Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Shyam Sankar
[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. [00:00:00] S1: A belief in exceptionalism and greatness. No army that lost its morale ever won the war. And so believing in yourself, believing that greatness is possible is a precondition to being able to express it and realize it. And a lot of cultures don't have that. The other thing, which I know sounds really simple, but is a complete plasticity of thought. Culturally, America is a place where people do change their minds. "Okay, this isn't working, let's do something different." Or, "I observed that thing working, even though it goes against the orthodoxy of everything I've learned. We're moving, we're pivoting." In Europe, people are still arguing about shit that happened 300 years ago. And some of these cultures are so rooted in the past that they can't update their priors. And so a culture that's capable of learning – you could call it plasticity, first derivative of learning, but how can you make progress without that? [00:00:00] S0: What does greatness mean to you in general? And also, I'm curious how you think about it personally. If you were personally in pursuit of greatness, what has that meant? What does that require?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S0: What does greatness mean to you in general? And also, I'm curious how you think about it personally. If you were personally in pursuit of greatness, what has that meant? What does that require? [00:00:00] S1: An aspiration that's substantially bigger than oneself. The focus of American greatness is on American prosperity and the American worker. How can we go do things that are actually enriching our civilization, our people, raising their own aspirations, inspiring them to go on and do great things? There's this unstable equilibrium in civilization that pulls you towards nihilism. And greatness is the antidote. It's the countervailing force to saying, no, actually it's worth investing in our institutions. It's worth going through this painful journey because what we're gonna get on the other end is something better, something that we all aspire for, something that you will be proud to pass down to your children. [00:00:00] S0: Is there an example of greatness that you've witnessed in someone else firsthand? That most stands out.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S0: Is there an example of greatness that you've witnessed in someone else firsthand? That most stands out. [00:00:00] S1: The obvious one to me is Alex Karp. His ability to really manage and unlock talent is something like I've never seen before. Those are some of the most profound lessons I've really learned about Palantir. From the very early days, he modeled our entire company as an artist colony. We have more in common with the Hollywood talent agency than we do with a typical software company in terms of our approach to looking at humans. And this first principled approach to the individual, and how do you grow this deep resistance to a cargo cult-like process in every manner or fashion that corrodes all the things that actually create value. And I think that's important, because if you drive that to the extreme, you actually get something that looks more like the Soviet Union. On the other end of this, it's "How do you maximize the potential of the people in front of you?" And you're advocating for their growth and their ability, which also involves a lot of – you have to have a structural personality where you're not threatened by other people's successes. You actually relish in the other people's successes. And that's the parallel between Alex and my father. [00:00:00] S0: If I was running an organization where my key goal was to unlock talent in the way you just described, how do you and he do that? What's the practice of unlocking talent?
· Shyam Sankar
[00:00:00] S1: Maybe we could just start with the precept of how we think about the talent to begin with. So really talented people are highly uneven. They're very good at some things, they're okay at another set of things, and they're really bad at some other set of things. And usually the trick is, where are they in their own journey of understanding what those things are? And particularly for high achieving people, when they're young, they misattribute what their superpower is. They think there's this thing they do that requires a fair amount of effort and therefore they get a dopamine hit when they succeed. It's probably something they're not even bad at, they're just okay at. Superpowers are effortless. In some sense, it's almost like not even rewarding to exercise your superpower. My analogy for this is Superman could fly, he could see through walls, but that wasn't some sort of arduous thing for him to do. It's just something he could do. That's usually something you learn comparatively. You're like, oh, this thing that's lizard brain, effortless, almost thoughtless for me – other people who are really smart can't seem to do or I do just way better. And embracing that is the first step. Helping them understand like, hey, all of your contributions to the world are gonna come from your superpower. Everything else is basically a waste of time. So how do you figure out how to get into that configuration? So there's some releasing of ego around that as well as understanding that, "Okay, this is what I need to focus on." The other part of this is kryptonite. There are some set of weaknesses you have that aren't just I'm kind of average or I'm maybe a standard dev below average. It's like, you're like six devs below average. It's not something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it. And so, can you be okay with that? As the artist, what is your process of accepting that? How do we help you accept? How do we help you understand actually, at the point of acceptance, you become more valuable and we're gonna be able to unleash you further to be able to do things. And then you have to create an environment that supports them through that because the discovery of kryptonite usually involves you being exposed to it. You're going to make some sort of really bad mistake that probably will have real consequences.
· Shyam Sankar, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Hopefully you learn from that mistake. It may take more than one time to get there, but you don't wanna create a culture which is like – you fucked this up, I gotta fire you. Oh, I'm so glad you learned that this is not what you do for a living. [00:00:00] S0: I'm so glad you fucked this up. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, exactly. I remember doing something that I really screwed up once that had consequences for the company. And I sheepishly went into Alex, and was just completely honest. And I didn't realize at the time there was no grand strategy behind this other than my commitment to just always being honest. He was very appreciative. He was also in pain as he internalized what this was gonna mean. But he valued the fact that I wouldn't try to hide it. And I took away from that, how important that environment was gonna be, and how do I scale that to the organization? [00:00:00] S0: What do you think your superpower is? [00:00:00] S1: I think there's actually a narrow sliver. If you thought about it in the Palantir context, the intersection of forward deployed engineering and product – there's an interface there. One inch on both sides of that interface, owning that almost as a dictator, that's my superpower.