Shyam Sankar
speaker
319 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 May
Shyam Sankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So this friend was like, there's this place, Orlando. I live in LA. There's this place, Orlando. All the theme parks are moving there. I need someone I can trust there. And that's how we ended up in Orlando selling knickknacks to theme parks, which was fantastic. For me, it was fantastic. My after-school care program was really mom would pick me up from school.
We'd go to SeaWorld so she could restock the shelves. And I'd be petting the stingrays. So I thought that was normal. I didn't quite realize what a unique experience it was. Now, there were some downsides to this. Some of the knickknacks we sold were t-shirts. And until I was old enough to read, I was dressed in all of the t-shirt misprints. It didn't say Shamu. It would say Tamu.
It's like everything that went wrong, that was free clothes I got to have. But it was also really a privilege to grow up in the shadow of the Space Coast. Orlando is close enough that in elementary school, you would file out to the courtyard to watch the shuttle launch. You would wake up Saturday mornings to a double sonic boom of the shuttle reentering.
And it gave you a visceral sense of scientific progress, American prosperity, what we can do collectively when we put our mind to it. Wow.
He is my hero.
At a pretty early age, because my dad, in some sense, you could say, was also an entrepreneur. And he was always encouraging me to think about these things. And I worked at his pharmacy in Orlando as a child in high school. I started programming. 11th grade, I started programming professionally and kept doing that.
I actually dropped out of Cornell for a hot minute there to build a company and try to get going with it. But I've always been dabbling in these sorts of efforts. And I knew that ultimately I wanted to be part of creating something new, being part of an early founding team.
And really, the reason I went from Cornell to Stanford in 2003 can be hard to remember, but even Google didn't recruit on the Cornell campus. Most of my technical classmates, unfortunately, went into consulting and banking. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the same thing as creating.
And so I had to find some way, some mechanism to get to the West Coast to be with a bunch of other people who really thought of building as the primary purpose of their life's mission. So within two months of being at Stanford, I had a full-time job as the fifth employee at a startup called Zoom with an X that did international money transfer. It was seed funded by Peter Thiel.
And my interviews were with Rolof Botha and Keith Reboy, who are founding members of the PayPal mafia. And that's how I kind of got started in that world.
So I had been working at Zoom for almost three years. And one of the colleagues I was working with said, you know, there's this company that just sounds perfect for you. It's a small group of people. At the time, it was 12 people. And my freshman room dorm mate at Stanford is one of the co-founders. No kidding? So he put me in touch with Joe, and Joe hired me. That's how I got started.
It was honestly something much smaller. I mean, it was still ambitious in the sense that this group of folks wanted to work on problems to help a handful of institutions in the world with counterterrorism.
And we had this idea that in the discourse, if we can remember what it was like immediately post 9-11, it was really the political discourse was something like, what matters more, security or privacy? And it's like, to us as engineers, that sounded stupid. Like, don't both of those things matter? And so... Politicians, they debate where should you be on the efficient frontier?
Should we trade off this to have more of this or whatever? But engineers, they build things so you can have more of both.
And so who's going to build the actual technology that allows us to protect the data so that we can maximize what we can share, so that there's never going to be dots that we can't connect again, and do so in a way that the American people have confidence in and can believe in, and recognizing that a solution that was really going to do that would have to span countries.
You know, one of the proudest operations that we were involved in was defeating an ISIS cell in Iraq that had a downed US drone that they were going to load with explosives and bring to a hospital, explode it, and then blame it on the coalition. And to solve that problem, it required intel from the Danes, the Americans, and the Brits. You know, and how does that work historically?
Hopefully you have friends at each of these services and you're all going to share information and it gets through the foreign disclosure process. And, you know, everything in that methodology is set up so that we lose. You're not going to be able to do it fast enough to intervene.
But, you know, our technology enabled that to happen machine to machine in a way that before they could get the drone out of their garage, they were gone. Wow.
Yeah. Well, yeah, at this point, so we do much more than counterterrorism, as you're pointing out. The business, there's two sides of it. There's the government side and the commercial side. OK. And it's about 50-50. which is unusual, I think, for reasons we'll maybe get into later. But the commercial side, it's 50 different industries, energy and mining, insurance, pharmaceuticals.
And the government side, most of what we're well known for is defense and intelligence. Absolutely, that's two-thirds of the business. But also health, the IRS, tax fraud, Justice Department, helping these organizations run themselves better. And what the technology really does, you can think about it as like an operating system for an organization. It allows you to actually see yourself.
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