Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…nal and it has to turn some people off. That's the key of a good, bad signal. So, I think in the present day, OpenAI and Anthropic, they're both sucking up some of the best talent that you and I know. And I think one way they do do that, and they are sincere in this, but they do really attract people who are almost messianic about the potential of artificial super intelligence 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 Palantir's version of that was that 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 social, mobile, local apps. You had, social media was on the rise. You had, the hot companies were 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?" 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. We're going to talk about the reasons people don't necessarily like Palantir and the moral question of what they do, but when people look at a company that is like... I guess OpenAI, to your point, is a good example where they're just so turned off by maybe their approach. What you're missing is that's potentially intentional because it actually draws in the people they really want. It makes me think about, I was involved in creating the core values at Airbnb and something that we learned at going through that process is, when you define the values for your company, it's really important to clarify who this is not for, exactly as you described, which feels unnatural. Like, "Oh, we want to be inclusive, we don't want to make people feel like they don't belong." But the whole idea is to be clear on here's who will thrive here and here's who's aligned with our mission. And what I'm hearing is Palantir and these companies take it to the extreme. A hundred percent, yeah. On my team at Palantir, one process that we followed, I could talk about this more if it's interesting, is 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 type. So, the idea is, basically, you write up a two-page plan for the project. You invite three or four smart folks who don't know anything about the project and their job is just to tear apart your plan. And so, you have to write, here's the vision for this, here are the goals, here are the tactics over the next three months. And one section was 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 move fast and I would always be, "Everyone likes to move fast." It is not a good principle actually because nobody can really disagree with this reasonably. You need something that actually a lot of people are going to go, "Why are you taking this principle? This seems wrong to me." So, you need something that people can disagree with.…

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