The Companies Changing Warfare Forever: Palantir & Anduril Execs on Drones, AI & the Future of War

**Friedberg** (0:00)
Trae Stephens, Shyam Sankar, welcome to the All-In Podcast at the Hill & Valley Forum. Thank you guys for being here. What's up? How are you guys doing?

**Shyam Sankar** (0:06)
Thanks for having us. Doing great.

**Trae Stephens** (0:07)
Good to be here too.

**Friedberg** (0:08)
You guys are friends, right? You guys go back a long time.

**Trae Stephens** (0:12)
A really long time.

**Friedberg** (0:14)
Okay, tell us how you guys know each other. Palantir, Anduril, what's the connection and the history? Well, I'll start.

**Shyam Sankar** (0:20)
You can fill in all the gaps.

**Trae Stephens** (0:21)
I feel like I know the story you're going to tell and it's going to be very uncomfortable.

**Friedberg** (0:29)
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**Shyam Sankar** (0:55)
So, Trae, I think, you know, in the early days of Palantir, I was roaming around giving demos to anyone who could possibly want to see them. Trae was working in an Intel agency and happened to see one of these demos, and he should tell you his version of it, his side of it, his frustration with bureaucracy. But I think he realized like, hey, this might be really cool. Maybe I should leave the hellhole I'm in, in the basement of this building, getting nothing done, talking about sports with other people to go join this crusade. So Trae reached out and applied. He made a big faux pas, he came all the way to Palo Alto, and he wore a full on suit tie cufflinks, CIA cufflinks mind you. Coming to interview with, I don't know, we were probably 20 people who wore t-shirts and second hand me down clothes.
He was intercepted in the lobby by a receptionist who really cared about him and told him to ditch the tie and try to dress down and don't screw it up too bad. But we loved him immediately and he helped us build the government business.

**Friedberg** (1:57)
So this was at Palantir. You were there employee 13, 2006, right? So this was pretty early on.

**Trae Stephens** (2:03)
Yeah, I came in in early 2008, but there were still 25, 30 people at that point.

**Friedberg** (2:09)
Pretty small. And Peter kind of incubated it, was involved at the beginning, right, Peter Thiel. Maybe you could just recap, because I know a lot of folks know the history of Palantir, but just kind of like the early stand up of Palantir and how things got going during that era with that small group, how you guys kind of figured out how to build the business.

**Shyam Sankar** (2:25)
Yeah, it was one of these things that was kind of a slow start. There was a real idea amongst the five co-founders, including Peter, that, you know, it's kind of insane to live in a world post-911 where people are arguing about what's more important, privacy or security. Like, aren't they both really important? And who is actually spending time pushing out the efficient frontier? For any amount of given security, you should have more privacy than you had before, or any amount of given privacy, you should have more security.
And this sort of changing the dialectic there was really the entire impetus of what we started with. And now there's a technical approach that follows from that. There's an approach to privacy and celebrities that are around that. But really, we started as a business that was pretty myopically focused on solving a handful of problems and counterterrorism for a handful of institutions in the world.

**Friedberg** (3:10)
Let me start by asking a question that I think is important to ask, particularly for a broad audience and for the two of you to frame your personal philosophical views. Is war good? There's a lot of conversation about there is a military industrial complex that has an incentive for war. What's your view, your philosophical motivation for why you do what you do, what your view is of war and defense and the work that your business is pursue?

**Shyam Sankar** (3:37)
Well, anyone who's been to war would tell you that war is awful. War is bad, categorically bad. That doesn't mean it's always avoidable. And that, you know, there are people who will want to use might to make right, to define a set of rules. And you have to be in a position to protect your people and your interests accordingly.