How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)

30% of PMs that leave volunteers start a company. Just give us a picture of what the people are like. I feel like they screen really hard for a few traits in particular. One is like very independent minded people. People were afraid to push back. People with broader intellectual interests. What's the difference between, say, a PM at Palantir versus a traditional PM? They were extremely powerful about

Only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward-deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way. There's two types of engineer opponents here. 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

and you would work alongside them, you would literally get a desktop. And so that engineer became known as a forward-to-board engineer. Well, it's something that you believe that most other people don't. I think this is a somewhat contrarian view within tech. Today, my guest is Nabil Qureshi. Nabil 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 Founding Member and VP of Business Development at GoCardless.

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 U.S. 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 were able to scale from a primarily services business to a software business. So I'm 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. They 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.com and click bundle with that i bring you nabeel koreshi

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. 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

including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for to power google This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be with even the most complex use cases.

to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, management, you should consider WorkOS. Open replacement for Auth0. up to one million. free check it out at workos.com to learn more that's work os.com This episode is brought to you by Atio, the AI native CRM. Atio is built to scale with your business from day one.

Connect your email and calendar and Atio instantly builds a CRM that matches your business model with all of your companies, contacts, and interactions enriched with actionable insights. Sync in your product's usage, billing info, or any other data sources, and Atio's flexible data model will handle it all without any rigid templates or workarounds. With Atio, AI isn't

It's the foundation. You can do things like instantly prospect and route leads with research agents, get real time insights from AI using customer conversations, and build powerful AI automations for your most complex workloads. Industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, and Modal are already experiencing what's next for CRM. Go to attio.com slash Lenny to get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com slash Lenny. Nabil, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

thanks honey glad to be here in our chat today i want to zero in on a post that you recently wrote where you shared your reflections on your time at palantir you spent something maybe just under eight years there The reason I'm really interested in Palantir is I've been doing a bunch of research recently looking into which companies hire the best product managers and

create the best product managers and palancer just keeps coming up over and over in the work that i'm doing so i'll share a few stats real quick so i looked at which companies produce the most founders especially out of their pm team and palantir is by far number one 30 percent of pms that leave palantir start in a company and that's like and number two is number is 18 and that's intercom

so that's that stat i looked at which companies pms that leave get immediately promoted in their next role palindra is number one of all companies in the world I looked at which companies PMs become the first PM at another startup that they join. Pouncer is number two in the world. And then I looked at which company's alumni PMs had their product down later in their career. Challenger is number three in the world.

Also, just the company is doing extremely well. It's worth, I think, something like $200 billion these days. So there's a lot to learn from Palantir. I actually want to start with a question that I imagine every employee at Palantir constantly gets. that and i still don't think people totally have an answer in their head what is what does palantir do That's a great question. You started off with an easy one.

Palantir is, the way I describe it, right, is they achieve outcomes for their customers very tactically. The way they do that tends to be through a data platform. They have what I consider to be the world's best data platform. And I can go into what that means in a second.

There's a couple different versions of this. So there's one that's optimized for intelligence and defense use cases. That one is called Gotham. And then there's one that's more optimized for commercial use cases. And that one's called Foundry. And that's kind of a classic.

you know, explanation of what they do. So they sell a data platform. They typically work with very large customers is the other thing. So it's going to be, you know, fortune 50, it's going to be governments around the world. It's going to be those kinds of, customers. So that's the kind of capsule answer, but there's lots to unpack in that. Awesome. Okay. And we're going to touch on a lot of this stuff, including the data piece.

I want to start with talking about just kind of the people and the culture of Palantir. You shared a bunch of really funny stories of what it's like to come to work and even interview at Palantir. There's a story you shared where because maybe the co-founder, you're walking by and he's chewing ice And that's like some benefits of cognition. Just give us a picture of what the people are like, especially early days Palantir and the culture and how unique it might be.

Yeah, it's definitely, it's another one company. I don't know how else you would stop this company if you were not somebody like Peter Teal. And so far as it seems like, you know, there was a point at which they owned

the silly fraction of the office space in Palo Alto. So you'd walk around Palo Alto and it would just be, you know, pounds and hoodies pounds and buildings everywhere and so on. And so I feel like what happened at some point is they raised a lot of money and they, resorted to all these really interesting ways of just getting top talent out of places like Stanford and other top schools.

and just people who knew the founders who tended to be very interesting, intellectual people. And I feel like they screened really hard for... A few traits in particular, right? So I would say one is very independent-minded people, people who weren't afraid to push back, who questioned the frame of everything and thought for themselves.

and had sort of strong convictions. Two is just, like, people with broader intellectual interests. You know, Kopp just released a new book, and, you know, he's quoting Habermas and all these European intellectuals and just things you don't typically see a tech CEO.

And so I think there's that intellectual surround in the company. And then, yeah, I think three is just people who are very intensely competitive. There's a sort of win-at-all-cost mentality to the company. And so I think those were the kind of... set of traits that were like this gravity while in California at a certain time. And so you just had a lot of really fascinating people joining the company event.

The way they screened for this was interesting too, right? So for the longest time they had, Everyone does this now, I think, but at the time it was a little bit rarer. A founder had to interview you in order for you to receive an offer. And so a founder, it could have been Alex Karp, it could have been Stephen Cohen. Earlier on it might have been somebody like Joe Lansdale, but it was always like one of these people. And

The interviews were pretty strange. So, you know, with Stefan, you'd be chatting about philosophy for an hour and a half, and it would very much just be like he would pick a topic out of thin air. It was impossible. powerful and then he would just go very very deep and try and test the limits of your understanding but it would really just be a fun conversation and then

You know, if you pass the vibe check, you'd be in. And so there was that strong selection mechanism. There was also the question of, you know, I think it's, it might have been Teal who mentioned this, but he thinks that a lot of the best recruiters in the world, like companies that attract talent, they put out this kind of distinctive signal.

and it has to turn some people off. That's kind of the key of a good bat signal, right? So I think in the present day, open AI and tropic they're both sucking up like some of the best talent that you and I know and I think one way they do do that and they are sincere in this but they do really attract people who are almost messianic about the potential of

artificial superintelligence, right? And who really believe this is the only thing that matters and it is going to be the biggest thing in the world. I think Palantir's version of that was the... You know, they were quite focused on things like preserving the West. You know, there was a slogan of Save the Shire, right? So they were talking about military and defense and intelligence and the importance of that.

while before everybody else. And bear in mind, this was during the era when it was like social, mobile, local apps, right? social media was on the rise you had you know the hot companies are like facebook and pinterest and things like that and so this was at the time a very strange thing and so i think to be drawn to that you had to look at the other options and say well

this is fine, but what am I really doing in life, right? Whereas you had this other place that was like, hey, consult the hardest, messiest problems in the world with us. And I think just at that time, that really drew some really good people.

We're going to talk about the thing, the reasons people don't necessarily like volunteer and kind of the moral question of what they do. But when people look at a company that is like, I guess OpenAI, to your point is a good example, where they're just like so turned off by maybe their approach What you're missing is that's potentially intentional because it actually draws in the people they really want.

It makes me think about I was involved in creating the core values at Airbnb. And something that we learned going through that process is when you define the values for your company, it's really important to clarify who this is not for exactly as you described which is feels unnatural like oh we want to be inclusive we don't want to make people feel like they don't belong but the whole idea is to be clear on here's who will thrive here and here's who's aligned with our mission

And what I'm hearing is Palantirca and these companies take it to the extreme. 100%, yeah. On my team at Palantir, one process that we followed, I could talk about this more if it's interesting, is you had to, when you started a new project, you basically had to organize what they called a murder board for it.

I think this is originally an army to upright. So the idea is basically you write up kind of a two-page plan for the project. You invite three or four smart folks you know who don't know anything about the project. And their job is just to tear apart your plan, right? And so you have to write, like, here's the vision for this. Here are the goals. Here are the, like, tactics over the next three months.

and one section was principles that you're following for this project and i remember giving this advice a lot was just like when people joined they would they would write principles such as you know move fast and i would always be like

Everyone likes move fast. It's not a good principle, actually, because nobody can really disagree with this reasonably, right? You need something that actually a lot of people are going to go, like, why are you picking this principle? This seems wrong to me. So you need something that people can disagree.

I want to come back to the beginning of what you described of what they look for, what Palantir looks for in people. You talked about independent-minded, a lot of interest, broad interest, and competitive. First of all, I think a lot of people hearing that, especially the last part, be like, I don't want to work there. Why does this work? Because this isn't naturally what you would think of as how you build the most amazing, productive team. Yeah, I think it just draws

people who want to win. I think that's what was really important. The other piece of it, I think, is that there's actually... This was much true 10 years ago, right? There was a lot of talent. that was a little bit outside of the tech ecosystem, but could easily have been very successful within it. So, you know, people who got out of the military or one of the intelligence agencies, and they were doing, let's say, an MBA somewhere to transition into.

corporate world and i think typically they would have taken a position at a kind of classic fortune 500 corporation and actually palantin managed to get a bunch of that talent and at the time that was very undervalued you know the the people who succeed the most in the Marines or the Special Forces or whatever it is, tend to be pretty smart people. They tend to have accomplished very difficult goals in very hostile environments. And it turns out that when you're

starting a somewhat chaotic tech company, that's actually a very useful skill to have. Again, I think more companies are doing this now, so scale AI, Android, etc. But at the time, that was a very differentiated talent pool. And so I think having those

those values as opposed to maybe the values that were more in fashion then so talking about you know how inclusive you are or you know the sushi that you serve at lunch or whatever it is uh it just drew a very different crowd and i think i think the game that was being played there was one It's mission alignment, right? Like you're doing a defense company. That's the kind of person you want to attract. But I think there's also two, which is just,

What is the talent that maybe is a little bit undervalued now and how do you actually draw those people to you? And I think that game is always shifting. This is definitely starting to explain why so many Palantir alumni go on to start companies and become leaders at other companies. These are leaders that you're hiring. So it feels like a lot of it is just the talent you hire people that are naturally leaders.

I think you're right, and we can get more into it, but I think there was also a very concrete set of ways where that place was a training ground for founders. I even think it turned a lot of people who might not have become founders into it.

good founders because of the way it works. So I think there was a selection effect there, but there is also some sort of training effect too, but it's kind of unique to the way the company works. And is that along the lines of the forward deploy engineer stuff or is that something else?

it is not okay cool we're gonna get to that i love it okay amazing before we do that one last thing is something i've seen is that you guys at palantir don't really have titles everyone's kind of the same level and just like generic titles for everyone

Talk about that. Why do you think that was important? Why was that useful? I don't know this for sure, but I do know that Thiel writes about this in Zero to One, and his take is just that as soon as you have these titles, you have a thing that people are competing for, and then you get these very... unproductive conflicts you get people optimizing to game the system you get good hearts law everywhere right so it's like

you have a metric, and then people basically manage to the metrics. There's a lot of interesting, I don't want to pick on any one company, but if you take Google, for example, there's a lot of interesting posts by people who left Google, and they cite this as a reason why they got a little bit disgruntled, is that

There's a way to get promoted rather than, let's say, improving an existing product. What you do is you start a completely new product and that has your name attached to it. And then when it comes to promotion season, you can say, hey, I did this new thing. And then boom, you have a new Google product. is maybe confusing to the end user. So I think they wanted to avoid all of these kinds of dynamics, right? And so the way that they did that was they said, well, titles are not going to be the

sort of mimetic totem that everybody competes for. Instead, everyone's just going to have the same slightly meaningless title, which is forward deployment engineer. And the only people who did have titles were the CEO, and then there were six directors. And that was it. And now I think it's a little bit more nuanced. There are different

There are some people with titles, but honestly, it was almost like we used to joke about it, right? It's like people would leave the company and then you'd see them update their LinkedIn and they would be like, oh yeah, I was totally the SVP.

you know, X, Y, Z. And it's like, no, you weren't. You just, you know, but then it's like, I totally understand it too, because when you leave the company, you have to make your experience legible to the next person. And so guess what? Things like SVP actually. right and so yeah i think they didn't they wanted to avoid this kind of intel competition there are downsides to doing this right um so

Maybe the competition isn't as explicit around a specific title, but instead what it becomes about is, you know, there's a particular exec or something and you want to gain that favor. And so it becomes more about like who can get in the inner circle of this person or whatever it is.

too. I actually am a big fan of this philosophy though, the no titles one. I think what it did do is that it basically said you If you are in, let's say you're in a role of you're leading a very important project, right, which would happen. What it said was, this is always fluid, so you are in this role because you're very good, and so it's a meritocratic thing, but If you stop performing well, it's easy to shift that because there is no explicit, I am the GM of this

project kind of title and so you always had to kind of earn your place in the company you always had to earn the right to work on what you were working on i think that was a good side effect let's start talking about forward deployed engineers what is a forward deployed engineer Yeah, so the way this originated was basically, you can think of it as,

There's two types of engineer at Palantir, right? So there's one that works on the core products. So they don't necessarily leave the building in Palo Alto or New York or the offices. They're very much working on the core products and they're a traditional software engineer. Because of the way the company works, where you had these very large engagements with these large entities, that was a different type of engineer, which

you sent it into the field, right? So what that meant was you would spend maybe Monday to Thursday and you would actually go into the building where the customer works and you would work alongside them. You would literally get a desk there. And so that engineer became known as a forward deployer. So within the company, that function is known as business development or BD, and then PD is product development.

And so within BDA, you had forward deployed engineers. There are actually two types. So there is one that is sort of a more technical software engineer. So you have to pass a software engineering interview and prove your chops there. And you would typically have a CS degree, but there was actually a type of forward deployed engineer that didn't have that. So you would still...

You would still get sort of a technical interview, but it would be less about, you know, do you know the specifics of this C++ algorithm? And it would be more about just like, can you reason about? data. We kind of didn't have that division originally, but it turns out that there's a lot of people who are technical adjacent, shall we say, who you really need in the room when you're working with these large organizations or these large companies because

translating what you're doing into language that would resonate with an executive or being able to kind of navigate the social dynamics in a room. All of these are very valuable skills. And so the hiring criteria that were a little different, right? It was a bit more about like, oh, you're savvy as a human. But all of that was given the title of forward-deployed engineer. And it's just an engineer who works with customers.

Okay, so just to make this crystal clear for people, because a lot of people hear this idea of Palantir having four deployed engineers, a few other companies have done this. it's pretty radical. So as you described, you basically have a desk at a company. So you worked with Airbus and we'll talk about that. So I'll just make it real. So you have a desk and a computer and login access and all these things at Airbus.

at the or can you go to their office four times a week you're sitting there with their employees working like side by side building a product for them versus what most people do or they just talk to customers in quotes where they do an interview once in a while they do a zoom they share mocks things like that this is like

that on steroids? Is that roughly the way to think about it? It is, yeah. And so we would really be there a lot of the time. And so the side effect of that was, one, you learn to live and breathe the customer's problems. and you learn to speak their language, right? And eventually they saw you sort of as one of them. And so you develop these really close bonds with the customers. So at Airbus, I would be at the...

where the planes were produced, or I'd be sitting next to people diagnosing issues with aircraft or whatever it was. Similarly, later on, I worked with the NIH, which was part of the US government, and I actually had a badge there and I would work with. civil servants and biologists and clinicians and people who are working there. And so it's this pretty radical thing, as you suggest,

I think the key thing there from a business point of view, right, is the average kind of deal that Palantir had was very large, right? So the many, many millions of dollars, which means that you could kind of pay for this as part of the thing that the customer got. And then...

It was sort of priced according to the value that the customer got, right? So as a simple example, like if you're Airbus and you're, let's say that you have an issue with one of your planes and you need to fix it and fixing that as well.

you know, $100 million or something to you, that's how it would be priced. It would not be priced as, hey, you're buying data infrastructure and it's similar to Snowflake or Databricks or one of these other providers. It's much more anchored to here is the outcome. but then the job of the forward cloud engineer is not just to deploy software and it's not just to sell And it's to actually solve the problem.

And so you would have to be there. You would have to meet the key stakeholders who are actually in charge of reporting to the CEO about this specific issue. You would have to become their friend. You would have to gain their trust. and you would have to, in some cases, create new software such that it could actually solve the novel problem that was in front of you. So I would have friends who worked with one of our energy companies

customers, and they would have to learn the ins and outs of how oil wells work, right? And then out of that, it turns out that having streaming data is actually very valuable for this use case. And so, boom, suddenly there's a product that can handle streaming data that becomes part of the core platform. But that would be the motion is you learn about the problem, you figure out what software best address it.

You build that software, you use it to accomplish the goal, and then eventually that kind of gets folded into the broader product suite. And so you can start to see why this would be a good forge for founders, right? And this was actually part of my thesis, but going in and joining was I said, well, Say I got five reps of this, which I got more than that, right? But say you get five reps of doing this in five disparate content,

You actually become very good at this cycle of like, okay, go into the building, gain the trust of the person, meet the people that, you know, are going to become your users, talk to them about their problems, make sure you're building something that actually solves them. And, you know, it's just a boondoggle. get really fast feedback and iteration loops, right? So every week you would have like a cadence where it's like Monday, you go and you do your meetings.

Monday night you build something, Tuesday you show it to somebody. Tuesday, you get the feedback. Tuesday night, you iterate on it. Wednesday, you show it to somebody. Wednesday night, you iterate on it. So you get like four of these, five of these cycles every single week.

And you're moving incredibly fast. So six weeks in, you've suddenly gotten to, wow, this is really valuable. And somebody is willing to pay you whatever $20 million for it. And I think this is why you get so many kind of founders coming out of this. Same process. It's becoming very clear why so many founders emerged at Palantir. Okay, so an important element of this, as you described, is that the idea here is build this as a one-off

solution to solve a real problem at, say, Airbus or some government organization. And then the idea is you create something out of that that then Palantir can sell to other companies what's extra cool about that is you they pay you to solve this problem for them and then that is

funding this other product that Palantir can now sell to everyone. What a cool business. However, early days Palantir, everyone thought it was just the services business or just consultants building software for companies like airbus there's no way they can make this a platform that works for a lot of people clearly that's what's happening and it worked out

This is kind of like the holy grail. Solve one customer's problem and then sell it to everyone else. Every SaaS business basically would love to do this. What do you think allowed them to actually achieve this and be good at this? What are some principles that... That works. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's true. I think that from when I joined until maybe till IPO and a little bit after,

I was told, hey, isn't this basically like a sparkling extension, right? Isn't it a consulting business? kind of lopping as a product company. And eventually it became undeniable. One, because, you know, I always laugh when people are like, what does Palantir do? It's like, you can go onto YouTube and just search Palantir demo and you'll get plenty of demos of how the software looks. Not many people know about this, but you can go and sign up with a credit card right now and start using it.

I can have a Palantir account. You actually can, yeah. I did not know that. I think it's called AIP now. So it's not actually that mystical and there is a product and if you look at the margins, they show that, right? So they have like 80% plus

margins, which is not really what you would get if you were actually a consulting company. It would be closer to 20 or 30%. So then your question was, well, how do they actually achieve this? I think That was just incredible talent in the product development organization, like really top tier. incredible talent and it took somebody it took some really really smart people to take the set of internal tools that we were using at the time to create value of customers and then go

What is the unified version of this? What is the thing that What would this look like if this were a product? And out of that process that I saw came Foundry. I assumed there was a similar process with Gotham a while back. but basically it's like the motion was that you would go in and you know early on you were basically armed with jupiter notebooks and some

some kind of data integration stuff, but it was very primitive. You had to create value that way. But, you know, we kept building tooling that was useful for forward deployed engineers. So we were our own first customers. And at some point, there was this concept of, wait, what if we take our internal tools and we let our customers use them? And I remember at the time, this is a really radical idea. And then...

Sean Sankar is one of his, I think he's a CTO, maybe he's a president now. He just mandated like, okay, every customer deployment, you have to have a customer using this within three months or whatever it is. And so...

It was horrible at the time because these had been built for these, you know, nerdy Silicon Valley engineers. And so they weren't particularly usable. They would crash all the time. You'd have to debug, you know, spark errors or whatever it was. But basically that process brought a lot more rigor to

are thinking about the product. And out of that kind of, I would say, three or four year process came the Foundry product. And then there was a lot of focus around, you know, things like performance and reliability and so on. That was all really painful. Yeah, I think the answer was just talent and then there was this recognition that we do know things that

Most people do not know about how data works in large organizations. That was the other thing. We discovered a lot of, you know, quote unquote secrets in this process of living with customers for so long. The basic one was just data integration is massively painful inside organizations. This is very hard to understand unless you've worked in a large organization, but it's actually impossible to, even now, to get access to a lot of your own internal data that you need to do your job, right?

you'll hear stories of people being like, I'm trying to calculate our sales this quarter and I had to wait six weeks for some other analytics team to get me this deliverable, right? And so just the knowing problems like that and being able to focus Our product efforts around those problems meant that we were able to build something generalized.

Okay, there's a lot here. First of all, you talk about Gotham and Foundry. I know that we'll link to videos of people checking these out, but just what's the simplest way to understand what these two products do?

Yep, so Gotham is optimized for military and defense use cases and Intel as well. I would say they both have some things in common, right? So they both have I would describe this almost as a pyramid where the bottom layer is data ingestion, the middle layer is data mapping, and then the top layer is anything that's user facing, so any UI component. If you think of Foundry for a second, right? There's different tools that allow you to ingest data to it,

There's different tools that allow you to easily build data pipelines and clean up data, which everybody has to do. And then there's a bunch of tooling that allows you to build compelling uis on top do point and click analytics do you know notebook style workflows whichever kind of however technical you are and so that's what i mean when it's a platform it's a suite of things that

has kind of a common data backing, but contains a bunch of different applications. And so I think that is somewhat true of Goffin as well. But you kind of, when you log in, you see this unified interface, right? So what is the actual difference then? I would say with Gotham, you're looking much more at workflows like

that involve maps, for example, right? So when you're doing a military operation, like a lot of the time you are going to be looking at a map and you are going to be monitoring, you know, the movement of troops or tanks or whatever it is. Another big difference is the idea of graph-based analysis. So Gotham, one of the kind of early use cases, right, was finding

combing through networks of terrorists and basically finding the bad guys. And so being able to do queries that are sort of graph-based was important, right? Who is everybody that Lenny called in the last week? Imagine like all the notes kind of fanning out from there. And then it's like, okay, well, this one looks interesting. Let's zoom in on that. What is this person's location, right? And so it's just like very graph-based way of thinking.

That also applies to things like fraud, and so Gotham has been deployed against fraud. If you look at Foundry, it doesn't actually emphasize that component so much because it turns out, you know, let's say you're a B2B SaaS company, you're probably not doing that much graph-based analysis. You're doing things that look a lot more like classic SQL queries, tables, that kind of stuff. And so Foundry is a lot more kind of traditional.

that was an amazing explanation for the first time i i'm starting to understand what these products do basically it just sucks in a bunch of data cleans it up so you can actually trust it and then helps you interact with it in various use cases maps graph tables. Yes. Okay, amazing. The example you gave of what you worked on at Airbus, you described it as basically a sauna for making planes.

Is that right? Yes. So how much of that becomes a part of this core product versus stays this one-off thing? Is it elements? Oh, that's a cool innovation. Let's put that into Foundry. How does that work? This was a really interesting story, actually. So the initial problem that we came into with Airbus was that they had a new aircraft called the A350.

Beautiful aircraft, by the way. I think if you fly New York to Singapore, it's often an A350. Really nice. And so it was a relatively new aircraft at the time, and their mandate to us was, okay, we need to ramp up production of this really fast.

much faster than we've ever done it before. So it's like the numbers are very approximate, right? But it's like, okay, we're producing four this month. We need to do eight the next month, 16 the month after and so forth. And you're going to help us do it. And so this goes back to what I was saying earlier is

The mandate wasn't like, hey, we need to upgrade our data infrastructure. We thought you guys would be met the list of requirements. It was much more just like, please help us accomplish this mission. This is like the big thing. And so we went in.

skips out the problem. There are a bunch of different things that we could build that but one of the basic problems that we figured out was that Without getting too much into the weeds, the way the factory would work is that there's a bunch of stations, and you can think of the plane as literally moving between each station, and then each station would do a certain set of work.

So initially it's literally like a big fuselage and the fuselage is sitting there and then people are doing a bunch of work orders against it. They need parts in order to do that work. And then at some point they say, okay, this is ready to move to station 31. and the plane is physically moved to the next station, and then station 31 does.

So in order for the next station to do its work properly, they need to know, one, like what work was done at the previous station and what work is remaining. Two is just like, if you think about this problem, like not all work is going to get done on time. kind of carry over to the next team and the next team then has to kind of like And so when I'm describing this problem to you, you can kind of start to visualize like, okay, maybe I need some sort of Gantt chart for this.

And I need the ability to click in and say, okay, what did actually, what did station 30 do and what work orders remained undone? And then it's like, okay, for those work orders, what parts do I need and where in the factory might they be? And so... This was very, very hard to do as is. A lot of it was just relying on people going and having conversations with other people on the factory floor.

And, you know, coming from tech where it's maybe not as complicated as building aircraft, that is a phenomenally complicated process, but it is easy to see, like, okay, you can actually improve this problem with software, right? All their data was stored in SAP, and SAP is established software. It's good at what it does, but it's not the most user-friendly necessarily, especially if you're not an expert in how it stores data. The table names are very hard to understand.

one of the things we figured out was just if you can pull in these tables that may as well be written in completely alien language. Like the table name would just be like S3F1 underscore Z or something like that, right? And you'd have to know like, okay, this is the table where the part ID is stored or something. If you can pull in those tables and

join them in the right ways, and then just map them to human concepts that humans can understand. So things like a part, a work order, an aircraft, et cetera, and basically build a kind of hierarchical mapping between them. Then what you can do is for a user, a user can just log in and say, okay, aircraft 79 where is that okay it's at station 31 all right these are the work orders etc right and so you've translated it into a more human legible thing and so

The thing we built, I mean, I kind of slightly flippantly described it as Asana. It's a little different, but basically that's what it did was it gave you a unified view of, okay, this is what's going on inside the factory. This is the work that needs to be done on this particular plane. And then me today going to my job at station 31, what work orders do I need to fulfill and where are the parts that I need? and so

Did this directly become a part of Foundry? Not exactly, because the way that other companies work is not going to be using this same set of concepts. But the overall idea of taking a bunch of tables and then mapping them to human understandable concepts was a very powerful one. And so this actually resulted in a big piece of foundry now, which they call ontology. You probably heard this

tongue, as you've seen. If you see palliative presentations, they always talk about ontology. This is what they actually mean by that. It is a set of concepts that is understandable to you as a human and you're not having to go and dig around and do SQL queries. You're just able to say like, where is the aircraft now and where is it going?

And so the ontology became a huge piece of foundry. It was directly informed by the learnings that we had from building that application inside that factory. And I would say it's still a very big... differentiator today like I don't think too many other companies ship this kind of stuff Wow. I love how excited you still are about this because I can see it being so fulfilling to solve this big problem. I saw a stat that I think you

their productivity? What was the number there? It was, yeah, I don't recall the exact stat, but we did ramp up. I think at least 4X that one, yeah. Which, I mean, obviously they did this and we just helped with it. But, you know, that CEO said that we played a critical part, so. also you moved to france i think for this that was like how forward deployed you were you lived in france for how long

Yeah, I lived in France for about a year and a half. The way they built their planes is they manufacture different components around Europe. So they build, you know, the tail in Spain and the fuselage in... part of the UK and Germany and so forth right and so they basically ship everything to France to be assembled at the end which you can imagine this is a very messy process and so I was mostly in France but there would be weeks where I'd have to kind of fly between all these countries just

figure out why things work in your post you wrote about how just the life of ford deployed engineer is pretty crazy you just get a call sometimes like hey you're flying to this random country tomorrow get get ready uh is that just life as a ford deployed engineer

It is, yeah. The company had a very, I would say, aggressive attitude towards travel in the sense of when you join, you were basically told, look, you have to be okay with travel, are you okay with that, right? And the attitude, which again, I think is a very founder-friendly one, is you need to be willing to just jump on a plane that night if that's the best thing to do for this customer and if it's going to

get us to earn its speed to win. And so there were many times when it would be like, oh, I need to take this cross-continental flight tomorrow for this particular thing. Because it will be useful. And so I think that's one of the kind of takeaways for me was just like being a person.

is so, so, so valuable when you are working with some external party. Just going there for a few days and spending time with them, maybe going out for dinner, you build so much more trust than if you're trying to close a customer over Zoom or... doing engagement over zoom it's just the vibe is completely different and so yeah getting on a plane was

a really cool part of our job for a very long time. This obviously changed around 2020 because COVID happened, the company IPO'd, and so there needed to be a bit more internal controls around this. But I'd say pre-2020, this was like a very big part. I'm excited to have Andrew Luo joining us today. CEO of One Schema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Welcome, Andrew. Thanks for having me, Lenny. Great to be here. So what is new with one schema?

I know that you work with some of my favorite companies like ramp and vanza and watershed i heard you guys launched a new data intake product that automates the hours of manual work that teams spend importing and mapping and integrating csv and excel files yes so we just launched the of one schema file feeds. We have rebuilt it from the ground up with AI. We saw so many customers coming to us with teams of data engineers that struggled with the manual work required to clean messy

FileFeeds 2.0 allows non-technical teams to automate the process of transforming CSV and Excel files with just a simple prompt. We support all the trickiest file integrations, SFTP, S3, and even email. I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to take this off our roadmap and instead use something like one schema? Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard

so many horror stories of outages from even just a single bad record in transactions, employee files, purchase orders, you name it. Debugging these issues is often like finding a needle in a haystack. One Schema stops any bad data from entering your system and automatically validates your files, generating error reports with the exact issues in all bad files.

I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me. If you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co. There's a lot of founders listening to this and a question that I'm thinking and they're probably thinking and there's kind of two questions here.

one is just when to go like how hardcore to go potentially with their own forward deployed sort of operation and then two is just how and a company i know is actually doing this how far to go with one company's problem and invest in just like we're gonna nail solving this one customer's problem with the hope that this is something we can abstract and sell as a big platform so let me actually let me start there and you're you know you're building a company

Any just, I guess, insights or advice on just how far to go down this road of we'll solve customer one's problem? And we bet that this is going to be a big opportunity for a lot of other companies. So I would say on the forward deployed piece, My friend, Barry McArdle, who's the CEO of Hacks, the analytics company, he wrote a really good post about this, actually. And his take was just like, you probably don't need full and deployed engineers. It's very specific.

But I think basically the thing there is you have to be willing to be quite almost wasteful. You have to be willing to invest a lot in Finding the thing. And for that, you just need a certain ticket size, right? So you need each customer's revenue to be probably in the millions of dollars. If it's below that, you're probably not looking at a traditional forward deployed engineer motion. It's something you look at.

front and so you know I think one thesis that a lot of people left Palantir with and started companies around was there's a lot of customers that Palantir won't serve because maybe they're too small a ticket size and so actually you could go and do something like Palantir for those companies,

But instead of charging them $5 million, you're charging them $250K. And so in a scenario like that, you might still have forward deployed engineers, but they're not going to France and spending five days a week in a factory. It's more like you'll have one person and they're looking after...

you know, five different customer accounts is more of that ratio in order to make the numbers work. And so I think a lot of the principles can be, um, can be abstracted from that experience, but it is a really specific sales promotion that depends on a specific way of doing business. I think to your other question, yeah, I think it's obviously something that is very hard to give a

general answer to. My main thing here is just that you can definitely tell when you are just doing consulting and when you are. closer to building a product. And I think the error that people make more often than not is they are actually too stuck on their own product vision that's the mistake i've seen a little bit more actually than the other way around right so if you if you go to um

I'm trying to give an example. If you go to an enterprise customer, and let's say you think you're doing analytics software, and it turns out they don't actually care about internal analytics this much, They actually have this other massive burning problem and they don't have a good solution to it yet. I think a lot of people are unwilling to go and pivot to the big problem because

They're like, well, we're analytics software, and so maybe this customer is a fit for our thing. And maybe that's the right call. In some scenarios, that is the right call. You should go find a different customer where your thing resonates more. In other scenarios, it's actually the right call to...

pivot and go and just put everything on that big problem instead and then go and find other customers for that thing. There's no hard and fast rule. I remember reading a really interesting post by, I think it was David Su from Retool, who had this exact thing, and I think he worked at Palantir for a while too. And he said that they had the retool product and it wasn't getting any traction at all. And then he tried an outbound email campaign where he literally just changed the subject line to,

build entire tools easily. And then suddenly they started getting all these replies from CTOs who were just like, oh yeah, this is actually a huge pain point for me. But the exact same solution, they were previously kind of framing it as I think it was like supercharged Excel or something like that and nobody was biting. And so they just changed the way they framed it, found a different set of buyers and succeeded.

No hard and fast rule, but you need to have this matrix of options in your mind and be very deliberate about it. which one you are going with and why. I think your piece of advice is really important there. Usually, in your experience, you're saying people index too far to know what they're asking you to do is not what I think they need or what customers will need.

you're saying it's actually more likely they're right and that's maybe where you should be focusing more versus this kind of abstract vision and original idea you had I think so. Yeah, I think it's very hard to not be anchored to your own experience and your conceptions as a problem. And one thing I've seen in really strong founders is they're able to sort of drop a bunch of those assumptions and almost treat

something, a new opportunity is a completely blank slate, and then just figure out how to reshape things so that you're taking advantage of that. And that's how you don't get stuck in a local network. Your other piece of advice is also really great. So people hear this, they're like, we can't afford an engineer to sit at her.

one customer prospect's office and build stuff for them but your point is you can have one for five different customers they're not there full-time they kind of bounce around but they're kind of it's almost like sales engineering just like what you call it sparkling sales or they help make it successful. I know Looker is a famous example. I think they call them forward deployed engineers. Do you know any other companies, by the way, that some version of forward deployed engineers?

That's a lot. I mean, I know that the AI labs are hiring forward deployed engineers now. They're building forward deployed engineering teams. And, you know, they could make it work, right? But I think there's going to be key differences I don't see Anthropic going into an enterprise customer and building some entirely from scratch solution for them. It's going to be something that leverages the Anthropic set of products.

There's a lot of companies that have this label now, but I think what's really confusing about it is just that it means a few different things. There's another post by Ted Mabry, who's, I think, the head of commercial at Palantir, and that's a very good one, too, to point this to. so say someone was uh i want to try this sort of thing in my company and what would be like a few bullet points of things they should get right

You're describing kind of the spectrum of what people describe as forward deployed engineers. If they were to try to do this, what do you think they need to most do correctly for it to be successful? The key things that made our model work were, one, they were actually Real engineers who can build product themselves. That's a very big difference, right? I think a lot of...

the time companies will say this person's a forward-deployed engineer, but actually they're mostly there to be more of a solutions architect or they're not necessarily building anything de novo. They're just listening and trying to find a way of deploying the existing product. They're not empowered to do new product. And so the really radical thing Palance has said was no, like, go in.

And if you need a completely new product to do this, you can go ahead and build it. And I think that's really the key difference. The other stuff I've already mentioned about is being in person and I think building close personal bonds with your customers. I do think the better founders do this anyway, right? Like they're on texting terms with

They're buyers, they become friends with them outside of work and they see them as humans and they're trying to help. I think that's very motivating. Gaining a really deep understanding of the business that your customers are in and knowing how those dynamics work. so you know a simple example might be

you know, like say hospitals in America, right? Like I think if you go into it, it's very counterintuitive to think of a hospital as a business. People think of it as, you know, it's a place where you get healthcare, right? But actually like, If you kind of view it the way a CEO or CMO views it, it's going to look very, very different to, as a very simple example, sorry, this is a little bit dark, but you know how kind of restaurants

want to turn over tables as fast as possible in order to kind of maximize their revenue for the day. Hospitals actually kind of want to do the same with patients, right? They would like to treat you and then get you out of a bed so they can free up the bed to get a new person in there.

That's not super intuitive unless you kind of think hard about how the revenue for that hospital works. But then once you think about it, you're like, oh, this has a bunch of problems associated with it, right? And you start to go in a really interesting direction. there's just like the words and memes uh and take you a long way working and understanding it okay so essentially the things you want to get right make sure it's in person

Make sure the person is technical. Make sure they have a deep understanding of the business and the problems they're having. The technical piece is interesting with AI tools these days, making everyone technical in some sense. You could argue this is going to become more common. People can just open up Cursor, Windsurf, and just start adding features.

I think this is a really interesting thesis you've just hit on, and I expect to see a lot more startups that take advantage of that in sight. Basically makes forward deploying engineers cheaper. Exactly. What is the current state of forward deploy engineers at Palantir? How much has it changed over the past few years? If you join now, is this still something you can do? Yeah, of course. I should obviously emphasize that one, I left

the company in 2023, and so this is just my possible view. I don't speak for them. I think that If you think about it, one of the metrics that the company had to measure its own success was essentially revenue per engineer, right? And so the more kind of quote unquote product leverage you had, the higher that number was.

So if you had to throw a lot of people at every marginal problem, then you weren't doing so well at that because you're basically building a new thing every single time and you are, in fact, a consulting business. If, on the other hand, every time you encounter a new customer, the product turns out to be kind of relevant to them, then great. And so this product leverage metric was actually a very unique thing and kind of a north star for the company for the whole time I was there.

If you reason that out, what that means is that in the early stage of the company, you will have a customer and then you might have five to ten engineers working at that customer. Over time, you want that ratio. So you want it to be, you know, each customer, because the product is so powerful, maybe AI coding's gotten a lot better. Each customer, you're leading two people. And then maybe you actually get to a point where you can't have one person.

looking after multiple customers. And I think that's how the job has changed is now it's a little bit more about You have multiple customers, maybe you're spending less like deep time with each individual one of them, but it's a lot clearer what problem you're solving across multiple customers and you have more of a kind of defined.

And so I do think that has been a bit of a change, but the company remains a very interesting and dynamic place to be. Like in some sense, the stories are always starting, right? One lens through which you can view this company is they spent 20 years basically building the mother of all data foundations for every important institution in the world and

Guess what's very valuable now that AI models are out is proprietary data that isn't public. Suddenly you have access to that and you are in a very privileged position to help your customers deploy AI in a way that makes them successful and that solves real business problems. That is essentially the bullfaces for this company and why it's

probably going to, you know, 100x again, right? And so it's still a really interesting time to join, but I do think the kind of nature of the ratio of people to a customer, for example, is one big difference. not investment advice but it might 100x

I totally understand why that might happen. So let's talk about the data piece. You said that this was one of the secrets of Palantir success. There's early insight into the power of ingesting data, cleaning data, being able to analyze and work with it. What a marketing share there, just like what they figured out about why this is so valuable, why it's so hard and how they achieved it.

I think it's just very obvious as soon as you step into a corporation and spend a couple of days there, right? As you're like, alright, let's suppose your job is to... Increase sales. Okay, so the first thing you want to do is get a clear picture of what's going on. All right, so let me go and query the sales database. Wait, where is the sales database? I can't get access to this.

okay, I need to file an access ticket. All right, now I have to wait one week, right? And so everywhere we went, this was the big pain point was we have to wait six to eight weeks just to get data access. And then when you do get data access, It's not like the data is in an easily queryable format. You actually really have to know what you're doing in order to get the right metrics out and so on and so forth. And so it turned out like, okay, It's this iceberg analogy where the actual analysis

is actually just the tip of the iceberg it's kind of the last five or ten percent and the 95 percent before that is i'm gaining access to the data i am cleaning the data i'm joining the data i'm normalizing it putting it all in the same format and so Once we spotted that, then it's like, okay, there's actually a lot of product to be built there just to make that process easier. This is one way I think Palantir does... People don't think of Palantir as this.

place where innovative new products and UX ideas come out, but I actually think it's been one of the most generative companies for that specifically in the last 20 years. It's just that most of that didn't see the light of day and so people... But if you look at the... the product primitives that they developed in order to make the things I just mentioned a lot easier. They're actually really valuable and interesting and could probably form the basis of independent companies themselves.

And so, yeah, it just took every single step of that process became much, much easier once there was a software solution around it, right? So if you talk about data ingestion, there's essentially a kind of universal data adapter that's part of Foundry. It can read anything, so JDBC, S3 buckets, whatever you want. And it can pull that, it allows us to kind of look into the data, maybe preview the first 20 rows.

and then it allows you, when you're ready, to set up a schedule and just pull it in on some cadence. That process alone for an engineer used to take a long time, especially pre-vibe coding and managing all those cron jobs. doing this on a Linux VM somewhere inside the customer's tenant was a huge pain, right? And so you productize that piece. Then it's like, okay, once you have the data, it's like, how do you actually

What if you're non-technical? Is there a way for a non-technical user to be able to join tables and see what the result is? And so there's all these very fascinating... Business problems that because I think the access was very difficult to get and people hadn't really solved before and so There was a lot of white space to do some product innovation So now I would say foundry is definitely the best

data platform in the world just because it has all these different applications within it that solve these discrete parts and it's just it came out of this years of painful experience watching people have to clean data and join it and figure out what this table name meant and so on.

you shared in your post this kind of evocative story of some people's jobs is just kind of gatekeep the data like they're there to help you to give you access to this very valuable data within the organization and how hard it is to get like that was a lot of this work is just breaking through those political battles of like okay we need this data for the good of the company and took a lot of work i guess anything there you want to add

It is, yeah. I mean, it's a huge pain, and there are good reasons for it, right? It's not like folks are malicious here. If you're IT or if you're an InfoSec-type person, then... Your goal is to prevent data breaches and to make sure that sensitive information doesn't spread too wide. And so what's the easiest way to do that is to lock the data down. basically be a gatekeeper for access, right? I think where it got a little bit more interesting was where your skills are.

valuable and depend on you being the gatekeeper so what I mean by that is like let's say I'm the guy who I'm the only guy who understands the the way the sales calculation pipeline works, right? And I write the SQL for it. All the requests from business SMEs come to me. I have a big queue of them. It takes me weeks to get through this queue. I have a great job. I have great job security.

And people depend on me, right? And so now along comes this company and they're like, hey, actually, we want to make sales data available to everyone and we want to make it point and click. suddenly you're like, hey, hang on, what am I going to do? And so that's where I think there was a lot of...

Difficulty, and I always say, people are like, what are Palantir's competitors? I don't think it's the ones you would think of necessarily. Palantir's biggest competitor is a company rolling its own And so the biggest difference would just be a CIO saying, I'm going to build my own data infrastructure. I'm going to own it. It's going to be on top of one of the hyperscalers

and we're all just going to do our analytics ourselves. And what we came along with, which was quite disruptive to this model, was saying, no, actually, all your data is going to get ingested into this one platform and everybody in your company is going to use it. The trade-off is it's going to be really, really easy for everyone to do things. But as you can imagine, some people aren't a huge fan of that model. Feels like Glean is the biggest competitor to volunteer after I hear this.

you know about that company i do yeah clean is clean looks amazing from the outside i mean You know, so many differences there. I can totally see why you would say this. Clearly a different use case, but it feels like the reason they've been successful is they figured out a lot of this data ingestion permissions search stuff. Totally. Interesting. Okay. I want to talk about hiring. You talked a bit about this. you're starting a company again, what are some of the key lessons you've

learned from your time at Palantir when you are hiring people for your company? I don't know if you're actually hiring people yet. Maybe when you may start hiring. Yeah, we have six people at the moment, so a really reasonably small team. You know, I think with hiring, it's funny, man. Like there's so much hiring advice online and you read it and you're like, yeah, this is super obvious. And then when you live it, you're suddenly like, ah, this is why people say this, right?

A few simple examples are, I think the thing that is really hard to find is somebody who really, really has

a lot about doing the thing and will go that kind of extra 20%. Like, I think, I think when you hire out of, especially not to pick on them, but I think if you hire out of famine, right, it's like people, people want like a 400k a year job they would like to work a certain number of hours they would like to ship some code and then go home like that's basically the model that you get accustomed to even if you don't intend to when you work at a big company and so

If you hire out of that for a really small startup, it can be really challenging because A lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like, no, I'm going to work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working, and I'm not just going to check My box is I'm actually going to look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve.

Everything I'm saying feels kind of obvious, but when you actually feel that difference between somebody who's just checking the boxes and somebody who's kind of an animal in this way, they'll actually go and pursue and accomplish the end outcome. That difference is...

very very big and it matters so much for your first 20 people right and there's no science to finding these people it's not like you can just put like somebody who cares about outcomes in your jv and then suddenly you'll get all these people applying uh and so then it's like okay well

How do you screen for that and how do you find those types of people? And so that's where it gets really interesting. I think that's where the mission alignment comes in. And so you do have to find people who, for what you're doing, have this extra maybe private reason to care about it a little bit. than the average person, right? So I think for Palantir, they did hire a lot

Vets, for example, maybe people who are a little bit more patriotic or pro-America than the average tech employee. And that those people had an extra reason to join Palantir and an extra reason to try. that little bit harder. And so, you know, what I'm doing is a little bit more in the kind of medical and health space. And so I think People who have themselves had experiences with this system. have maybe had relatives go through difficult experiences with things like cancer or whatever it is.

They're just that extra bit motivated to really care about the thing you're trying to do and then work that little bit harder. And so I think aggressively filtering early on for things like mission first. how much have you cared about stuff in the past and what's an example? You know, you ask questions like, what's the hardest you've ever learned to get something done and why, right? And that, like,

does differentiate a lot of people. A lot of people don't actually have a great answer to that. So I would say that's been a really big learning is it's less about testing for the right skills. Yes, that's important too. It's much more about just like who has that extra 20. That is really interesting, as you just said.

Everything you've shared is essentially around motivation and drive and passion and kind of just like commitment to working on this intently. And it's almost like a second thought of just like, oh, so they're like really smart and skilled at stuff. It feels like that's just table stakes and this is actually what makes the difference in your experience. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's different for every business, right? So I think if you're in a space like B2B SaaS where

Maybe it's a little harder to tell the story of like, oh, this is so mission critical, like whatever. There are other ways of getting at this thing, right? So for example, I know a lot of people, again, it's a little played out now, but I know a lot of people who have a sales team, they will explicitly go for people who are professional athletes or

played sports in college right and it's like okay what does that test for it's like you are very very disciplined you're very very goals and numbers oriented and you're willing to just work really really hard and so there's all these kind of lateral ways of getting at these that I think you just have to be kind of intentional about.

As a personal example, I'm a runner and so I actually love meeting fellow runners and I always like to, I kind of joke like, oh, maybe I'll go higher from like run clubs or something like that. It's just like, same with, you know, I play a lot of chess. Like, I love meeting chess players. I'm not necessarily saying that's the right kind of hire for me, but I think having this this thing of here are some traits that seem uncorrelated but which actually give you

good signal to this person's personality. Those are actually really important. The last thing I'll say just as a funny illustration of that concept is I think Max Lifton tells the story of somebody interviewing at PayPal early on and he passed all the skill interviews. And then it just got to the final round and he said something about liking to shoot. like you like to play basketball and they were like instant reject and it was just like the vibe here was just like if you're not like a

mega, you know, Linux nerd, hardcore computer person that we don't want you hearing if you actually passed all the tests just because you like to shoot hoops. Now, whether that was the right call or the wrong call, I don't know, but that's an example of what I told you. i think that's like a great echo back like people hearing this may be like what the hell how that's like How dare they do that?

But this is exactly what you said at the beginning of our conversation that if you're like an approach to building a generational business is to be very clear about who this is not for and that's okay it's your company not everyone needs to work there and it's almost saving them time because they may they might realize this isn't for me this isn't the people i want to be around necessarily

So I think it's important to see that side of it. It's like it's your business. It's important to be clear about who is a good fit for the company and who's not.

speaking of that let's talk about product management for a bit i know palantir pms are like not very not traditional product managers uh what what is like did i imagine people have the title product manager palantir okay so if so what As far as you understand, what's the difference between, say, a PM at Palantir versus a traditional PM, say, at a FANG company?

As far as I remember, quite anti-PM for a while, and eventually we did need them because we just got more serious about productivity. Classic story. Classic story. A classic story. Many companies. The big difference, or one big difference, I noticed was that they were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward boys. You basically could not become a PM anyway.

As an example, when I mentioned earlier the thing that we built for the plane factory, the person who was managing that deployment, she later became the PM for ontology. And it was just because she'd kind of proven her mettle in the field. and you know the reason for that's pretty simple right it's going to be someone who understand how customers work and has that customer empathy and it's going to be someone who

has this drive to get things done because that's what we decided for. I think the failure mode that they were very, very averse to in traditional PMs was this kind of Google Docs syndrome of like, okay, I'm going to write my... product requirement documents, and I'm going to kind of manage it in this very sort of sane, rational way, I think.

So the company was really rigorous about that. And so basically PMs are almost always internal promotions and they always came from me. It was not like I'm not aware of a single case where we took somebody who was a PM at a place like Google, which excellent PMs and hide them successfully into Palinset is a very different way.

So I think that was one thing. You know, this is maybe more of a classic PM trait, right? But you just had to be either an engineer yourself or extremely good at working with engineers. And the ones I saw who... succeeded the most were just best friends with their engineering team, right? And the team would always just be like one, you know, it was called a group PM and then it would be a lot of very, very good engineers. And basically the successful failure mode was just like,

Do the engineers like and trust you? And I mentioned before, like, how it's very kind of almost disagreeable personalities. And so if you didn't gain the trust of your engineering team pretty fast, you didn't last very long. I think we've cracked the problem, the question of why are Palantir PM so successful. First of all, the hiring bar is just like basically hiring for leaders.

in a lot of different ways to this forge for founders where they're working with a company solving a real problem, building a real product that makes money. And then those are the people that become the PMs at Palantir. And then they go on to leave. And that's why 30% of them end up starting companies. I'm surprised it's not higher. Or become first PMs at other companies or heads of product.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's crazy. I was part of a pretty small team within Palantir. I think it was 20 to 25 people when I joined. And I think at least six of them now are. either unicorn or just pre-unicorn founders from from that like group of 25 people which is actually a crazy ratio and then a bunch more have become founders recently at an earlier stage so yeah there's all these little pockets of excellence and um

It's been really interesting to see. I think the other thing that's driving that a little bit is, you know, when you leave, it's just such an interesting company to work at that, you know, I think the retention numbers were actually very high for that company. Like people would often stay.

a lot longer than maybe the average value tenure. And so when you left, it was really this decision of just like, something very specific is pulling you and you want to kind of play the next level of the game and so it was very unusual for someone to leave and then join maybe a more traditional tech company it's sort of like you're either going to go become a founder or

wow, Julie, everyone, there's so many interesting different things to work on. And I know that sounds a little culty, but that's just, that's what everyone thinks. I could totally see that. A lot of people that left Airbnb have never found something more meaningful. It's just hard, especially if you're early.

There's a stat that I didn't share that I think is really interesting. When you look at YC founders and where they've come from, I think you may be sharing this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders.

in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger, sample size, yeah yeah let's talk about the the moral question of palantir a lot of people hear probably seeing the title of this episode hearing this will not be excited about Palantir being highlighted and promoted and a lot of people kind of disagree with what Palantir is doing you know it builds products that kill people in some ways they work with governments they don't agree with

I know you wrote a really insightful way of how you approached this question when you decided to work at Palantir and how you see people tackle with this. Can you just talk about the kind of the framework that you landed on and how you thought about this yourself? Yeah, it's a really interesting topic. It's definitely very nuanced. I think

What I was trying to say in that post was a couple of things. One was that there was a lot of upside there, right? So I worked on the US COVID response. I have friends who... you know, worked on operation log speed and, you know, These are all things that I think saved a lot of lives. And I was pretty focused while I was working at NIH on cancer research. And so to me, these were just obviously good things and you couldn't do them anywhere else. And so that was a lot of reason to say.

The question I had in that post was, well, okay, there are definitely going to be other pieces of this that people object to, right? So during the kind of 2016 to 2020 era it became a pretty common thing to go into work in new york and you'd have people protesting outside your office or you know doing all kinds of things and so There was this question of, well, is this okay? And I think the point I was trying to make was I don't think that it's rare that disengagement is the correct.

And I think it's more recognized now, but especially then, it went a bit too far, right? So the famous example here is Google kind of disengaging with a Pentagon. AI project just because some people felt that working with the Pentagon was itself morally bad. I think that's way to the left of what the median American would say. I think the median American would say it's fine to work on defense stuff within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things.

There was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just like, hang on, it's not like working on defense is inherently evil. It's actually a pretty interesting thing. And then there's this question of, well,

Would you rather be in the room and making this better or not, right? And so I'm struggling with how much I can share here, but like as a simple example, If you're doing even a workflow, which I think many people would not be super comfortable with, like let's say you're targeting somebody for some kind of strike.

If you compare the way it's done now to maybe the way it was done in 2010, it's going to be a lot more targeted. It's going to be a lot more accurate. And so you've actually improved that process and reduced the chance of error. Maybe you should feel good about that, right? Now, that is a bullet many people are not willing to bite. I didn't work on the defense side of the company myself, but I think you have to be okay with

these kinds of gray zones and actually actively thinking about what you are doing. And that doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do to work in a defense company, right? Maybe we go into a very dark future. we start being the bad guys in some ways, and then it's probably not a great idea to work at a defense company, right? So it's a shifting landscape, but I think I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech

just didn't want to think about this at all, right? So, like, You have engineers now who are working on optimizing short form videos for higher engagement.

you sort of want to say to them, like, hey, are you thinking about what this is doing to the brains of young children? Or have you seen, you know, an 11-year-old kind of scrolling something for five hours and you think this is a good thing? And I think people don't want to think about this stuff too much. I'm not saying I know the answer, but there was almost this refusal to look at what tech was doing. from a political lens for a very long time it was just like hey

Let us play with our toys. Let us sit in Manolo Park and, like, don't bother us. And we're just going to build cool stuff. And 2025, we're in a very, very different state of the world, right? You know, tech is involved in politics now, and politics basically came to tech, right? There's this famous image of Mark Zuckerberg sitting in Congress, and he kind of looks very pale. He's like, why have they dragged me in here again, right? But I think tech went through this journey of,

Oh, we're suddenly becoming important now. Oh, we're really, really important now. Oh, we better stop playing this game of politics. And so I think what I'm saying now is a lot more consensus than it was 10 years ago, but at the time the feeling was just like, look, what we are doing is political, so you're bettering.

I think when this became really real for a lot of people is with the Ukraine war, like the governments running out of certain vehicles and ammunition were just like not able to produce it. And then we're like, oh, thank God for a company like Androil and all these other. tech companies that are actually ahead and keeping us ahead. I think the only reason the US is ahead of China in the space race is because SpaceX is one company that just has been doing this for a long time.

So I think a lot of people have kind of realized, okay, maybe we need these things. Right, yeah. And I would make this argument as well. It's like people are like, well, how can you feel good about working in defense? And it's like, well, you're not going to feel great if China invades Taiwan, actually. You're not going to. I think you're probably also not going to like that outcome.

we do just live in this world where you do need to build up the turrets to these things and they better be good so to me it didn't feel that difficult of a question. I think when you zoom into particular things, they can be very difficult questions, and there have been a bunch of those in the last couple of years. But yeah, again, disengagement isn't the answer.

Yeah, and again, it's not for everyone. I think that's an important kind of theme through this conversation is some companies like to build, sometimes to build a generational really successful company, you need to turn some people off because That's what brings in the best talent oftentimes. Okay, just a few more questions. Kind of like stepping back a little bit.

You're building a company again. What are kind of like a few core pieces of advice that you're bringing to your new startup that will inform how you build this company from your experience at Palantir? We talked about a lot of stuff. Is there anything, I don't know, if there are like three things that you think are like, I'm definitely going to do these things this way because it worked really well at Palantir.

One thing is probably just really fast iteration cycles. So placing a lot of bats and then being really rigorous about just going through that cycle very slowly. I have this article, principles, and one of the things on there is basically saying, like, your P successes goes up the bold bets you make, and it's sort of a function of how many bets you make and the probability of success. And so one easy way to almost guarantee that you'll hit something is just to make a lot of that.

and then just kind of like cycle through them very quickly now obviously this is difficult this often this question of well is this actually failing or like are we quitting too soon kind of thing but that's kind of one The principle I take is just test this thing very early. You know, like a classic YC thing is just When you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money, if they say no, then...

find a new problem, like don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does because you don't have that kind of time. I do think the importance of just like having a really tight, distinctive internal culture and um building a strong feeling of trust within a team is really important and and kind of like you mentioned with Airbnb and you know people people definitely felt this at Palantir there was this

feeling of like, well, you worked here, you must be good. I trust you and all of that. And I think it's so important to create that. And you kind of know that feeling. That's what, like, people ask me, you know, should I go work at place X or should I just go be a founder straight away? I don't know the answer for everyone, but I will say one of the benefits of working at a place like that is you just have all these

internal bench box now for, okay, this is what this should feel like. And if it doesn't feel like that, we're off. And I can't imagine not having those bench box and just kind of having to

Figuring a lot. So yeah, I think that think two is just like distinctive internal strong team culture. And then I think, I think for me think three is just like, working with a really messy um part of the real world so you know i kind of joked when i left like uh i'm excited to just do pure software i'm excited to i don't know i want to build an id or something and just like not have a support email even and all of that but

It turned out my comparative advantage in a lot of ways was the networks I'd built and the experience I'd had in engaging with the messy parts of the world. they do need technology a lot, right? Like there is this, There's this horrifying thought I have sometimes of just like, maybe we'll get ATI in the next two years and the healthcare sector will still be broken and it will still be impossible to afford rent in New York City and build houses and all these things.

and that may well become true and so i think it's important to engage with those parts of the world too even though they're really really And I think the really nice thing about LLNs is that actually... there's so many workflows now that are accessible to you as a tech founder and people are somehow more open to working with tech companies than they ever were before. Selling into the sectors of the economy in 2015, incredibly hard. I think now, post the chat GPT moment,

People are willing to give chances to small startups that they weren't willing to do previously. As you mentioned earlier, the cost of doing things like forward deployed engineering has fallen by maybe 5 to 10x now at least. And so there's a lot of new possibilities. I'm excited to engage with them.

Wow, that is some alpha right there that you're finding that some of these very large organizations are more open to working with startups because, you know, classically investors don't want to invest in companies that are going after health care companies and governments and things like that. So it is really interesting actually to hear.

I'm going to... we were back with the tips you just shared and there's actually like a secondary tip that i think is the more interesting piece so the first thing you're taking away is iterate quickly but i love your tip of ask for lots of money quickly early to see if it's an actual idea that people will pay lots of money for and if not move on i love that the other is build a very distinct culture

But the piece you share there that I love even more is this idea of knowing what a high bar looks like, knowing what awesome A-plus people look like. And you need to work at a company like Palantir to actually see that.

So the advice there, I feel, is just work at a company that is amazing first with the best talent to understand what that should look like. Plus, you build a network of those folks. So I think that's really interesting. And then the other piece is, of advice you're pulling away is work on like really hard messy problems because that's where the biggest opportunities are and it's sounding like this is the easiest time to actually do that.

Amazing. Okay, I'm going to take us to a recurring theme on this podcast called AI Corner. And what we do in AI Corners is we share some way that you've found AI to be useful in your day. day to day either in life or in work is there any way you found some tool in it some ai tool useful that uh you can share

Oh my gosh, there are so many. I'll give you a few examples. So I use whisper flow quite a bit. So this is the talk to your... keyboard and it will transcribe for you app very good it's just great when you're iterating very quickly with an LLM and you sometimes you have to do these paragraph long prompts and it's just easier to speak into them right so whisper flow I like

just if you double down on that there's like it's like you press a button and you start talking and it's writing out what you're saying cool and like there have been these products for a long time dragon dictate and all these guys Is the difference now, these are just, like, very, very good now at actually transcribing what you're saying? I think that's right, yeah. You know, they use a really good model, and so Raleigh makes mistakes, even when I think it's fine.

And then the other UX, I think they just nailed. So that's a really good one. I love Claude Code for developing, even though I have my complaints about it. There's something just very addictive about just telling it what to do, and it's basically something that you run within the terminal of your computer, and so you just type Claude, and it opens up a Claude interface. It's very cute. It's very beautifully designed.

You just tell it what to do, and it actually operates on the file system directly. So if you're like, hey, create a bunch of these files, it'll just do it, and you don't need to go and look around inside Finder yourself. And then it'll do these really complicated pull requests, and it'll basically... quite well. To me, this is a very exciting preview of AI agents. That's what I was going to ask. This is essentially an AI agent engineer.

I didn't know that's what ClockCode did. Very cool. It's sort of a guided agent, but yeah, it is really sweet. And then, yeah, I'm just enjoying... Every week, there's a new, wonderful new thing to play with. Last seven days, I've been testing Gemini Pro 2.5. Excellent model. I don't love Google's UX sometimes, but...

I was playing with that and I use LLMs every day for all kinds of things. The other day I was doing taxes and I needed to classify a bunch of transactions based on some metadata and so I just wrote a script up really quickly and it did that. I love just the smile on your face as you're describing all these AI tools.

i think a lot of people are just like holy shit i'm just overwhelmed with all the things i need to be paying attention to all these things i'm here all these tools i gotta try and i love just this vibe of just like this is incredible and so fun We need more of that. Okay. I'm going to take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. You're going to get a double whammy contrarian corner. So here's the question, what's something that you believe that most other people don't?

I think going to college is great. I think this is a somewhat contrary view within tech, maybe not in the broader economy, but, you know, I often see people saying just like, oh, if you can just drop out when you're 18 and just start working, why would you go to college? And I think this is completely wrong like maybe it's good advice five percent of the population who probably would have been teal fellows anyway but college is one of the few times when you can

Just make really, really deep friendships. You are in, you know, typically a nice campus. If you're in North America, you get to spend all of your time just thinking and writing papers and reading books and hanging out with your friends.

It's actually very precious and it's very hard to find that kind of time after you turn 21 because you've got to pay your rent, you've got to do work, you've got to do all this stuff. Let's say you make a bunch of money, you take a career break, it's still like all your friends are working and

you always feel like there's a ticking timer on top of your head or something. And so just taking those three or four years at the very beginning and going really deep on lots of different intellectual topics and being able to try different things and discover more about yourself

I'm a big college fan. I can't comment on the ROI or whatever. I personally think the ROI is great, even though the fees are kind of high in the US. But that's probably my kind of contrarian within tech view is don't drop out of college unless you have a really good reason.

It's so funny that that is contrarian and does sound contrarian. I had a great time in college. Hear, hear. Okay. Is there anything else, Nabil, that you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? No, I think it's just, it's a really exciting time in the world, right? You know, I think AI can be exhausting, but it does really just open up the possibility of building a better world in all these ways. And so I think just reassess what you're doing.

every couple of months and make sure that it's aligned with where I think AI is going and make sure that you are working on something that you feel has very high potential if it succeeds. I think that's more going than ever now just because the amount of leverage we have with technology is at the highest point in time. Let me double click on that real quick. So for people that want to do what you're describing, what helps you understand where AI is heading and just kind of like

align with it? Are there like places of information and news you find useful? Is it just play with it kind of thing, what would you recommend? This is the big question. I use Axelot to keep on top of AI, so I just recommend finding a good Twitter list and maybe following people off of that. There's some good newsletters. I really like Latent Space. I know his X handle. It's swyx. I can't remember his actual name.

that one is very good and it's it's pretty technical i would recommend trying to stick to the more technical music letters if possible like i think there's a lot of kind of philosophy about AI or AI policy type stuff, and I think that's good if that's your area, but it's an area where it's very easy to have a lot of takes on it. You're not necessarily learning a lot by reading those.

But I think it's just important to know what's going on and make sure you are revisiting your own workflows as often as possible and just making sure that the people who went here are going to be the kind of hybrid cyborgs here. fused with the AIs, right? This actually played out in chess, if I can take a slight detour as

The chess players who succeeded the most in the mid-2010s especially were the ones who were really early adopters of neural network-based chess engines. So when DeepMind did their thing, There was very quickly an open source version of it called Leela. And you find basically like the very top players like Angus Carlson, Fabiano, they were the ones who kind of mind melded the most with Leela and learned how it played and then kind of started copying its moves and so

I think there's, like, becoming a cyborg to the extent that you can. And then I think there's this barbell thing of, like, it's also important to just leave everything and go touch grass just for your own mental sanity. excellent advice and with that Nabil we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready to Here we go.

What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? The first one that comes to mind is Emperor by Keith Johnstone. This is actually, I wrote about it in that essay. It's one of the books that Palatay used to send to people. I just think it's a really interesting book. So nominally speaking, it's about improvisational theater, which I believe this guy was a pioneer of. He was a British guy.

Keith Johnstone active between the 60s and the 80s, I think. And Impro is just this really interesting book about creativity and how social behavior works and basically just what he taught his improv students. It's a very weird book. It's full of these unbelievably strange ideas.

like there's a lot of very tactical things he tells you to do in the first chapter for example just to break out of your own mental frameworks um like really just wild stuff like he'll tell you to walk backwards while counting down from a hundred and like think about some problem that you're struggling with and there's all these kind of odd things but the number of ideas per page i've found on that book is

extremely high the concepts about how social interaction works and how things like status and so on play into your social behavior. super important and they made every kind of forward-to-point engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you kind of read people better and interact with them better and become more conscious of how you're coming across and just modulate. What is the title again? Impro. Impro. Okay, cool. We'll link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, so in prose, number one, I think, just to go a little more highbrow, maybe Shakespeare's history plays. There's a set of them called the Henriette. So like Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI. I find most people don't read these, so they'll read Hamlet or Macbeth or whatever.

The Henryon is absolutely incredible. You don't have to be interested in British monarchy or British history in order to enjoy them. They're actually some of the most interesting and insightful books I've read about power and how power works and politics and kind of what the sacrifices fit. you might have to make if you want to be a successful king in that case, but it transfers over. I think it's worth thinking really hard about, I think especially in a world where

Everything is kind of organized around these prominent figures and personalities now, right? Like when you think about the current administration, you think Trump, Elon, or like when you think about AI, you think of Sam, Dario, right? And so I think it's important to... understand like how do you think about these personalities and

Yeah, the kind of game that they're playing at Henry is actually, the Henry art is an incredible kind of set of books around that. They're also, like, easy to read, which sounds hilarious when I say it, but You can read a Shakespeare play in a day. They're sort of, I don't know, they're like 50 pages long. It's not that bad. So you have to get used to the language, yes, but I would recommend that for sure.

I guess you asked for two to three. I love High Output Management by Andy Grove. I just think that's a great business book. And people sort of tend to read summaries of it on the internet more than they actually read the book.

but the actual book has a lot of really interesting stories and explanations about like I think the most powerful thing about that book is actually how Andy Grove thinks unless any of the specific tactics there and I think you don't get that unless you read like how he came up with Your first two books were extremely out there versus what other people have recommended. And the third book was the most recommended book on this podcast. So I love that spectrum that we just went on. Perfect.

Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've just really enjoyed? The last movie I really loved was Decision to Leave. It's a Korean movie. It's by the director of Oldboy, which maybe some people have heard of.

It's a great movie. I think it was released a couple of years ago and the basic premise is there's a detective who is investigating a woman who's accused of killing her husband and he gradually starts falling for her which starts to affect his judgment all these ways just like a really fascinating

kind of psychological thriller with a sort of romantic element to it visually very beautiful um yeah i think a lot of the most interesting movies nowadays come from abroad actually so east asia south asia like Don't watch so much. That's been a while. Totally understandable for a founder. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you just really love? It could be an app, could be some physical, could be a water bottle.

I don't have a good answer to that one. I guess I didn't buy enough stuff. Totally acceptable. There's no wrong answers in the lightning round. Moving on, do you have a favorite life motto that you often find useful in work or in life that you... share with your that you come back to they share with friends or family so there's this architect called christopher alexander who wrote these beautiful books um that are about you know beauty and kind of modern architecture right and he

He was a teacher at UC Berkeley, and he got really frustrated by the students because he just felt like they were always turning in kind of like average work. And so he would always tell them every week, like, Imagine there's a Gothic cathedral in France called Chartres, and he would say, you have to aim for Chartres. You have to make something that is better than that. That should be your goal, not just to turn in something that...

that's sort of, you know, what you feel is good enough. You actually have to try and be better than the very, very best that ever did it. And I find myself just like repeating this a lot to myself. It's just like aim for aim for that like really try and do that otherwise it's very easy to anchor on something right in the middle and you just you do this unconsciously all the time

So is that the motto, just aim for charge? Yeah. I love that most people have no idea what that would be. But with the context, it's quite powerful. Final question, what's a classic novel that would you think would be most valuable for product builders? I just, my favorite novel is Anna Karenina. And I recommend that everyone read Erica. I'm reading that right now. I've never read it before. No way. And yeah, so it's by Leo Tolstoy, as you know.

It's this epic 19th century Russian novel that follows a set of characters across society. And I think it's just extraordinary because what's what's amazing about him is he's just able to imagine himself into the brain of anybody and so even like um

he will briefly just go into the consciousness of, I don't know, the servant who's bringing the meal to the table or something like that. And he'll just tell you a page of what they were thinking. And then he'll just flip back into his main character's head. And I think that is,

the most impressive demonstration of this kind of skill I've ever seen. And I think, like, to connect it to your question, this is what you have to do if you're going to be really good at products, is you have to really think yourself into the other person's head and you have to be...

really seeing it the way that they do. And it's so hard, especially as a founder or product person, not to just get stuck on your own way of seeing the problem, right? It's like, you wrote up this doc, you made these docs, You're like, this is going to be great. And then you take it to somebody they don't care that much. You really have to exercise your empathy and understand why they see it that way.

What a beautiful way to bring it all together. Let me also add, while I'm reading the book, something a tip here is people talk about having ChatGPT voice mode just kind of sitting there next to you. i found that extremely helpful with this book where i just ask like what the hell does this thing mean like there's all these russian dances and balls and etiquette and you just ask and you're like i'm reading anachron what does this mean and it just tells you

So there's another cool tip for AI. Okay, with that, Nabil, this was incredible. Two final questions in case people want to look you up. Where can they find you online? And how can listeners be useful to you? Find me online. My website is libioqu.co. And my ex-handle is NabilQU. I'm probably most active on that. But yeah, my website has all the links and a bunch of essays and interesting stuff.

How can you help me? I would say send me an email. My email is on my website. Introduce yourself. Say hi. I love meeting people. I don't always have time for coffees nowadays or things like that, but I genuinely do get a lot of energy from just receiving emails from interesting people, so. Please get a right shot.

Awesome. Definitely check out Nabil's Principles. Is that the name of that post? Yeah. Great. Okay. That's one to start with. And then also there's the Palantir post that we just talked through. Okay. Nabil, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Appreciate it, Lenny. Bye, everyone.

thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode!