Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Shyam Sankar, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
It's hard to think about now because we think about it as almost a foregone conclusion, but leading up to it, there was a lot of uncertainty. That worldview is centered in understanding – look, I think the US is the greatest force of good that exists in the world. That as a country, we understand that there's something special about founders. There's a reason we call them the founding fathers. If you think about just empirically – Europe has created zero companies worth more than 100 billion euro from scratch in the last 50 years. Honestly, it’s an astonishingly bad track record. We've created all of our trillion-dollar companies from scratch in the last 50 years. The primacy of people and being in a culture and environment that allows that to happen, that doesn't subjugate the human, doesn't snuff out human flourishing, that allows you to pursue these things. That may seem trivial, but the heretics are all a version of that. It's not like Pollyannish where there's no resistance to these creatives. It's like, despite the resistance, you can succeed here – which is really not true, I think, basically anywhere else. [00:00:00] S0: What was your dad like personally?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S0: What was your dad like personally? [00:00:00] S1: The pieces of his personality that I’d say had always stuck with me. Every spare moment this man had, even though he was so busy and he was just grinding, he would be on the phone trying to help someone. I had this weird memory of someone who, almost my dad had this sort of engineering autism that I think a lot of us have, but he met someone who had totally disfigured teeth. And he just had the actually profound kindness to tell him like, you should get cosmetic surgery. And that guy is so profoundly thankful for that. No one else had the balls to say that. This actually changed his job prospects, it changed his life. And so he's just one of these people, you clearly can see the positive sum-ness in him. Like, hey, I'm just gonna keep paying it forward. [00:00:00] S0: If you had to identify the component parts that make America the thing that you think is the greatest country in the world, what are the key components? Obviously maybe democracy is one, but I don't wanna take for granted the things, given your life experience and your unique perspective that you think most add up to this being a place worth your life's work to extend their interests, protect their interests, et cetera.