How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)

30% of PMs that leave Palantir start a company. Just give us a picture of what, what the people are like.

I feel like they screen really hard for a few traits in particular. One is, like, very independent-minded people who aren't afraid to push back. Two is people with broader intellectual interests.

What's the difference between, say, a PM at Palantir versus a traditional PM?

They were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward-deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way. There's two types of engineer at Palantir. So there's one that works on the core products, and they're a traditional software engineer. There was a different type of engineer which you sent into the field, right? You would spend maybe Monday to Thursday, and you would actually go into the building where the customer worked, and you would work alongside them. You would literally get a desk pass. And so that engineer became known as a forward-deployed engineer.

What's something that you believe that most other people don't?

I think this is a somewhat contrarian view within tech.

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Nabeel Qureshi. Nabeel is a founder, a writer, a researcher, and an engineer. He was recently a visiting scholar researching AI policy at the Mercatus Center alongside Tyler Cowen. At one point, he worked with the National Institute of Health and major clinical centers to create the largest medical dataset in the world. He worked at the Bank of England for a bit. He was founding member and VP of business development at GoCardless, one of Europe's biggest financial technology unicorns. And most related to the topic of this conversation, Nabeel spent almost eight years at Palantir as a forward-deployed engineer, working on public health projects with U.S. federal agencies, including public health services during the COVID-19 response and applied AI in drug discovery. Whether you are a fan of Palantir or hate everything that they do, they are an important and fast-growing company that is pumping out incredible product leaders, as you'll hear, more than any other company in the world. So, it is worth studying and understanding. I've never heard an in-depth conversation digging into how they operate, build product, hire, and were able to scale from a primarily services business to a software business. So, I am very excited to bring you this inside look. In our conversation, we go deep into: what the heck does Palantir even do?; why getting good at managing lots of data is an underappreciated secret to their success; a look at the unique forward-deployed engineer role that they innovated and what other companies can borrow from their insights here; also, how they hire and how they build amazing product leaders; plus a ton of advice on talking to customers, building products, and starting companies. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a bunch of amazing products for free for a year, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear, Perplexity, Granola, and more. Check it out at lemmysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Nabeel Qureshi. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. This episode is brought to you by Attio, the AI-native CRM. Attio is built to scale with your business from day one. Connect your email and calendar, and Attio instantly builds a CRM that matches your business model with all of your companies, contacts, and interactions enriched with actionable insights. Sync in your product's usage, billing info, or any other data sources, and Attio's flexible data model will handle it all without any rigid templates or workarounds. With Attio, AI isn't just a feature, it's the foundation. You can do things like instantly prospect and route leads with research agents, get real-time insights from AI using customer conversations, and build powerful AI automations for your most complex workflows. Industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, and Modal are already experiencing what's next for CRM. Go to attio.com/lenny to get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com/lenny. (instrumental music) Nabeel, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.