👋 Howdy to the 1,333 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 152,112-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

❤️‍🔥 Building Just-In-Time Performance Management. An interview with Barbra Gago, Founder & CEO at Pando.
💫 Creating Multiplayer & Eating Up Market Share With Figma. The story of the next stage of one of today's greatest startup stories.
✨ Arctic Vaults, AI Agents & The Future Of Dev Tools. An interview with Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director of Product Management at Google.

PARTNERS 💫

AI-native CRM.

Attio is the CRM for the AI era. Connect your email, and Attio instantly builds your CRM with enriched, actionable data.

Then unleash the full power of the platform—from AI-powered automations to research agents, Attio can handle some of your most complex operational processes like finding key decision-makers and triaging leads.

Join industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and more. Start for free.

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Today, I bring to you my deepest deep dive, ~6,000 words on the story of Alex Karp and Palantir. It was a fascinating one to write, and I am sure you’re going to love it. A quick note from me: this piece will actually be the last deep dive I will write for 8 weeks. I've noticed that I'm getting burned out from too much work and need to take some time to refresh my mind, body, and soul. This tweet sums it up a little as well.

I wrote these pieces, you see, in my spare time away from being CEO of my startup, Athyna. A piece like today’s might take me 20 hours. I type these words at 6:44 on Sunday night, preparing to leave for the movies at seven and for the piece to ship at nine. I’ve written literally all weekend. So for the next couple of months, I will only ship out a newsletter once a week and half of them will be interviews, half guest posts. This will give me the break that I need to come back fit, fresh and firing on all cylinders. I love this newsletter, and I love that you read it. So I want to make sure I am always at my best for the both of us. Anywho, that’s it for now. Enjoy this post and see you in a bit!

DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

Middle-earth, Big Brother & A Philosopher King: The Palantir Story

Palantír, etymologically speaking, means ‘to keep watch from afar.’ To some Palantian bulls today, this can be loosely translated to being a guardian angel. A benevolent entity that’s forever keeping us safe. To the bears, it means Big Brother. And no, not the one with the intruders. The dystopic, Orwellian kind right out of the pages of 1984. To me, the jury is still out.

The founder of Palantir, Alex Karp, is akin to Cosmo Kramer with a PhD in philosophy and clearance to brief the Pentagon. He appears, makes a bold or baffling statement, then disappears again—part CEO, part myth. You’re never quite sure who he is or what he does. And maybe that’s the point.

Today, it’s my job to change that. My aim is to demystify both Palantir and some of the grey matter inner workings of its founder, Alex. In preparation for this deep dive, only moments ago, I finished Alex’s new book: The Technological Republic. An ode to an American and technological landscape unlike anything I have ever read. More on that later.

For now, let's delve into the fascinating story of Palantir, one of the most contentious companies in recent living memory.

Palantír = ‘palan’ (far), ‘tir’ (keep watch)

When I mentioned etymology in our introduction, you may have wondered what I was talking about. You won’t find the term in a regular Google Translate search. The name comes from the Quenya language, one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented Elvish languages. In the world-building of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Quenya isn’t any old elvish language; it’s the language of the High Elves.

During the time of The Lord of the Rings, it was an old language, mainly used for ceremony, lore, and poetry. Sindarin was more common for everyday Elvish conversation. Think of it in the way that we speak English today, but Latin in some ceremonial examples. The Palantír itself is a seeing stone—a lava lamp-looking, magical crystal orb that allows users to communicate across vast distances and see events (past, present, and sometimes future) in other parts of the world.

If you are like me, you are probably sick of this analogy by now. So let’s journey from the make-believe back into reality, with a college friendship that would prove meaningful to the future of our sovereignty.

A PayPal Mafia connection

Alex Karp recently stated that, "The death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir.” A stunning statement from the CEO of a Fortune 500 technology CEO. But how did we get here? It all started in 2023, with a young Peter Thiel, fresh off PayPal’s sale, setting out to build software that could “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.”

In 2004, a then 35-year-old Thiel funded the creation of a prototype of what Palantir may look like, built by PayPal engineer Nathan Gettings and Stanford students Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. That same year, Thiel would hire Karp, a former colleague of his from Stanford Law, as the firm's first chief executive. All five men would be considered the co-founders of Palantir.

For a company that is now one of the darlings of the technology world—the current price-to-earnings of Palantir at time of writing is ~600x (Google’s is 19x by comparison)—they struggled to find investors early on. Silicon Valley legend, and Sequoia Capital chairman, Michael Moritz, was reported to have been so bored with the initial pitch that he drew dicks doodles on his notebook through the entire conversation.

Alongside their first external backing, Thiel would go on to write a much larger check of $30 million in fresh funding on behalf of himself and his now vaunted venture firm, Founders Fund.

By this point, Palantir, a company that builds data platforms to combat bad actors, was well and truly established and was quite literally inside the walls of the intelligence community itself.

The early product, in a nutshell

A lot of people have now heard the name ‘Palantir,’ but what they do is still somewhat of a black box. In the early days, Palantir had a singular focus: to sell products to governments to keep the United States and its allies safe. That, in the very early days, looked like a product called Gotham, an ultra-secret platform for spies, soldiers, and police. Gotham was essentially an intelligence OS helping connect siloed databases to visualise networks of bad actors. Head to their landing page for Gotham, and the real value proposition will be clear to see: Powering the kill chain.

_{*Palantir get credited (rightly or wrongly) for helping to take out Osama Bin Laden. While Palantir Technologies' software and data analysis tools are reported to have played a role in the intelligence gathering that led to the location of Osama bin Laden, the company did not directly kill him, nor do they discuss the level of their involvement.}

When I take a look at their product frames today, it looks like Google Maps meets a bad guy CRM with a left-to-right, pipeline-staged flow of targets. It’s like an enterprise full of death. This is now, but we are talking about then, when their product’s value was in ingesting vast amounts of data, and making it all make sense. The engineers were working at the edge of what was technically possible with Gotham—mixing relational databases, graph tech, and UI customisation tools years ahead of their time.

In the early days, analysts often viewed Palantir as a consulting firm. ‘EY of war’ or some such notion. The idea was that a FDE would come in and build a novel solution that would ingest, connect, and visualise datasets from a staggering variety of formats: PDFs, chat transcripts, phone logs, GPS records, etc.

The magic was in link analysis, drawing connections between these disparate data points, like suspects, phone calls, locations, and bank accounts. If this sounds like the KPMG of the killing zone, it was. Palantir, though, over time, would roll any useful-for-all technology it built into its global platform, giving the product more universality, and moving Palantir further away from Deathloitte (consulting) and closer to Slaughterforce (platform).

_{*If you are expecting me to stop with the consulting anaolgies here, you are in for a long read. I came prepared.}

This early product looked more like middleware than something a Figmanian product design wizard would create; one part data cleaning, one part knowledge graph, and one part UI hackathon. The learning curve was quite brutal. But it worked. And once you were in, the product made you feel like you had superpowers, connecting dots others missed. Dots that would likely save countless lives in the process.

Finding PWF (Product-Warzone-Fit)

A mid-2010s TechCrunch piece, citing leaked documents from 2013, showed that Palantir were working with a who’s who of governmental and military organisations. From the CIA, DHS, and FBI, to the Marine Corps, Air Force, and even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

They were expanding their footprint rapidly, and the once VC-repellent startup, off the success of their first winning product, Gotham, was now starting to become the belle of the private markets ball. And they were just getting started. By the midway point of the decade, with the high-level client list growing, the budding intelligence juggernaut had raised a total of somewhere north of $1.2 billion and was rumoured to have had a private market valuation of $20 billion. Here is a snapshot of the rounds raised in the formative years from the mid-2000s to mid-2010s.

By this point, Palantir wasn’t just raising big rounds—it was landing mission-critical wins in the field. In Afghanistan, for example, their platform was used by U.S. troops to uncover IED networks. By pulling together phone logs, safehouse locals, vehicle movements, and prior attacks, soldiers could finally make sense of enemy patterns. One commander reportedly called it “the only software that actually works in theatre.”

But it wasn’t just military actions where Palantir were excelling. In New Orleans, Palantir (controversially) partnered with local police to try and stem gang retaliation shootings. The system helped detectives identify which affiliations were most likely to escalate, and which weren’t worth chasing.

It was messy, expensive, and barely scalable. But it worked. In that moment, Palantir wasn’t a product company. It was a human-plus-machine strike force embedded at the edge of government operations, outperforming legacy vendors one case file at a time.

From Gotham to Foundry (From spies to Salesforce)

By the mid-2010s 2010s Palantir looked like a success by any metric. Growing revenue, deepening influence, and investors lining up to take part. But their next move was unconventional. If they cut their teeth with Gotham, their ultra-secret platform for spies, soldiers, and police, the follow-up was to turn to the commercial market.

Their next act would be Foundry, a newer platform that took Gotham’s DNA and repackaged it for enterprises like Airbus and Morgan Stanley, promising any big company ‘Palantir-grade’ data integration without needing a room full of forward-deployed mega-nerds to make it work.

The early stages of growth in the commercial space proved challenging, though, with their first product, Palantir Metropolis, an “unmitigated failure” (even if Joe Lonsdale disagrees). Palantir also had to learn a proper enterprise GTM market function. They needed to manage long procurement cycles (which I guess they were somewhat used to), the need for glossy UIs, and the easy integrations, areas where upstarts like Snowflake or Tableau had already been excelling.

Since no one builds technology for governments and militaries, you can often get away with a duct-taped product approach.

“To do things that do not scale,” as Brian Chesky would put can be powerful, but to enter the commercial market, they needed some level of scalability. The key unlock for Palantir’s commercial ambitions wasn’t just Foundry; it was a lesser-known tool called Apollo. Think of Apollo as the silent operator behind the scenes: it lets Palantir deploy software anywhere—cloud, on-prem, air-gapped servers in bunkers—and update it continuously. In other words, it turned Foundry from a big, clunky install into a flexible, enterprise-grade platform. Suddenly, companies didn’t need to host Palantir’s FDEs to make it work. That was the moment things started to scale.

And it paid off. Airbus rebuilt its entire digital factory system on Foundry (see the full impact study here). “We are saving no less than one aircraft out of service per day, largely based on predictive alerting, but also in relation to expediency and heightened accuracy,” the Director of MX Ops Planning & Analytics would say. If that sounds like gobbledygook (/ˈɡɒb(ə)ldɪɡuːk/) to you, don’t worry, me as well. I asked ChatCPT to reframe this quote as if it were needing to be explained to a 3-year-old, and the results were quite good.

That’s not all. BP ran Foundry across its hundreds of rigs to optimise oilfield output. And Palantir even landed a spot inside Ferrari’s F1 operations team. Not bad for a company that used to only brief three-letter agencies behind closed doors.

The new Military (Tech) Industrial Complex

If the European Renaissance between the 14th and 17th centuries was a period—or ‘rebirth’—of interest in art, literature, and philosophy, then the period we are entering today may be a similar resurgence in interest in defence-related startups. Defence was a dirty word in technology in the early days of Palantir; they were a relative outlier when courting the Pentagon.

But now other players have entered the space (and space), such as the likes of Anduril—founded by ex-Palantirians, and also named in Quenya, after Aragorn’s sword, Andúril, the Flame of the West—SpaceX, and even OpenAI. If Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman owned the defence budgets of the early part of this century and the latter part of the last, then you can absolutely expect the new big four of Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenAI will control a large part of the next.

These firms are now beginning to blur the line between where Sand Hill Road ends and the military-industrial complex begins. In 2025, Palantir joined SpaceX and Anduril in pitching a futuristic ‘Golden Dome’ missile-defence shield–a SpaceX-led plan for hundreds of sensor satellites and AI targeting, sold on a subscription model rather than the Pentagon’s traditional procurement. Not only is there money to be made for these new entrants into the space, the chances are the celebrity combination of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey and Alex Karp are likely inspire the next generations of builders to turn create the next generation of Team America: World Police, rather than an app that helps you checkout from your online shopping cart 0.001% faster.

Palantir’s journey is often framed as David vs Goliath—a startup taking on defence giants of the past. In fact, Palantir had to sue the U.S. Army in 2016 just to be allowed to compete on a major intel system contract, arguing the Army unfairly favoured its usual vendors. Palantir won that case, a landmark that cracked open the door for tech companies in defence. I, for one, am all for it. I had ChatGPT whip up a quick comparison chart for us below.

These new kids aren’t just playing the same game better—they’re playing a completely different game. While the old primes build once and bill forever, the new breed ships code weekly, with AI, autonomous systems, and global-scale infrastructure. And while the old guard relies on 1970s procurement doctrine, the new players run like software startups: agile, iterative, accountable to outcomes, not process.

In a world where warfare is turning invisible (cyber), autonomous (drones), and predictive (AI), it won’t be the company with the biggest missile that wins. It’ll be the one with the best model weights. The New Age of Defence has begun.

Alex Karp, Philosopher King

The New York City-born son of a Jewish pediatrician and an African American artist, Alexander Caedmon Karp (born October 2, 1967) is one of the most fascinating men in the world. He is a dyslexic, half-black, half-Jewish, populist-left, single at 56, ski-obsessed, modern-day philosopher.

Dr. Karp, as his Palentirian (they call them that) disciples know him, is part-man, part-monk. A man who spends his days doing Tai chi, skiing across a number of his resort side holiday homes, and killing bad guys (allegedly). He is a man just as comfortable discussing German poetry as he is analysing geopolitical tensions. Time magazine, after including him in the 2025 edition of the world's 100 most influential people, would call Dr. Karp "the embodiment of a new kind of Silicon Valley billionaire: an unashamed techno-nationalist who evangelizes Western power."

Alex was raised in a heavily progressive, ‘leftist’ family, and took much of his political leanings from his parents, who were activists in his childhood, fighting for civil rights by day and social justice by night. For someone who has spent his formative years working side by side with right-wing figure Thiel, you’d be surprised to know he still leans left, having recently donated to the Harris campaign during the 2024 election.

Alex Karp’s politics are unique. As I mentioned in the introduction, in preparation for this piece, I read Dr. Karp’s new book, The Technological Republic, and to break the fourth wall for a moment here, he may be my spirit animal. I believe he is one of the true leaders today who is principled enough to stand up for what they believe in. You may not like what he says, but I, for one, am glad that at least someone is out there creating conversation. Creating debate.

To understand Alex Karp’s politics, you have to start in the seminar halls of Frankfurt, at one of Europe’s most serious philosophy schools, where people sit around debating big questions like power, truth, and what makes a just society. His main teacher? A famous German thinker named Jürgen Habermas, basically the Yoda of political philosophy.

It wasn’t your typical college education. Think less 'frat partying' and more 'arguing about morality in four languages.' That time shaped Karp’s brain in a big way. He came out of it not as a left-wing activist or a right-wing hardliner, but as someone who sees the world through his own bespoke lens.

One of the things I found interesting about Alex is his harsh assessment of the current technology landscape. He believes that we are not building anything of substance anymore. His book hammers this point home, and really acts as a catch cry for people who want to build something meaningful in the world.

I can understand why the average young Stanford grad may not want to work at Palantir, which uses terms like “kill chain” on its website. But would it be a better, more values-driven life to go work at Meta, Google, TikTok, or Netflix? If you are acting with intellectual honesty, I’d say no. We can pretend as if bad guys in the world do not exist, but the fact of the matter is that they do, and the more I think about it, the more I believe in the mission of Palantir.

Another shockingly raw statement from Alex is his thoughts on ‘The West,’ an idea he frequently discusses in his book.

Alex is a progressive. A true left-leaning hippie. But, this statement would be shot down in many liberal circles around the world. But, is he wrong? And if he is wrong, how wrong is he? As someone who is liberal myself, I like to be accepting of all other peoples and their religions. And I have always somewhat subscribed to an idea I believe I heard from Sam Harris many years ago about the difficulty of the idea of ‘truth.’ The truth is really in the eye of the beholder.

But most of you reading this will also believe, I’m guessing, in basic human rights, an idea that Western values hold dear. And some other areas do not. Regardless of his stance and what you think of it, I appreciate that he has the courage to say it. And to be fair, I may agree with him.

Palantir’s long list of controversies

If you thought Alex Karp was controversial, he’s nothing compared to the broader societal and philosophical quandaries that Palantir stares down the barrel of on a daily basis. One of the first controversies arose in the early 2010s, when Palantir’s tools were used internally at JPMorgan Chase to monitor employees’ emails, calls and movements.

Around the same time, it was leaked that Palantir pitched cyber operations to discredit WikiLeaks and its supporters, including Glenn Greenwald. The proposal sparked an uproar, and Palantir quickly issued a public apology.

A system designed to track, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. This has now turned into their recently announced ‘ImmigrationOS.’

Palantir has also supported the Israeli Defence Forces with targeting and operational software. Its role in the Gaza conflict drew scrutiny amid allegations of war crimes and AI-enabled surveillance of civilians.

But the controversy doesn’t end there. To go really deep in my research, I even pivoted from controversy to conspiracy, listening to tin-hat foil wearers from the Candace Owens podcast to Sam Tripoli to understand what the kooky side of the internet thinks. And let me tell you, it’s dark.

I think it seems, from the outside looking in, that the conspiratorial-minded believe that Palantir founder, Peter Thiel, planted JD Vance into his seat in the White House as his meatspace avatar that he uses to control us by way of election nudging secretly, mass surveillance, military AI, and elite influence ops—all part of a Palantir-powered cathedral of soft authoritarianism. Dark AF right? SHell, some people think Peter Thiel is the literal Antichrist.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to paint Palantor in a pretty dark brush. I am very libertarian, but I am also not a total doomer when it comes to Trump and Palantir’s Big Brother-esque, Orwellian surveillance state.

At the end of the day, Palantir is either the last line of defence for Western civilisation, or the software stack for an authoritarian future. Maybe both. But in a world where the threats are increasingly asymmetric, invisible, and real-time, it’s no surprise that the most serious governments want Palantir in their corner.

The success playbook

• Win trust from the most demanding customer: If you can build tools that work in war zones and counterterrorism units, selling to a Fortune 500 looks like child’s play.

• Embed inside your customer’s operations: Don’t just sell software, sit next to the analyst using it. Palantir’s FDEs co-built the solution, making the product indispensable.

• Hire the zealots: Palantir hired not only the best engineers on the planet but also those who are ideologically aligned with the mission. These are super-employees.

• Secure long-term contracts: Focus on contracts that are sticky, high-margin, and nearly impossible to rip out. Defence and spending is recession-proof.

• Build products for problems: Gotham and Foundry weren’t designed to please users; they were built to solve mission-critical chaos. Function first, UX later.

• Run toward complexity, not away from it: While Silicon Valley chased consumer dopamine, Palantir went after hard problems; terrorism, pandemics, logistics at war-scale.

• Back yourself with ideological capital: Peter Thiel’s network gave Palantir more than cash; it gave them air cover, conviction, and powerful allies who share the mission.

• Create a mythos: Palantir cultivated secrecy, intellectual elitism, and anti-consensus swagger. The result? A company people argue about, and remember.

• Play the long game: Palantir stayed private for 17 years. No quarterly earnings pressure. Just slow, methodical, relentless product compounding.

Looking into the Palantír

Palantir was recently admitted into the S&P 500, and it seems that the company’s future cannot be brighter, with a market cap at the time of writing well north of $300 billion dollars. It’s a good time to be polishing up that kill chain for the Palantirians today.

But I also do not expect them ever to be far from controversy. A constant meme that reminds us of just how closely intertwined capitalism is with the afterlife today. I leave you with a note from Dr. Karp himself: “The future belongs not to those who style themselves as creators, or even to the merely brave, but to those who actually build something substantial and lasting.” Whether you like them or not, Alex Karp and Peter Thiel are doing just that.

Fun facts

• Middle-earthen-English: The name Middle-earth comes from the Old English “Middangeard”, meaning ‘the inhabited world between heaven and hell.’ The same root word that gave Norse mythology its “Midgard.”

• Welcome to The Shire: The company’s Palo Alto office features Lord of the Rings décor and is nicknamed the Shire (the Washington office is Rivendell).

• No sales team required: For years, Palantir bragged about having zero salespeople. Just engineers in suits pitching the Pentagon.

• IPO after 17 Years: Most unicorns IPO in 8 years. Palantir? Took 17. Karp thought markets were “too short-termist.”

Extra reading / learning

• How Tech Giants Turned Ukraine Into an AI War Lab - Feb, 2024

• Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want? - August, 2024

• Palantir - Is it a bubble? - January, 2025

And that’s it! Alex doesn’t have social media accounts, but if you’d like to learn more about Palantir, you can check them out here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Paddle—a merchant of record, managing payments, tax and compliance needs—we use their ProfitWell tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you are hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it for up to 80% off check out my startup Athyna. 🌏

2. Want to see my tech stack: See our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna you check them out here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investor and leaders in tech. 👀