Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Thanks, Lenny. Glad to be here. In our chat today, I want to zero in on a post that you recently wrote where you shared your reflections on your time at Palantir. You spent something, maybe just under eight years there. The reason I'm really interested in Palantir is I've been doing a bunch of research recently looking into which companies hire the best product managers and create the best product managers, and Palantir just keeps coming up over and over in the work that I'm doing. So, I'll share a few stats real quick. I looked at which companies produce the most founders, especially out of their PM team, and Palantir is, by far, number one. 30% of PMs that leave Palantir start a company. And number two is 18% and that's Intercom. So, that stat, I looked at which companies PMs that leave get immediately promoted in their next role, Palantir is number one of all companies in the world. I looked at which companies' PMs become the first PM at another startup that they join, Palantir is number two in the world. And then I looked at which companies alumni PMs become heads of Product down later in their career, Palantir is number three in the world. Also, just the company is doing extremely well. It's worth, I think, something like $200 billion these days. So, there's a lot to learn from Palantir. I actually want to start a question that I imagine every employee at Palantir constantly gets that, and I still don't think people totally have an answer in their head. What does Palantir do? That's a great question. You started off with an easy one, Lenny. So, Palantir is, the way I describe it, is they achieve outcomes for their customers very tactically. The way they do that tends to be through a data platform. 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 of 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 the classic 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 capsule answer, but there's lots to unpack in there.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.