Nabeel S. Qureshi: belief

Transcript context

…Not investment advice, but it might 100X. I totally understand why that might happen. So let's talk about the data piece, you said that this was one of the secrets of Palantir's success, this early insight into the power of ingesting data, cleaning data, being able to analyze and work with it. What a marketing share there, just what they figured out about why this is so valuable, why it's so hard and how they achieved it? I think it's just very obvious as soon as you step into a corporation and spend a couple of days there really, 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's 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. And so everywhere we went, this was the big pain point, was we have to wait six to eight weeks just to get data access, and then when you do get data access, it's not like the data's in 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 10%, and the 95% before that is, I am gaining access to the data, 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. People don't think of Palantir 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 every single step of that process became much, much easier once there was a software solution around it. So if you talk about data ingestion, there's essentially a universal data adapter that's part of Foundry. It can read anything, so JDBC, S3 buckets, whatever you want. It allows us to 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 and doing this analytics, VM somewhere inside the customer's tenant was a huge pain. 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 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 get, and people hadn't really solved before, and so there was a lot of white space to do some product innovation. y fascinating business problems that, because I think the access was very difficult to get, and people hadn't really solved before, and so there was a lot of white space to do some product innovation. So now I would say Foundry's 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 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.…

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