Zeynep Sahin
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on the atlas — 5
- Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi9 savers
- Deep Dive: Building an AI-Native Company | Contrary Research1 savers
- Black Swan Bias: Rare Events Don’t Happen Everyday1 savers
- Curius / Onboarding2621 savers
- Hypothesis Sheets: how to navigate and exit the idea maze with a (good) startup idea | Michael R. Bock7 savers
highlights — 17
these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiGrey areas. By this I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiIt’s easy to critique free countries when you live in one, harder when you’ve experienced the alternative (as I have
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshithe company was loud about the fact that people worked long hours, were paid lower than market, and had to travel a lot. Meanwhile, we were being kicked out of Silicon Valley job fairs for working with the government. All of this selected for a certain type of person
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshithe company often felt like there was no clear strategy or direction, more like a Petri dish of smart people building little fiefdoms and going off in random directions. But it was incredibly generative
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshinobody could tell anyone else what to do. So it didn’t matter if somebody was influential or thought your idea was dumb, you could ignore them and go build something if you thought it was the right thing to do
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiHiring, sales, fundraising are all negotiations at their core. It’s hard to be great at negotiating without having these instincts for human behavior. This is something Palantir teaches FDEs, and is hard to learn at other Valley companies
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshithe company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiBeing a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiBut a cult of skeptical people who cared deeply and wanted to argue about where the world was going and how software fit into it – existentially – that was interesting to me.
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiThe world needs more companies like SpaceX, and Palantir, that differentiate on execution - achieving the outcome - not on playing political games or building narrow point solutions that don’t hit the goal
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiIt helped that customers had hilariously low expectations of most software contractors, who were typically implementors of SAP or other software like that, and worked on years-long ‘waterfall’ style timescales. So when a ragtag team of 20-something kids showed up to the customer site and built real software that people could use within a week or two, people noticed
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiThe company believed this to a hilarious degree: it was routine to get a call from someone and have to book a first-thing-next-morning flight to somewhere extremely random; “get on a plane first, ask questions later” was the cultural bias. This resulted in out of control travel spend for a long time — many of us ended up getting United 1K or similar — but it also meant an intense decade-long learning cycle which eventually paid off.
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshithe differentiating factor may have been the level of intensity from the top: both Peter Thiel and Max Levchin were extremely intense people - hyper-competitive, hard-working, and unwilling to accept defeat
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshiseriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun
Reflections on Palantir - Nabeel S. QureshiNearly 50% of all internet traffic in 2025 is generated by bots, much of it from automated scrapers and crawlers that will soon outpace human traffic entirely
Deep Dive: Building an AI-Native Company | Contrary Researchhe’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on
Curius / Onboarding