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 In-Q-Tel brought a fresh, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed cohort of CIA analysts out to the West Coast. We were maybe 20 people at the time. We were one of the stops along the way. And she saw the demo, and she's like, I need this. Why don't we have this? In fact, I joined this organization because I thought I'd be having James Bond technology. And somehow I have WordPerfect and Lotus Notes.
And she organized a day on her own. I think she was maybe like a GS-12. On her own, she organized a day of... Three meetings where more than 200 analysts came to see this thing. At some point, the deep state, the IT people got wind of this and came to this meeting trying to shut it down, trying to dampen the excitement. But the analysts were just in revolt. Like, why can't we have a pilot?
Why can't we try this out? And that broke the floodgates open for us. So years. I probably did 300 demonstrations and meetings trying to get a single pilot. And that one day, she made it all happen.
It was always about defense. I mean, I'm very happy we have a commercial business. It powers a lot of innovation. And frankly, a lot of the things we learn in commercial, we're able to bring over to give the government decisive advantages. We're able to amortize the R&D. Ideas that BP or Avis have make the Army better. That's one way of thinking about it.
But we really started because we cared about the government mission. And we honestly would not have built a commercial business except for the fact that the government was so slow and so hard that we were going to go broke if we just stuck by being purely a government company. Wow.
A desire to build all this stuff themselves. We don't need this. We don't need these outsiders. They don't know our stuff. I'll reason by analogy. So I recently met someone who was in Kwajalein. And I think it was 2014 when SpaceX was launching their early rockets. And Elon was one launch, he had three failures, and he was one launch away from losing the whole business.
And he said, I was there, and the SpaceX facility is right next to the Boeing facility. And you go to the SpaceX facility, and you compare it to the Boeing. The Boeing facility is like a clean room. You're wearing a bunny suit. It looks so sophisticated. SpaceX, it's open air, parts on a table, things are rusting. And you're just like, these guys are never going to make it.
They don't know what they're doing. But you fundamentally misunderstood what was happening there. It's not, where are they today? It's, what's the first derivative? How quickly are they improving? How good is that team? And that is the world's best team, right? And look what's possible now. Our launch capability is unmatched. And the price performance that Elon is able to deliver.
When I was a kid growing up, Shuttle, it used to cost $50,000 per kilogram to get to orbit. With Starship Heavy Reuse, it'll be 10 to 20 bucks I mean, it's just orders of magnitude difference, right? And I think there was something like that in the early days for us, which is, this seems like a joke. Who are these kids running around in shorts?
You know, I remember one early meeting I had in the Pentagon, I didn't wear a tie. I mean, I wore a suit, everything except for a tie. First 30 minutes of the meeting, I just got dressed down for how disrespectful it was to show up without a tie. Look, I always wear a tie now. I've learned my lesson. But I think we lost the plot. The substance is the code, not the quality of my tie.
It's the quality of the code.
There was. There was a lot of pushback. There's a lot of – kind of fake partnerships, like, hey, let's bring you in for some small, tiny amount of work share that will actually be zero. We don't really need you, is the vibe. But I would say, in fairness, when we first started, we thought the primes would be our big competitors.
What I didn't realize is actually the government was our big competitor. The way that the government structured you have these program offices and they have the perfect five-year, 10-year plan. They kind of just want to lock in their plan. And we were a threat that disrupted all of their well-laid plans. Instead of adopting us, you know, they wanted to reject us.
And so if you really look at the early days of Palantir, all of our adoption was driven from the field back. You know, so all of our attempts to get people in DC really interested in what we're doing, it was in benefit of hindsight, was wasted time. You know, our first deployment, was with Tent Group as they took over Siege of Sotaph AP in Balad.
And it's because the commander, the colonel, was just like, three days before deploying, he called us up. We had been showing him our software. He's like, well, I don't know. Like, I don't buy things. I'm a warfighter. I don't buy things. And three days before he was going, he just had that feeling, like, I need this.
Like, if you guys come, drive for Fort Carson, I'll palletize your servers, and I'll give you four seats. And that's what happened. We just drove all our stuff over there, flew over. For two weeks, the Krusty Warren officers were like, why do I have to find housing for these 22-year-olds? Two weeks. But after that, we earned our keep. They're like, I know why they're here. You were over there?
I didn't go on that trip, but Matt Grimm, who is one of the co-founders of Andral, was working for me at the time. He went over on that trip. Greg Barbaccia, who's now the federal government CIO, he was one of our first guys on the ground in Balad. But you've been over there? Yeah. What was that like for you? It was eye-opening.
I mean, most of my time I spent at Leatherneck, so in Hellmond, working with the Marines. Nice place. I've been there. Dicey spot. What year? That was 2012, or 2011.
I mean, we would have these... It's like a cup of motivation undersells it. It's like a water tank of motivation. You have these people. They come back from mission. They tell you what happened. They tell you their ideas, their feature requests. And you just have unbounded energy to code right there. You're just in a plywood little setup writing code.
And OK, I'm going to have something better for you for tomorrow. And you just do that again and again, that the whole product development life cycle, that was really, I was the first forward deployed engineer at Palantir, which investors hated because they thought it was a service business, not how you're supposed to do software.
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