Nabeel S. Qureshi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And again, it's not for everyone. I think that's an important kind of theme through this conversation is some companies ... like, to build ... sometimes to build a generational, really successful company, you need to turn some people off because that's what brings in the best talent oftentimes. Okay. Just a few more questions. Kind of like stepping back a little bit. You're building a company again. What are a few core pieces of advice that you're bringing to your new startup that will inform how you build this company, from your experience at Palantir? We talked about a lot of stuff. Is there anything, I don't know if there are three things that you think are like, "I'm definitely going to do these things this way because it worked really well at Palantir." One thing is probably just really fast iteration cycles. So placing a lot of bets and then being really rigorous about just going through that cycle very soon. I have this [inaudible 01:16:40]principles, and one of the things on there is basically saying EOP successes goes up the more bets you make, and it's sort of a function of how many bets you make and the probability of success of those individual bets, right? And so one easy way to almost guarantee that you'll hit something is just to make a lot of bets and then just kind of cycle through them very quickly. Now, obviously this is difficult, often this question of, well, is this bet actually failing or are we quitting too soon, kind of thing. But that's kind of one principle I take, is just test this thing very early. You know, like the classic "why feed, why see" thing is just when you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money and [inaudible 01:17:22] then find a new problem. Don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does because you don't have that kind of time. I do think the importance of just having a really tight, distinctive internal culture and building a strong feeling of trust within a team is really important. And kind of like you mentioned with Airbnb, and people definitely felt this at Palantir, there was this feeling of like, well, you worked here, you must be good. I trust you, and all of that. And I think it's so important to create that and you kind of know that feeling. That's what ... like, people ask me, should I go work at place X or should I just go be a founder straightaway? I don't know the answer for everyone, but I will say one of the benefits of working at a place like that is you just have all these internal benchmarks now for, okay, this is what this should feel like, and if it doesn't feel like that, we're off. And I can't imagine not having those benchmarks and just kind of having to figure it all out. So yeah, I think that thing, too, is just distinctive, internal, strong team culture. And then I think for me, think three is just working with a really messy part of the real world. So I kind of joked when I left, like, I am excited to just do pure software. I'm excited to, I don't know, I want to build an ID or something and just not have a support email even and all of that. But it turned out, look, my comparative advantage in a lot of ways was the networks I'd built and the experience I'd had in engaging with the messy parts of the world. And they do need technology a lot, right? There's this horrifying thought I have sometimes of just like, maybe we'll get ATI in the next two years and the healthcare sector will still be broken and it will still be impossible to afford rent in New York City and build houses and all these things. And that may well become true. And so I think it's important to engage with those parts of the world too, even though they're really, really challenging. rk City and build houses and all these things. And that may well become true. And so I think it's important to engage with those parts of the world too, even though they're really, really challenging. And I think the really nice thing about LLMs is that actually, there's so many workflows now that are accessible to you as a tech founder and people are somehow more open to working with tech companies than they ever were before. Selling into the sectors of the economy in 2015, incredibly hard. I think now post the ChatGPT moment, people are willing to give chances to small startups that they weren't willing to do previously. As you mentioned earlier, the cost of doing things like forward-deployed engineering has fallen by maybe five to 10 x now at least. And so there's a lot of new possibilities and I'm excited to engage with the best.…

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