But let's get into this, because your background relative to where you are today is so different. After studying philosophy, law, and social theory, as we just talked about, you managed money for European families and then built one of the most consequential technology companies in the modern era. Alex, what about that kind of background gave you the experience to be able to do what you're doing? What did those early experiences help you without having a pure technology background?
You know, there are all these questions that there's like formal answers for, and I wish I knew the real answer. I really do.
My best version of an answer is that most people who are broadly speaking in business endeavors — broadly defined, here I'm including anything where something has to deliver foundation. I mean, many of these things don't work anymore, but as a matter of theory: foundations, international organizations, universities, businesses — I am a primarily creative human being. And creative is different than pure execution, and that creativity I inherited from both sides. We were outside the norm on every variable.
And then the one thing I've hid most of my life until recently is I am, by any normal standards, severely dyslexic, and that disability lends itself on the positive side to being more able to work quicker, more creatively, more honest with oneself, and able to process things that are probably outside of distribution, to use a slightly technical term. And the value of things is pretty correlated to: are they outside of distribution, and can you get them into distribution.
But we're going to double click on that in a minute, because we're also going to talk about the artist colony.
For those of you that don't know, Palantir went public with a direct listing. I think the market cap at the time was like 15, 16 billion. Today it has a market share...
$7, a $7.50 a share or something. I remember the price well because it was also in keeping with Alex — unusual, a direct listing, not an IPO. But Alex, you describe Palantir as an artist colony. What do you actually mean by that, and what's the underlying ideology that this brings?
I mean, it's like always, you know, I think we have a lot of people we've embarrassed who didn't invest or otherwise, but I think all of them would say Palantir over 20 years has had the highest bar for talent, and that talent has gone on to do among the more formative things in defense tech, but also, you know, in the AI movement.
We look for people who are unusually jagged, and I try to work to slot people and increase their intelligence where it's unusual, and that ends up with a very difficult to manage environment. We have a flat hierarchy to manage that, but if you can converge an actual important thing inside the company, which usually has a societal hook to someone's n of one or n of very small number talent, you can build things that no one else can build, which I would say...
...in the anti-terror context, in the institutional integration managing of AI context, battlefield context. And then interestingly, you know, like I think some of these movements, the defense tech and sovereign as an example, we were the primary leaders in creating a movement which is now not only our movement.
No, it's much broader than that. And in fact, I mean, that really gives the audience a feel for the leadership style and what does it mean to be an artist colony, and also frankly ties into your background. In other words, the ability to think and to be creative from that standpoint, well, and to accept creativity of others, which means that they can do and express things you can't do. Correct?
Which I think, as a generalization, our organizations do not exactly excel at. So, as a generalization, the person who sticks out who may be better at something gets fired, especially if they're telling the truth at all. And so here, by here, I don't mean commercial institutions. I mean, look what's happened to our educational institutions, our... I mean, you know, like basic functioning, like why does Europe struggle to have a tech scene, or why do we struggle to produce new and creative things? And I think part of the problem is just...
It's very difficult for humans to accept that there's a human that they're working with that is so much better at something that they can barely understand it.
And then harnessing that, though, is something, by the way, that I think we uniquely do well in the West when we do it well. And then why I think it's very important for us in America and then in Europe, because this is actually our sole advantage, that we, as a matter of theory, we've been doing this for a thousand years. But it is very, very hard to do because there's an humiliation aspect to it, and none of us really... So, but if you are working in a context where you believe that artistry is the only thing that can create a certain kind of beauty, and you see it work over and over and over again — sometimes it doesn't work — you get more comfortable with that.
And actually, interestingly, over time you understand the psychological pain that's inflicted inherently in being in that environment is what you associate with something that's working. And actually, I think one of the primary things we train people in is, you know, people always have this thing we grow up with: does it feel good or feel bad? But sometimes, like, all medicine is kind of poison, and getting people to accept and embrace for real, not on paper. Like, we all say these words. So that's the other thing. It's like everyone says it. Okay.
It's like, you know, Wittgenstein — a very important statement from Wittgenstein was: to believe you're following a rule is not to follow a rule. And in German it's particularly tight. But it's like we all say all this stuff, we're all saying it. Everybody will say these words. Now go do it. It's really, really hard.
You have a 12-year-old looking person who's like, 'But Dr. Karp, I think basically everything you've done is wrong,' or everything you think here, or they have a way of framing things. Okay, how do you interact with — and by the way, they're not always right, so you have to manage that — and how do you insert yourself into their aptitude without destroying it, but while raising it?
But you've actually inserted... So now let's keep going further on that, because that's a great aperture into actually the business. You've inserted yourself into places that are incredibly consequential: the US Department of War, Maven. Can you give us a description?
Well, I mean, honestly, so that's the neutral thing, but you're sitting in Europe — like, almost all relevant anti-terror efforts, Europe would be different without these anti-terror efforts. What's happening in France would have already happened. And Ukraine — like, I'm under serious security constraints because of the enormous role we play — certain parts of Israel, like the transformation of institutions.
And this is actually, I think, a particularly interesting point you're making. What we are tacitly saying is: okay, I see how you could manage an artist colony and it could create value, but it's another big leap, and this is the business acumen to getting that into an enterprise that might not be able to appreciate or value that, and getting them to adopt on their terms while it's not their terms.
And an enterprise that frankly has done it a certain way for decades, with an inherent group of people, where you're bringing in something very, very new. Well, we're bringing in people that don't seem the same, that aren't like... It's a very... and the philosophical thing that's interesting is how do you do this and then have a transfer mechanism, because at the first instance they're not at all correlated. Now, it's not true, because without the transfer mechanism we don't know what to build. But so the transfer mechanism also affects the product, and so that's where we ended up with FDES and me on the front line dealing with the clients and all sorts of other things.
But at a first instance, this is exactly... I met the patriarch of the crown family, and he basically asked the same question. You know, it was a titan of industry. He's like, 'Okay, but how did you get the first olive out of the jar?' Because, you know, having the olive, that's one thing. Having people adopt it — and then the trick is not just to get them to take the olive, but to change their taste so they appreciate the taste of the right olive. And that is complete artistry. And I don't know exactly how we do it, but I know that we know how to do it.
But you've done it. You've done it in a variety of places. Because now let's move away from defense and talk about commercial enterprises. Everyone in the audience understands Accenture and SAP and McKinsey and Microsoft and what they do for a large enterprise. What is the problem that Palantir is solving for a large...
I mean, it really — I mean, at this point the crazy thing is it depends on the enterprise. We have a basic offering, which is Foundry, which will allow you to integrate all your data sets. In many cases, a crucial step that has not happened — that's what we were doing like 2017 maximally, all the way. Then we began doing more complicated things, would be like how do you run your ideas on the enterprise, like you can think of like passive searches pre-AI.
Now at the final, what we're doing with a lot of people is the sovereign architecture, which is how do you power models you create, you own, that you may want to selectively share with others, so you could white label them or not. How do you own the whole stack and impregnate your tribal knowledge into your enterprise in a one-to-one way so you're not losing it, so a CEO can actually change their enterprise and augment what they know with models in our product so the models actually work. How do you do that at scale?
But again, I think the original question you're asking: how do you do that while the enterprise accepts it and their taste changes so that they understand what quality looks like now and...
And they understand, because you're touching on AI sovereignty by that statement too, but also understanding in a world where everyone's watching their costs what value they're getting.
Well, it's cost. I mean, again...
Cost... cost is a metaphor for two things: what did you pay, and what did you lose? Correct? Okay. So the cost is not just what you paid for the token, it's what portion of your IP did you have to transfer to get the token.
And so what we're saying is you can control the true cost. For example, most, all enterprises, including government, non-government, have parts of their enterprise they'd be very happy... they don't like... no one cares really what you're doing in your marketing in Argentina. So you could use a model that de facto is transferring what you're doing to someone else, and it transfers to your competitor. They would care if you understand how you organize your supply chain, or what parts of your supply chain, or what vendors you understand to be great and what's okay. That stuff has to stay enterprise.
So the truth first as a cost thing: it's what did you pay for, what did you lose. And also then you get to value. In both cases you need something like an application platform. Currently the only one available at scale is ours: Ontology. That application platform will allow you to control actual cost, as defined by me, and control and understand actual value, and that value is going to come down to what is the delta between what you could do with or without this.
And we do both, and we do it in a way that is quite unique, because you also need to be able to instruct and build product around it, and you have to know how to work with the institution.
But you've also said that CEOs — you know, we've talked about the price of tokens — and you've said that CEOs are livid because they're paying for tokens that create no value.
No, no, they're livid because they're paying for tokens that create no value, and they're doubly paying because some portion of their IP has been migrated to their competitor.
Which gets back to the sovereignty.
So, like, you know, this is why, again, I don't want to be vulgar, but most CEOs I deal with, compared to this, it's some kind of venereal disease, and they're really, really upset. And actually, in a weird way, they're less upset now because the sovereign platform shows them that they can actually enjoy the product without getting something that they don't want to have for the rest of their life.
And by the way, ensuring that the stuff that is integral to them, the stuff that is proprietary that they care about, they retain control.
Retain control. And honestly, what we're seeing in the next version is you could even white label this if you want and use that as your IP to expand into other verticals.
But so, but yes, what made people very, very... look, the CEOs I deal with...
Not all of them are technical. They're all shrewd and they're all intelligent. In fact, by and large, one of the ways you make it to the top is you hide how smart you are. So they do not... Like, yes. You're laughing because you're trying and failing at this. You're trying to hide it, but it's not working.
Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Every single person who's like sure they're intelligent tells you how stupid they are. Just like all your super wealthy clients are telling you how they can't really afford to pay you.
They're so wealthy. Their assets are like, it's all liquid now.
They'll pay you as soon as it's liquid. It's hard being a multi-billionaire.
But the issue really becomes here: people want to have the sovereignty of the assets. There's also the other issue too, and that is, by the way, protecting themselves in terms of the incursions that are continuously coming after us from a security standpoint. So frankly, when you look at wealth, business, integrity of the assets, security of the assets...
