Money
wsj.com
wsj.com
The interview was super hard and didn't really tie up with the expectations of the job.
Needless to say I didn't pursue the application further.
A couple years later I ran into someone who worked at the London office. They described it to me as a chaotic environment, with poor engineering practices. In other words, a typical startup.
The interview process didn't differ much from Microsoft or Google, or probably many other tech start-ups and large firms: 4-5 technical interviews with whiteboard coding that lasted all day, plus a lunch interview.
Key differences:
1. There were several people that were interviewing that day; we started with a pep talk of sorts with someone higher up, and met again in the middle of the day. As the day went on, the group was shrinking.
2. I had little idea what Palantir was actually doing until the middle of the day, when they showed us a demo of their product -- something they developed for a police department in CA. They now have a 3-minute demo on Youtube which probably contains the same information, but back then there was an air of secrecy around that presentation.
3. The management pep talk was really pushing the "we are saving the world!" narrative, to the extent that it seemed cultish to me. I mean, at the time, it could be interesting to work for the Big Brother to see how the cookies taste like on the dark side, but I couldn't pull off enthusiastically pretending I was literally saving the world working for Palantir.
In the end, I believe I did well on the technical side (that part was not much different from several other places I passed interviews at), but I was very skeptical about their corporate agenda.
They asked me if when I needed the result, and I said I wanted it quickly. I got a prompt "no" in a couple of days - and I'm satisfied with that result.
Dear Palantir people, if you are reading this: presumably, you aren't looking to hire dumb people. Why play the doublethink? Let's be honest, programmers aren't the most ethical crowd out there to begin with. A modicum of honesty in the interview process, along the lines of "we are developing powerful technology with good applications, but also a wide potential for misuse, along the lines of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State" would go a long way. Bonus points for talking about what you do to prevent that from happening (and again, if you want to lie - that is the kind of lie I'd eat, because it's something I'd both want to - and maybe could - believe. </rant>
They described a culture that encourages asking hard questions, and doing the right thing in ethically complex situations, even if that meant turning down a business opportunity. It came across as frank and sincere, and I didn't get any sense they were grooming for a cult, more that they were looking for people who were smart and passionate.
Does anyone know what the "secret sauce" is for Foundry? If we were to assume the USG/Gotham business is worth $10bn, that would mean Foundry-related business is worth ~$30bn if the whole company is in fact worth ~40.
What is the killer use case for Foundry? What does it do, that competitors don't, that makes it worth so much? And to what extent are the current success stories actually stories of the product succeeding without FDEs?