Nabeel S. Qureshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so just to make this crystal clear for people, a lot of people hear this idea of Palantir having forward deployed engineers. A few other companies have done this. It's pretty radical. So, as you described, you basically have a desk at a company. So, you worked with Airbus and we'll talk about that. So, let's just make it real. So, you have a desk and a computer and login access and all these things at Airbus. You go to their office four times a week. You're sitting there with their employees working side by side, building a product for them, versus what most people do where "they just talk to customers," where they do an interview once in a while, they do a Zoom, they share mocks, things like that. This is like that on steroids. Is that roughly the way to think about it? It is, yeah. And so, we would really be there a lot of the time. And so, the side effect of that was, one, you learn to live and breathe the customer's problems and you learn to speak their language. And eventually, they saw you as one of them and so, you develop these really close bonds with the customers. So, at Airbus, I would be at the factory where the planes were produced, or I'd be sitting next to people diagnosing issues with aircraft or whatever it was. Similarly, later on, I worked with the NIH, which was part of the US government, and I actually had a badge there and I would work with civil servants and biologists and clinicians and people who were working there. And so, it's this pretty radical thing as you suggest. I think the key thing there from a business point of view is the average deal that Palantir had was very large in the many, many millions of dollars, which means that you could pay for this as part of the thing that the customer got. And then it was priced according to the value that the customer got. So, as a simple example, if you're Airbus and let's say that you have an issue with one of your planes and you need to fix it, and fixing that is worth a $100 million or something to you, that's how it would be priced. It would not be priced as, "Hey, you're buying data infrastructure and it's similar to Snowflake or Databricks or one of these other providers. It's much more anchored to, here is the outcome. But then the job of the forward deployed engineer is not just to deploy software. It is not just to sell software. It is to actually solve the problem. And so, you would have to be there. You would have to meet the key stakeholders who are actually in charge of reporting to the CEO about the specific issue. You would have to become their friend. You would have to gain their trust. And you would have to, in some cases, create new software such that it could actually solve the novel problem that was in front of you. So, I would have friends who worked with one of our energy company customers and they would have to learn the ins and outs of how oil wells work. And then out of that, it turns out that having streaming data is actually very valuable for this use case. And so, boom, suddenly, there's a product that can handle streaming data that becomes part of the core platform. But that would be the motion, is you learn about the problem. You figure out what software would best address it. You build that software. You use it to accomplish the goal. And then eventually, that gets folded into the broader product suite. And so, you can start to see why this would be a good forge for founders. And this was actually part of my thesis going in and joining, was I said, "Well, say, I got five reps of this," which I got more than that. an start to see why this would be a good forge for founders. And this was actually part of my thesis going in and joining, was I said, "Well, say, I got five reps of this," which I got more than that. But say, you got five reps of doing this in five disparate contexts, you actually become very good at this cycle of, okay, go into the building, gain the trust of the person, meet the people that are going to become your users, talk to them about their problems, make sure you're building something that actually solves them, and it's just a boondoggle. Get really fast feedback and iteration loops. So, every week, you would have a cadence where it's like Monday, you go in. You do your meetings. Monday night, you build something. Tuesday, you show it to somebody. Tuesday, you get the feedback. Tuesday night, you iterate on it. Wednesday, you show it to somebody. Wednesday night, you iterate on it. So, you get four of these, five of these cycles every single week. It already got it. So you get four of these, five of these cycles every single week, and you're moving incredibly fast. So 6 weeks in, you've suddenly gotten to, wow, this is really valuable, and somebody's willing to pay you whatever, $20 million for it, and boom. I think this is why you get so many founders coming out of this same process.…

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