Shyam Sankar Is Trying To Mobilize A Country | Palantir CTO Interview

Thanks for having me.

We have a gift for you. This is the actual Mobilize gift box here, which is a reconditioned, marginally reconditioned actual ammo box from the Lake City ammo facility in Missouri here. And inside, we got some goodies for you.

Book itself.

March 17th.

I love it. If I may say so. Pretty badass Mobilize patch.

I love it.

How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? Thanks for having me.

That's right. March 17th, Mobilize.

Yeah, as you just mentioned, I've been at Palantir almost 20 years now. I joined as the 13th employee, the first forward deployed engineer. That wasn't even my title. That's the title I came up with about a year into the job. But really I had been working at another startup for a couple years in San Francisco that Peter had seed funded. And I heard about these merry band of misfits that were working on solving problems in national security and counterterrorism and I was just ruined like I could not think of working on anything but this. So it all went pretty quickly. I met Joe in January of 2006. And by March I started and it was just awesome. It was just in the beginning it was like I built demos which was really a fancy way of QAing the product like product didn't work, product didn't exist you know those early days and started building a team around that and iterating with the customer doing the early deployments and it's been one thing after another since then.

For better or worse, I mean my frame is kind of the same. Like I try to keep my head in the engine room as close to the coalface with the customers, the deployments, the work, thinking about what could be better about the product, where should we be going next, where are we going to unlock the most amount of value for our customers? Kind of managing that work that goes on between the forward deployed engineers and the product development teams, right? So I know it sounds like a weird answer, but it doesn't feel different to me because I'm not paying attention to it. I'm like in the work.

Well, it starts with, you know, one of the things Alex has always said is like no great company was principally started to make money. Great companies start as a cult that happen to be a company because that's how you get to keep doing the thing you're obsessed with doing, right? And better part of 19 years working in national security. I put out in October of '24 a treatise called the 18 Theses that really represented not only my diagnosis of one, we've lost deterrence. We're in a precarious place. Perhaps World War III has already started. We have the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the militarization of the Spratly Islands in '15. Iran with breakout capability of the bomb in '17. A pogrom in Israel, the war in Ukraine, Second Thomas Shoal, lots of skirmishes in South China Sea. Like it looks a lot like the Spanish Civil War as the prelude to World War II. So the clock is ticking. We have a limited amount of time to deter broader conflict which is just an outcome that is going to be horrible for the world. And as really the leader of the world, we need to look seriously at what we can do to deter this. And then from there we talk about okay well what happened? We spend like a trillion dollars a year on defense. We were the sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We built the arsenal of democracy in World War II. We have the most innovative economy in the world. What is going on? And it really goes through a diagnosis of what we believe it's like it's about the primacy of winning like we what built that arsenal of freedom. And we talk about a term that I love the heretics and heroes, right? It really is about people, about the primacy of people. And it wasn't Northrop Grumman. It was Jack Northrop and Leroy Grumman. And when we kind of pray at the altar of process and we think that hey the institutional approach alone as opposed to the great and courageous acts of incredibly creative people rebelling against the bureaucracy is what makes things work. We lose sight of what makes things work, right? And very importantly every major military innovation and we document a lot of these in the book is an act of heresy. You know, it was Churchill as the head of the British Navy, the Royal Navy, who built the tank because the British Army didn't think they needed anything other than horses. You know, it was Hyman Rickover who against the wishes of the US Navy built the nuclear navy, one of our last remaining asymmetric advantages against the Chinese, right? Innovation after innovation. Andrew Higgins, he ended up supplying 92% of all boats in World War II, but the Navy didn't want to buy them in the leadup to it, you know? So part of it is a message to the heretics that are serving every day as uniform service members or civilians in the department that your heresy is the difference between winning or losing and a message to the heretics that are outside the building like the heirs to Kelly Johnson the founder of Skunk Works like the work that you're doing really matters. The reason to send the message now is it finally felt like the shot clock was running out and the people had showed up. Maybe it's a version of the Churchillian saying that after doing everything else in the end, America does the right thing and the people, the founders were coalescing around it that the desire for profound reformation in the Pentagon itself was starting to bubble up and I think this was a moment to crystallize it all. So 18 Theses, the book is really like the long form explanation of 18 Theses and it crystallizes it, grounds it in more history and it does more research and kind of a deeper look at what we should be changing in particular.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, can I look my kids in the eye and say I did everything possible so that you guys would not be fighting a war and that you would be living in a free and prosperous world, right? And I guess I not only was the shot clock running out, but I felt like after 19 years of doing this, I'd earned specific opinions of what is broken and what we should be fixing and had a duty to at least articulate them. I'm not sure they're all right, but I think they're directionally right enough to catalyze a reformation.

That's right. We settled in Orlando when I was a child fleeing violence in Nigeria. And I think it really began on the couch with dad watching great American movies. You know, Hunt for Red October, Red Dawn, Rambo 3, Rocky 4. And I know that sounds crazy. You can only kind of connect these dots in retrospect, but I feel like as a 5-year-old, I knew what it felt like to be an American before I understood civics, right? But I was definitely raised in a household that understood the stark counterfactual, but for the grace of this nation to be dead in a ditch in Lagos. And I think growing up in Orlando in that time, like that's essentially the shadow of the space coast. Like when the shuttle re-entered, you'd have double sonic booms over your house and you could file out in the courtyard in the elementary school and look at the shuttle take off. You could see the contrail. It's pretty small, but you could see it. You were filled with this sense of wonderment that the future was going to be better because of technology and these were noble things to have and that the ambition, it's like we should send humans to space like ambition was latent in the environment, right?

Hardware is critical at the end of the day you're not going to win the war or deter the conflict with bits you know you need atoms. Now, the bits can help you bend the atoms better, and that's the whole thesis behind Warp Speed, which we can get to. But, you know, I think the starting precept is that the industrial base that won World War II was an American industrial base. Ford was building planes, General Mills, General Motors, Pontiac, Philco, everyone was in the fight. And in fact, that industrial base carried forward until roughly the fall of the Berlin Wall. And when the Berlin Wall fell, only 6% of spending on major weapon systems went to defense specialists, i.e. companies that we would think of today as defense contractors. The rest went to what I call as dual-purpose companies. Companies that had a consumer or private sector business and were providing for our prosperity and safety, our freedom really as companies. So, you know, Chrysler used to make missiles and minivans. Chrysler was the prime contractor on the Minuteman ICBM. That's hard to think about today. You know, Ford used to build satellites until 1990. General Mills, the cereal company, built torpedoes and inertial guidance systems. Kodak was, yeah, they made film. They also made spy satellites.