Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S1: I'd probably pick Rickover’s. So Hyman Rickover, born in a shtetl in Poland, came to the U.S. when he was six, had one of these near-miss moments where, in those days when you landed at Ellis Island, you had 10 days for someone to come pick you up. His mother gave someone money to go send a telegram to the father who'd already been here. And that guy just pocketed the money. On the 10th day, there was another guy who arrived at Ellis Island who bought them one more day, who knew them. And then he ran out, got the father, because it was this near-miss where this guy almost didn't even end up here, he would have been sent back to Poland. But he was this feisty character. I think he was five foot two, very short. He went to the Naval Academy. He was so unlikable that in the yearbook in the Naval Academy, they had torn out his picture. He's just one of these difficult people. In World War II, he drove a coal ship. He was not some exceptionally high-performing senior military officer commanding a destroyer or a carrier or anything like that. But after the war, he went to Oak Ridge, and he observed the vestiges of the Manhattan Project. And he had this idea. We could build nuclear-powered submarines. And he'd had this experience on diesel-powered submarines, which suck. They're basically surface ships that happen to go underwater for like an hour. This became this thing he was obsessed with. Talk about chutzpah. Oppenheimer himself thought this idea was going to fail. So you have Oppie telling you you're stupid and this isn't going to work, and you're just going to go for it. So he started on this project. And he built the first nuclear submarine in seven years, start to finish. The Navy hated him so much that his first office for this project was literally the women's restroom. They're like, what can we do to humiliate this guy into quitting? But he just kept going. And if you actually look at his personal memoirs, you can see that the humiliation got to him, but in a way that he could channel it to be motivating. It wasn't like he was somehow inured to the pain of it all, but he could push through it. And I think recognizing every major project you do is going to push you in these sorts of ways. How do you dig deep? How do you grind through the pain? And he created a really unique culture in naval reactors, which is alive today.
· Shyam Sankar
So I think part of what's really cool is that our nuclear submarine force is one of our last remaining asymmetric advantages against the Chinese, and we built it in the fifties. What a legacy for this guy to have built. And then the engineering culture that he created, he was in this unique role of both being a human who would invent the technology and therefore was qualified to think about how to regulate it. So whereas the Russian submariners, they would spend roughly six months at sea and then six months in Sochi recovering so their white blood cells could regenerate because the radiation shielding sucked. We've had no deaths due to nuclear incidents in our submarine force. And he designed it to a standard. He's like, I'm designing this thing so my son could be in it. It's a hundred times safer than what we believe the minimum standard to be. And that obsession, it's not a manager's view of the world. It is a founder's view of the world – one of his legacies, he was an admiral for 30 years. And even as an admiral, he was very difficult. Zumwalt, who was the chief of naval operations for a while, he said "The Navy has three enemies, the Soviet Union, the Air Force, and Hyman Rickover."
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: I remember reading the book about John Boyd, who – three times, he was the best fighter pilot. Then he helped develop the F-16, and then he came up with the military strategy concept that was instrumental in some of the U.S. wars in the nineties. And he was sort of a bastard as well. Highly disliked, really bad father, highly disagreeable, but incredibly important in U.S. military history. You don't seem to have that kind of personality. You seem, by all accounts, very likable within Palantir and outside of Palantir. Say a bit about your own disagreeableness. Where does it surface? It seems like this is a field in which you have to have a very clear view of how things should be, which we'll talk a lot about in a few minutes. And then this disagreeableness and resilience and persistence to make it happen. And that seems a little bit at odds with your personality, from what I can tell. Curious how you think about that.
· Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S1: It surfaces in certain ways. As Karp would say, I'm not everyone's cup of tea. Where you can very clearly see it is in the early days of Palantir, you'd be dealing with the government. And it's easy to think of that as a monolith, but you have operators who want to use your software, but are not in charge of buying it. And you have the IT people, or the program who's in charge of building what you would be building. So you're a structural threat to them. The advice is to go along and get along. Those guys are the people paying you. Why don't you just do what they want? The problem is, if I did what they want, it wouldn't work. And so that's where the disagreeableness comes in. It's being ornery about, "No, I'm going to deliver the thing that actually works for the operator." I'm going to piss off literally everyone along the way. They are knives out, going to try to kill you. We had to sue the army to compete at some point. And I think in that vein of being truly committed to, is the product excellent? What else could it be doing? You can think about the whole OODA Loop of forward deployed engineering is that, it's this continuously solving through back propagation of what should the product be? That's like the motor of innovation.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: If I think about Palantir's story and success – and you're part of that story – your personal worldview seems really important. And you having a strongly held worldview seems like a key component of being able to do what you've done over the last 10 plus years. I would love to hear the formative experiences that contributed to that worldview. I'm curious, just like at a high level, what your worldview is. Maybe even more interested in how you came to it, because you've got a very unique personal backstory.
· Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S1: I think there's no singular event. I think there's a combination of family history, the environment that I grew up in. Starting with the family history part – we fled violence in Nigeria, where my father – we frankly almost died to settle in the US. And that happened pretty young in my father's life, in his early-mid thirties. It's a pretty jarring experience where it gives you a whole new lease on life after that point, where you think about – you have a deep amount of gratitude and perspective on the trials and tribulations that may come ahead. But it also grounds you in a profound understanding of the counterfactual. What makes this country so special? Sometimes it can be unmooring not to have those experiences, actually, because it's easy to take it for granted. It's easy to become cynical. But that's a really powerful rooting. And particularly because my father didn't have the classic immigrant story where he came here and became successful, which I think is a great thing if it happens to you, but it's also a facile journey. It's easy to appreciate. Dad started businesses that went bankrupt. It was very hard. But having that rooting experience that created a graciousness and perspective in him – he was always so thankful for the opportunity. I took a lot away from that over time, especially as I grew up and could understand and had awareness of what was happening. The second thing I think is really important, is growing up in Orlando in the 80s and 90s, it was this profoundly optimistic period. You could say it was probably pretty optimistic everywhere, but in the shadow of the Space Coast, you were bombarded with this idea that technology was going to make the world better, that there was a structural positive sum view of everything. And it was so motivating. People had ambition around these things. So I think that set a frame for me, for how I thought about things and how do I want to spend my life and energy. I think that's really it, is this commitment to building. Part of what's interesting about the heretics that I'm drawn to is that they're all builders of some sort. The conversion from heresy to heroism is a result of an empirical thing they built. John Boyd was alive to see the success of his innovations for Gulf War I, where the US destroyed the fourth largest army in the world.