The Shawn Ryan Show
#190 Shyam Sankar - Chief Technology Officer of Palantir: The Future of Warfare
10 Apr 2025
Who is Shyam Sankar and what is his background?
Yeah. Is he still with us today? He passed away in 21. I'm sorry to hear that. Sorry to hear that. So you grew up, I mean, you're an entrepreneur. When did the entrepreneurial mindset kind of kick in for you?
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.
Man, it seems like all you guys know each other pretty well. You and how did you meet Joe?
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.
Wow. I love talking to him, man. He's such a fascinating guy. So what was Palantir at the start, at the beginning?
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