00:01:58 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:01:58] S1: You know, I love that answer. I mean, I actually think that this is something that Zach used to talk a lot about at Facebook, which he was that the... Like, you know, doing a company is really hard. Most companies don't work. It is absolutely the hardest thing to kinda do in terms of building a career. So you should almost do a company as an act of last resort. If this is the best vehicle that you can find to build... Bring an idea to life, then you should kind of embark on a company. And in some ways, it should kind of, you know, really draw you to it as opposed to the other way around. So maybe with that framing, Trae, how do you recognize when you are getting pulled, particularly in a super noisy environment like we live in today where there are so many different distractions and ideas and people? And a lot of it sounds pretty enticing. And frankly, I'm assuming that the time when you joined Palantir, it was a bit easier because it was not as noisy then. Right? So how do you almost winnow out the noise that invariably exists in the ecosystem right now?
00:02:57 · Trae Stephens
[00:02:57] S0: Yeah. I mean, the the Palantir story is actually maybe a relevant one here because I I was working in The US intelligence community. I I wasn't looking at startups. I frankly had no expectation that I would spend my career in tech. I thought I was going to be a civil servant my entire life. So not only was tech less noisy in 2007, but tech for national security purposes was nothing other than Palantir. So I had this experience of basically trying to fight to get Palantir into the agency where I was working. And I was told no. They basically said, if you believe that there's a requirement that isn't being met, you need to write up like a statement of work, and then we'll see if we can get it funded. And I'm like, woah, This already exists. Like, literally, the product exists. Other people in the intelligence community are using it. We can just use the existing product. And they're like, oh, no. No. We don't buy things. We build things. And like, woah. This is crazy. And so I reached out to the guy who gave the demo. It was a very small team at time. There were only like 20 people. So some of you might know Shyam Sankar, who's like the president of Palantir now. He was the guy that gave the demo. And I reached out to him and I'm like, man, I hope you're not wasting your time because this is going nowhere. Like, I've been fighting this battle internally. And he just sent me this email, and he's like, wow. It's adorable that you think you're going to be a government civil servant if this is bothering you of all things. And so he asked me to come out to Palo Alto. So I took a day off of work and flew out on a red eye and hung out for one day at Palantir. And I was like, oh my gosh. These are my people. He offered me a... Well, doctor Karp offered me a job on the spot after talking to me for literally five minutes. And I'm like, woah. Had spent eighteen months going through an interview process for a government job, and I just met the CEO, and he offered me a job five minutes later. It was like a baptism by fire into, like, how startups really work.
00:04:49 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:04:49] S1: Two questions. Why was it immediately apparent to you that these were your people? And also, why did he offer you the job you think after just five minutes? And by the way, for what it's worth, my experience at Facebook was actually very similar, which is that I remember walking into the Facebook kind of, like, house slash office. And my first reaction was like, oh, these are my people. This is gonna be super fun. This reminds me of, like, the people that I love hanging out with. It feels like a dorm room. They're writing code, drinking beer, eating pizza, playing video games. Like, I am going to love it here. And I think I talked to Mark for literally five to seven minutes. He asked me maybe one question about databases, and he's like, you seem to know databases. So it was very apparent, like, on both sides pretty quickly. Curious, like, what what what do you... What was your experience like?
00:05:36 · Trae Stephens
[00:05:36] S0: Well, I think I I think there's, like, a a corollary to venture capital here that's probably worth mentioning and quick passing. Please. Please. Yeah. Which is that people believe that there's some, like, KPIs or something that VCs are looking for. And that, you know, when you ask, like, what... How do you know that, like, this founder is gonna be a great founder? How do you know that this company idea is going to be a great company idea? And I think people are really desperate for the insight. And the reality is it's actually really obvious most of the time. And if you're just being honest, within five minutes, you can usually tell, like, Okay, this person is insane. Like, I obviously want to have like a ten year relationship going on with this person. And 95 of the time, you know, you meet with a company, and you're like, oh my gosh, this is not it. Like, I'm not I'm not gonna do this. Now there's like the mean way of handling that where people are like, I'm gonna pass in the meeting. And I try not to do that because I I I think people have passion and you wanna like be respectful to that and be helpful if you can. But I think it's the same thing in in recruiting for hiring. You know, in the government, the... A typical meeting is basically like 20 people come into a room. You have like the 10 people sitting at the rolling chairs around the table, and then you have the 10 people sitting along the back benches in the chairs that don't roll, if you've been in a room like this. And the people in the chairs that don't roll are junior and usually incredibly ambitious with ideas and opinions. And the people in the rolling chairs are focused on not breaking any rules. They're the ones that are saying like, let's go around and introduce ourselves. And it's like, my name is John. I've been here ten years. Here are the projects that I've worked on. Thank you for convening this conversation. It's really important that we have this this discussion. Here's the agenda. At the end of the meeting, I want to like requisition a white paper. And then you move on to the next person, they do the same thing. Hour long meeting, forty minutes in, the rolling chair people are still introducing each other. And the last twenty minutes, it's just like this mad rush to like, Okay, now what are like, is the white paper that we need to write?
00:07:47 · Trae Stephens
And that was infuriating for 23 year old Trae. I couldn't do. I couldn't do that. And so going into Palantir, I was I'd be chatting with someone, they'd be like, Okay, you have to see this. And they would go over. They'd open up their IDE. They would show me something. They would make a change. They would launch it in the product. They would show me, like, how this thing worked in the product and how we were thinking about changing it. And it was just that for an entire day. And I'm like, oh my gosh, these people, like, they do things. Like, they're literally just doing the things that they're talking about. And then having this conversation with Doctor. Karp, who's... Was clearly insane. Like, I love him, but he... I mean, he's a he's a wacky dude. He's a wacky dude. I was just like, you know, totally blown away by this idea that there are these band of renegades, sort of like the rebel alliance in Star Wars, that they're just fully committed to breaking the bureaucracy. And I... After spending two and a half years working in the government, I believed nothing more than that the bureaucracy needed to be broken.
00:08:49 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:08:49] S1: Yeah. Very interesting... Actually, I didn't realize that you were at Palantir in 2007. I have an interesting story, which is that in that time period, Facebook was scattered through a bunch of different offices in Downtown Palo Alto. And we would keep on, like, getting new office space and then kinda growing out of it. But then I got introduced to this guy from Palantir, Aki. And so Aki's strategy was basically like, I don't need to look for office space. I'm just gonna find somebody from Facebook. And as they keep on vacating office space, I will keep on kicking it. And so Aki and I would meet every three months. He's like, hey. Do you have any office space for me? I'm like, yeah. This is the one we're gonna be leaving soon. And he would just end up taking. He's a great guy.