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How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)

11 May 2025 30 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Nabeel S. QureshiLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

belief 13evaluation 7recommendation 5uncertainty 2commitment 1preference 1prediction 1

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

30 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends Impro.

“The first one that comes to mind is Impro by Keith Johnstone. This is actually ... I wrote about it in that essay. It's one of the books that [inaudible 01:28:36] used to send to people. I just think it's a really interesting book. So nominally speaking, it's about improvisational theater, which I believe this guy was a pioneer of. He was a British guy, Keith Johnstone, active between the '60s and the 80s I think. And Impro is just this really interesting book about creativity and how social behavior works and basically just what he taught his improv students. It's a very weird book. It's full of these unbelievably strange ideas. There's a lot of very tactical things he tells you to do in the first chapter, for example, just to break out of your own mental frameworks, really just wild stuff. He'll tell you to walk backwards while counting down from a hundred and think about some problem that you're struggling with and there's all these kind of odd things. But the number of ideas per page I've found on that book is extremely high. The concepts about how social interaction works and how things like status and so on play into your social behavior are super important. And they made every kind of fully deployed engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you kind of read people better and interact with them better and become more conscious of how you are coming across and just modulate that.”
Publisher
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05 / belief

I mean, I know that the AR-Labs are hiring forward deployed engineers now, they're building forward deployed engineering teams and they could make it work, but I think there's going to be key differences.

“I mean, I know that the AR-Labs are hiring forward deployed engineers now, they're building forward deployed engineering teams and they could make it work, but I think there's going to be key differences.”
Publisher
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07 / belief

I don't recall the exact stat, but we did ramp up production, I think at least 4X that 1 year, which I mean obviously, they did this and we just helped with it.

“I don't recall the exact stat, but we did ramp up production, I think at least 4X that 1 year, which I mean obviously, they did this and we just helped with it.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

08 / belief

I think the only reason the US is ahead of China and the space race is because SpaceX just is one company that just has been doing this for a long time.

“I think the only reason the US is ahead of China and the space race is because SpaceX just is one company that just has been doing this for a long time.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / belief

I think that's a way to sort of the left of what the median American would say, I think the median American would say it's fine to work on defense stuff within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things, and so there was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just hang on, it's not like working on defense is inherently evil, it's actually a pretty interesting thing.

“I think that's a way to sort of the left of what the median American would say, I think the median American would say it's fine to work on defense stuff within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things, and so there was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just hang on, it's not like working on defense is inherently evil, it's actually a pretty interesting thing.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / belief

I think when you hire out, especially not to pick on them, but I think if you hired a [inaudible 01:00:17] right, it's like people want a 400K a year job, they would like to work a certain number of hours, they would like to ship some code and then go home, that's basically the model that you get accustomed to even if you don't intend to when you work at a big company. And so if you hire out of that for a really small startup, it can be really challenging because a lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like, "No, I'm really going to, I'm work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working, and I'm not just going to check my boxes, I'm actually going to look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve.

“I think when you hire out, especially not to pick on them, but I think if you hired a [inaudible 01:00:17] right, it's like people want a 400K a year job, they would like to work a certain number of hours, they would like to ship some code and then go home, that's basically the model that you get accustomed to even if you don't intend to when you work at a big company. And so if you hire out of that for a really small startup, it can be really challenging because a lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like, "No, I'm really going to, I'm work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working, and I'm not just going to check my boxes, I'm actually going to look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve.”
Publisher
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11 / belief

I think when you zoom into particular things, they can be very difficult questions and there have been a bunch of those in the last couple of years.

“I think when you zoom into particular things, they can be very difficult questions and there have been a bunch of those in the last couple of years.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

12 / uncertainty

First of all, the hiring bar is just basically hiring for leaders in a lot of different ways, to this, I don't know, forge for founders where they're working with a company solving a real problem, building a real product that makes money, and then those are the people that become the PMs at Palantir and then they go on to leave and that's why 30% of them end up starting companies, I'm surprised it's not higher, or become first PMs at other companies or heads of product.

“First of all, the hiring bar is just basically hiring for leaders in a lot of different ways, to this, I don't know, forge for founders where they're working with a company solving a real problem, building a real product that makes money, and then those are the people that become the PMs at Palantir and then they go on to leave and that's why 30% of them end up starting companies, I'm surprised it's not higher, or become first PMs at other companies or heads of product.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / commitment

One is how hardcore to go potentially with their own forward deployed operation. And then two is just how and a company I know is actually doing this, how far to go with one company's problem and invest in just like we are going to nail solving this one customer's problem with the hope that this is something we can abstract and sell as a big platform.

“One is how hardcore to go potentially with their own forward deployed operation. And then two is just how and a company I know is actually doing this, how far to go with one company's problem and invest in just like we are going to nail solving this one customer's problem with the hope that this is something we can abstract and sell as a big platform.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / belief

I think a lot of the time companies will say, "This person's a forward deployed engineer," but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect, or they're not necessarily building anything to know, but they're just listening and trying to find a way of deploying the existing product.

“I think a lot of the time companies will say, "This person's a forward deployed engineer," but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect, or they're not necessarily building anything to know, but they're just listening and trying to find a way of deploying the existing product.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / belief

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.

“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.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

20 / belief

There's a stat that I didn't share that I think is really interesting, and when you look at YC founders and where they've come from, I think you maybe shared in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size.

“There's a stat that I didn't share that I think is really interesting, and when you look at YC founders and where they've come from, I think you maybe shared in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

21 / preference

Are you okay with that?" And the attitude, which again I think is a very founder friendly one is you need to be willing to just jump on a plane that night if that's the best thing to do for this customer and if it's going to get us to where it needs to be to win.

“Are you okay with that?" And the attitude, which again I think is a very founder friendly one is you need to be willing to just jump on a plane that night if that's the best thing to do for this customer and if it's going to get us to where it needs to be to win.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

22 / evaluation

" So it's this very graph-based way of thinking that also applies to things like fraud. So Gotham has been deployed against fraud, but if you look at Foundry, it doesn't actually emphasize that component so much because it turns out, let's say you're a B2B SaaS company, you're probably not doing that much graph-based analysis.

“" So it's this very graph-based way of thinking that also applies to things like fraud. So Gotham has been deployed against fraud, but if you look at Foundry, it doesn't actually emphasize that component so much because it turns out, let's say you're a B2B SaaS company, you're probably not doing that much graph-based analysis.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

23 / evaluation

I think you're right, and we can get more into it, but I think there was also a very concrete set of ways where that place was a training ground for founders.

“I think you're right, and we can get more into it, but I think there was also a very concrete set of ways where that place was a training ground for founders.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

24 / recommendation

You don't have to be interested in British monarchy or British history in order to enjoy them. They're actually some of the most interesting and insightful books I've read about power and how power works and politics and what the sacrifices that you might have to make if you want to be a successful king in that case.

“You don't have to be interested in British monarchy or British history in order to enjoy them. They're actually some of the most interesting and insightful books I've read about power and how power works and politics and what the sacrifices that you might have to make if you want to be a successful king in that case.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

25 / evaluation

What you're missing is that's potentially intentional because it actually draws in the people they really want. It makes me think about, I was involved in creating the core values at Airbnb and something that we learned at going through that process is, when you define the values for your company, it's really important to clarify who this is not for, exactly as you described, which feels unnatural.

“What you're missing is that's potentially intentional because it actually draws in the people they really want. It makes me think about, I was involved in creating the core values at Airbnb and something that we learned at going through that process is, when you define the values for your company, it's really important to clarify who this is not for, exactly as you described, which feels unnatural.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

26 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

28 / evaluation

You basically could not become a PM any other way. So as an example, when I mentioned earlier the thing that we built for the plane factory, the person who was managing that deployment, she later became the PM for ontology, and it was just because she'd kind of proven her method in the field.

“You basically could not become a PM any other way. So as an example, when I mentioned earlier the thing that we built for the plane factory, the person who was managing that deployment, she later became the PM for ontology, and it was just because she'd kind of proven her method in the field.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

29 / evaluation

Not exactly, because the way that other companies work is not going to be using this same set of concepts, but the overall idea of taking a bunch of tables, and then mapping them to human understandable concepts was a very powerful one.

“Not exactly, because the way that other companies work is not going to be using this same set of concepts, but the overall idea of taking a bunch of tables, and then mapping them to human understandable concepts was a very powerful one.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

30 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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