How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)
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What does Palantir actually do and why does it matter?
30% of PMs that leave Palantir start in a company. Just give us a picture of what what
the people are like. I feel like they screened really hard for a few traits in particular. One is like very independent-minded people who weren't afraid to push back. Two is people
with broader intellectual interests. What's the difference between say a PM at Palantir versus a traditional PM?
They were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployment engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way. There's two types of engineer apparently. So there's one that works on the core products, and they're a traditional software engineer. There was a different type of engineer, which you sent into the field, right? You would spend maybe Monday to Thursday. And you would actually go into the building where the customer worked, and you would work alongside them, you would literally get a dustbar. And so that engineer became known as the forward deployed engineer.
What's something that you believe that most other people don't? I think this is somewhat contrarian view within tagging. Today, my guest is Nabil Kureshi. Nabeel is a founder, a writer, a researcher, and an engineer. He was recently a visiting scholar researching AI policy at the Mercatus Center alongside Tyler Cohen. At one point, he worked with the National Institute of Health and major clinical centers to create the largest medical data set in the world. He worked at the Bank of England for a bit. He was a founding member and VP of Business Development at Go Cardless, one of Europe's biggest financial technology unicorns. And most related to the topic of this conversation, Nabil spent almost eight years at Palantir as a forward-deployed engineer, working on public health projects with US federal agencies, including public health services during the COVID-19 response and applied AI in drug discovery.
Whether you are a fan of Palantir or hate everything that they do, they are an important and fast-growing company that is pumping out incredible product leaders, as you'll hear more than any. Other company in the world. So it is worth studying and understanding. I've never heard an in-depth conversation digging into how they operate, build product, hire, and we're able to scale from a primarily services business to a software business. So I am very excited to bring you this inside look. In our conversation, we go deep into what the heck does Palantir even do? Why getting good at managing lots of data is an underappreciated secret to their success. A look at The unique forward-deployed engineer role that they innovated and what other companies can borrow from their insights here.
Also, how they hire and how they build amazing product leaders, plus a ton of advice on talking to customers, building products, and starting companies. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a bunch of amazing products for free for a year, including Superhuman, Notion. linear, perplexity, granola, and more. Check it out at lenny's newsletter dot com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Nabil Kureshi. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and skim provisioning.
That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered. By WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercell, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does Palantir actually do and why does it matter?
0:00–11:10
2
How does Palantir’s unique hiring process shape its culture?
11:10–21:52
3
What are forward‑deployed engineers and why are they a game‑changer?
21:52–32:20
4
How do Gotham and Foundry differ and what problems do they solve?
32:20–42:33
5
Why is the ontology‑first data model so powerful for LLMs?
42:33–53:59
6
What moral questions arise from Palantir’s work with governments?
53:59–1:04:56
7
What lessons from Palantir can founders apply to their own startups?
1:04:56–1:19:16
8
How can product managers at Palantir succeed without traditional PM titles?
1:19:16–1:37:24
Speakers
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