“Start With One Superstar” - Palantir Co-Founder REVEALS How The PayPal Mafia Found The Top 1%
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with Palantir co-founder and CEO, Alex Blumberg, to talk about how he got his start in Silicon Valley, how he went from a nerdy kid to a computer scientist at Stanford, and what it's like to work with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Transcript
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Palantir, when you say Palantir to the average person,
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some is good, some is bad, some is neutral, some are scared.
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but one of my favorite signs on the old defense secretary, Rumsfeld,
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if nobody is angry at you, you might not be doing much.
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My dad's not doing well, which is sad, but they're amazing people.
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He was our chess coach when we were little for fun.
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And we won the state championship when I was a kid,
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and my brothers did too, and we thought we must be really smart,
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but a really optimistic, positive, competitive guy.
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How old were you when you won the championship?
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I was the K-6 champion twice in a row in fifth and sixth grade,
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and we won the nationals in junior high school.
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But it's because we worked really hard at it because he was a good coach.
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You had to spend 30, 40 hours a week to be the best.
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We grew up in Fremont, California, and Silicon Valley,
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and these were tournaments in California and around the country.
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I was a valedictorian, and I had a bunch of really smart friends who taught me a bunch of stuff about,
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you know, we went way ahead in math and science and stuff.
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So at what point did you and Peter Thielen cut?
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Because I think when I heard a story about you were still in college and you were doing something with them,
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You know, a lot of the smartest kids in Stanford computer science were going to PayPal at the time.
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It was something where I really admired the talent that was there.
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You have to realize that company, there was one company started by Peter Thielen
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And there's one company that Elon Musk started with Roloff and a bunch of other really smart people.
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So it was all the smartest friends around, both Elon and Peter.
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They actually rejected me my freshman year, but they let me in my sophomore year to go help them.
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Was that like the place everybody wanted to work in?
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Not everyone, but I think for me it was when I noticed a lot of the smartest, most interesting people going in there.
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Because, you know, it's kind of like, well, you know, at that time when you look at the numbers,
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But how did you know that these, would they talk about it in the small circles?
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I'd already done most of the undergrad work before I got there, which is normal nowadays.
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And so I met a lot of the smartest other computer scientists, and they were all trying to go work there.
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And then I was the editor of the Stanford Review, which Peter had started.
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So Peter's way, how proactive was Peter of trying to get it in front of all the smartest kids coming out?
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Oh, this is the most critical thing to do for these businesses.
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That's what we spend a lot of our time on now, flying up to see all the kids at Harvard and MIT this week.
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Is it, you know, do you go straight to the top?
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So Palantir, we had a whole playbook when we started that, you know, Palantir hired a lot of the top talent.
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These young men and women on your team, and they're, like, talented computer scientists, and they help you map out who the other best people are.
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And they help you throw parties, and they help you get to know them.
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And you just have people who are young, smart, technical people who are social, and they're there, and they're mapping it out.
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So when I come in, there's different groups we've met.
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And people who want to work with us, we want to learn from them.
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So it's a mutually beneficial thing where you're getting to know all the top talent, and you're helping connect them to your top companies.
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And it just becomes a way to work with them all.
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So I'll have a superstar from my portfolio who's, like, one of our best engineers who just came from MIT.
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And they have, like, five or six of their smartest friends in the younger year.
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So you're recruiting smart guys hanging out with smart guys.
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Yeah, and then you might talk to them, and you might work on projects with them, so you get to know a little bit.
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But, yeah, you're just purely through the network.
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It's the same way if you're a football coach or you're a baseball coach.
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You know, like, right now I met with one of the law firms that represents a lot of young talent.
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Nowadays, they're recruiting kids at 10, 11, 12 years old.
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You've got personality, I can get some sponsorship money.
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Of course, you've got to have the physical abilities.
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You know, it depends if you're hiring an entrepreneur or hiring an engineer or an engineering leader.
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An entrepreneur needs to be able to say, here's my hypothesis about the world.
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Usually, they want to have some chip on their shoulder, something they're trying to prove.
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You need smart, interesting, curious people to build things.
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But you need to have, like, a certain level of leadership and opinions about the world, I think, to build things.
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When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury,
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we had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap.
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We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step.
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Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection.
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