How Palantir’s AI Bet is Revolutionizing Defense and Beyond, with CTO Shyam Sankar

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Palantir has built a data-driven application platform over the past two decades that is used by governments, militaries and some of the world's largest companies for analytics and operational decisions.
Palantir recently announced a new platform, AIP, as part of a push to invest in AI. This week on the podcast, Sarah and I talked to Palantir's CTO, Shyam Sankar, who's the company's first business hire and has led the company for nearly two decades, previously as a COO. Shyam, welcome to No Priors.

**Shyam Sankar** (0:32)
Thanks for having me. Great to be here, Sarah and Elad.

**Elad Gil** (0:34)
So I think you have a very unique background. I believe you grew up in Nigeria and then moved to the United States.
You got interested in computers reasonably early. It'd be great to just hear your personal story and your background.

**Shyam Sankar** (0:45)
Yeah, I spent the first three years of my life really in Nigeria. My father had built the first pharmaceutical manufacturing facility on the continent. Until then, all the drugs were really imported.
We fled Nigeria during some violence and really resettled in the US as kind of like refugees. A great deal of gratitude, understanding the counterfactual reality of how the world could have ended up there.
I grew up in Florida.
I think relevant to the current age, I grew up in a time where when the space shuttles would launch, we would all file out into the recessed courtyard to actually just watch it. That seemed quite normal. It also seemed really normal that on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. you'd be woken up to double sonic booms every now and then. I'm eagerly awaiting the return of the space age, that commercial space and new space has been bringing back to us here. But I made my way out to Silicon Valley in 2003, and started getting involved with startups. The first company I worked at was Zoom with an X that was founded by Kevin Hartz. It was an international money transfer company. Then after three years at Zoom, I started at Palantir as the 13th employee, really the first person on the business side and have had the most fantastic ride ever since. But never been more excited about what we're doing than what we're doing right now with AIP and the opportunities that are in front of us.

**Elad Gil** (2:07)
How did you originally find Palantir? Because it's a very secretive company very early on. It was a very small community in technology and Silicon Valley had actually heard of it. I was just curious how you connected with the company and got involved.

**Shyam Sankar** (2:23)
Peter was also a seed fund investor in Zoom, so got some exposure there. One of my friends was actually a freshman year roommates at Stanford with Joe Lonsdale.
I had heard about this company that was very small at the time, and it really talked to my heartstrings. My uncle was a victim of terrorism. I was in New York during 9-11 and it just like this was going to be, I would rather fail on working on a problem this important than do anything else.

**Elad Gil** (2:50)
Then you joined, as you mentioned, as employee number 13, the first business hire, et cetera, and you had a variety of roles over time. Could you explain a little bit how your role has changed over the lifetime of the company?

**Shyam Sankar** (3:00)
I think the common thread through it all is just doing what you need to do, which I know sounds like a banality, but really when it first started, I wrote our first candidate management system. What are you doing as a business hire before you have really a product here?
I was an aggressive QA tester, you could say, but the real initial contribution was what we call Forward Deployed Engineering. It comes from an insight that Alex had around like, well, he muses, why are French restaurants so good? Well, maybe one theory is that the wait staff is actually part of the kitchen staff there.
They have deep context and understanding of the food. The Forward Deployed Engineering idea was that the people who are going to be interacting with customers in the field, we're going to be computer scientists. You could actually understand what does the product do today? What does it need to do today? Under what conditions is it going to work? How do you create this hybrid role that's product management, customer success, and engineering all in one?
That's really the team that I first built up. Then as we went from Gotham and Foundry and now AIP, there's a lot to do there. Whether it's interacting more often with the customers, thinking about the technology or really thinking about how are you going to get to value? I think a lot of what forward deployed engineering really gets you to think about is, how do you do these things backwards? Instead of really going forward from the technology, how do you work backwards from the problems that your customers actually experience? Use that to create an accountability function.