Joe Lonsdale

We started Palantir with Stefan and I. I got about a bunch of my friends who were in PhD computer science programs one summer to come and sketch and draw it up with us. And they all thought we were totally crazy. So we couldn't convince them to join. A few of them joined a few years later. What is Palantir?

We started Palantir with Stefan and I. I got about a bunch of my friends who were in PhD computer science programs one summer to come and sketch and draw it up with us. And they all thought we were totally crazy. So we couldn't convince them to join. A few of them joined a few years later. What is Palantir?

We started Palantir with Stefan and I. I got about a bunch of my friends who were in PhD computer science programs one summer to come and sketch and draw it up with us. And they all thought we were totally crazy. So we couldn't convince them to join. A few of them joined a few years later. What is Palantir?

At a very high level, Palantir is an effort to take the very top technology culture in Silicon Valley and apply it to solve the most important problems in these institutions that didn't have tech cultures or the intelligence and defense world. But what is it actually doing? There was really initially four pillars of Palantir. It was data integration,

At a very high level, Palantir is an effort to take the very top technology culture in Silicon Valley and apply it to solve the most important problems in these institutions that didn't have tech cultures or the intelligence and defense world. But what is it actually doing? There was really initially four pillars of Palantir. It was data integration,

At a very high level, Palantir is an effort to take the very top technology culture in Silicon Valley and apply it to solve the most important problems in these institutions that didn't have tech cultures or the intelligence and defense world. But what is it actually doing? There was really initially four pillars of Palantir. It was data integration,

search discovery analysis, knowledge management, and collaboration. Each of those is a really big, hard product. So what happens if you have a government department? At the time, government was spending, say, $36 billion gathering data. So you're you. It's your job. There's like 5,000 databases. There's all sorts of signals and humans and other things coming in.

search discovery analysis, knowledge management, and collaboration. Each of those is a really big, hard product. So what happens if you have a government department? At the time, government was spending, say, $36 billion gathering data. So you're you. It's your job. There's like 5,000 databases. There's all sorts of signals and humans and other things coming in.

search discovery analysis, knowledge management, and collaboration. Each of those is a really big, hard product. So what happens if you have a government department? At the time, government was spending, say, $36 billion gathering data. So you're you. It's your job. There's like 5,000 databases. There's all sorts of signals and humans and other things coming in.

There's all sorts of rules about how you access this database, what you're allowed to see, depending on the context. What the hell do you do sitting in the middle of that? That's a weird, crazy problem. And you're a smart guy, but you're not a computer scientist. And so our job is to empower you.

There's all sorts of rules about how you access this database, what you're allowed to see, depending on the context. What the hell do you do sitting in the middle of that? That's a weird, crazy problem. And you're a smart guy, but you're not a computer scientist. And so our job is to empower you.

There's all sorts of rules about how you access this database, what you're allowed to see, depending on the context. What the hell do you do sitting in the middle of that? That's a weird, crazy problem. And you're a smart guy, but you're not a computer scientist. And so our job is to empower you.

Our job is to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all could be seen together, let you ask simple questions like, okay, take this guy we found next to Sam Bin Laden, show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay, now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? What do we know about them?

Our job is to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all could be seen together, let you ask simple questions like, okay, take this guy we found next to Sam Bin Laden, show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay, now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? What do we know about them?

Our job is to hook up to all the databases, integrate it so it all could be seen together, let you ask simple questions like, okay, take this guy we found next to Sam Bin Laden, show me any links to anyone else around him based on these contexts. Okay, now take those guys and monitor them. Do they show up in any databases? What do we know about them?

and just be able to kind of iteratively explore and analyze while not breaking the rules on what you're allowed to see and bringing things in more easily. So it's a hard problem to solve.

and just be able to kind of iteratively explore and analyze while not breaking the rules on what you're allowed to see and bringing things in more easily. So it's a hard problem to solve.

and just be able to kind of iteratively explore and analyze while not breaking the rules on what you're allowed to see and bringing things in more easily. So it's a hard problem to solve.

So Palantir today is different than Palantir then. Palantir then was all about organizing this information to extend human intelligence into this massive amount of data. Because there's no way that any single human is going to be able to keep 5,000, 20,000 databases of stuff in different formats in their mind at a time.

So Palantir today is different than Palantir then. Palantir then was all about organizing this information to extend human intelligence into this massive amount of data. Because there's no way that any single human is going to be able to keep 5,000, 20,000 databases of stuff in different formats in their mind at a time.