Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…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. I want to come back to the beginning of what you described of what they look for, what Palantir looks for in people. You talked about independent-minded, a lot of interests, broad interests, and competitive. First of all, I think a lot of people hearing that, especially the last part, be like, "I don't want to work there. " Why does this work? Because this isn't naturally what you would think of as how you build the most amazing, productive team. I think it just draws people who want to win. I think that's what was really important. The other piece of it, I think, is that there's actually, and this was much truer 10 years ago, is there was a lot of talent that was a little bit outside of the tech ecosystem but could easily have been very successful within it. So, people who got out of the military or one of the intelligence agencies and they were doing, let's say, an MBA somewhere to transition into the corporate world. And I think, typically, they would have taken a position at a classic Fortune 500 corporation. And actually, Palantir managed to get a bunch of that talent. And at the time, that was very undervalued. The people who succeed the most in the Marines or the Special Forces or whatever it is, tend to be pretty smart people. They tend to have accomplished very difficult goals in very hostile environments. And it turns out that when you're starting a somewhat chaotic tech company, that's actually a very useful skill to have. Again, I think more companies are doing this now, so Scale AI and et cetera. But at the time, that was a very differentiated talent pool. And so, I think having those values as opposed to maybe the values that were more in fashion then, so talking about how inclusive you are, or the sushi that you serve at lunch, or whatever it is, it just drew a very different crowd. And I think the game that was being played there was, one, it's mission alignment. You're doing a defense company, that's the kind of person you want to attract. But I think there's also, two, which is just what is the talent that maybe is a little bit undervalued now and how do you actually draw those people to you? And I think that game is always shifting.…

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