The Philosopher in the Valley & My Reflections on Leaving Palantir

This book was perfectly timed to my paternity leave, a time where I was not actively working and could reflect on my job. The post will be a short review of the book, followed by a much longer section where I will attempt to verbalize all my thoughts on Palantir. Thoughts on my time there, what I did and didn't like, and why I am leaving. I am not writing this as some manifesto. I have been explaining to a bunch of people in my life why I have been considering leaving, and my thoughts never feel coherent, the reasons change day to day. This is for myself to reflect, and I might even continue to edit it as I remember things.

I thought this book was excellent, a biography of Alex Karp, but also a tale of Palantir's history. The author was around Karp for an extended period of time, providing a lot of details that even I did not know. It lays out all the Palantir milestones over the years, many of which I remember quite clearly, but hearing about it with a bit more distance is cool. A lot of it affirmed how I felt in those moments, but even with my sense that things have been shifting over the years with Karp and the company, the book marks a couple pivotal Karp moments that have reshaped the company. I thought it was very objective, and critical in a lot of moments, and I am glad Karp endorses such an open look into his life. I haven't read a lot of biographies, but I assume the good ones are free from the biases of their subjects, which this is. I burned through this and found it tremendously satisfying, but probably only because of my ties to the source. If you are interested in technology and the rise of a startup with government ties then this would be enjoyable.

Okay there's the end of my book review. I will probably reference it a ton going forward, since it really helped me think through all my feelings around the company and my work. Again, this next section is more for me, and will probably be a bit unorganized stream of thoughts and free association.

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I got an internship at Palantir in 2013, and it was a dream come true. During one of my first exams at the University of Waterloo I clearly remember a TA wearing a shirt that said "Palantir" on the back, and given that I love Lord of the Rings I made a mental note to Google them after the exam. When I got back to my dorm room I saw they were a tech company, they made big data applications, and they prided themselves on their mission. This wasn't some social media or mobile app, they were solving problems that mattered. They were small, unflashy, in California, mysterious, all things that intrigued me. This was a time in my life where I had virtually no software experience, but knew that was the direction I wanted to move, so the bar was set and I had a goal.

When I got my Palantir interview I was on my fourth internship, and I had some good experience but felt completely unqualified. The interview went well, but I didn't hear back for weeks, until the day where I had to lock in my job decision for the next semester. I woke up thinking I would be going to Hulu, which was also incredibly exciting, but Palantir called an hour before locking it in, offering me the internship. This usually indicates that they had someone else selected that turned them down, so I was not their first choice, but I was ecstatic and instantly accepted.

The internship was incredible. I made strong connections with the people I worked with, and I loved the weather and life in Palo Alto, California. I certainly still felt completely unqualified, but I wanted a return offer for my final internship so badly. I got it, but I still feel that it was only because me and my boss played basketball together all the time. This first internship I was also going through a painful breakup of a long term relationship, and being out of the country experiencing this Silicon Valley lifestyle was very healing, or at least distracting. My first internship was January to April, my second September to December, and it was one of the best years of my life. A bit overwhelming, meeting all of these people from prestigious schools and learning from many people I would still consider the smartest I have ever met. But I was firmly behind this company, and when they offered me a full time job it was as if all of my hard work over the years had finally paid off.

Team cooking class

An unforgettable moment would come back in Waterloo, during my last school semester, when they sent me my official offer letter. They paid higher than any internship at the time, but that money always instantly went back to cover my studies the following semester. When I got that offer letter and saw the salary amount I was in a public computer lab in the mathematics building and I started openly crying. I remember covering my head with my sweater hoodie, but honestly not caring as tears rolled down my cheeks. I was so proud of myself, blown away by a large salary but also the security I had gained for myself. I also felt like I somehow snuck in the back door, an imposter's syndrome I still feel at work to this day. But I had achieved the dream job, I was dating the girl that would eventually become my wife, and in that moment I felt more accomplished than I ever had.

Day 1 picture day

I say all this because it's a good memory, but it was an intoxicating feeling I have clung to when I think of life away from Palantir. Why would I leave the job that was my dream? I felt so lucky and fortunate to get in, and if I leave the next company I try to join will realize I am a sham. When considering the clients Palantir works with that I disagree completely with, I still remember the joy and pride of that moment, which makes me more apologetic for the company, not wanting to admit that this dream company may have always been flawed. It was a perfect moment, and it's easy to look at the company with that emotion running through me and clouding my vision.

Annual "Puzzlehunt" at Stanford

I have worked for Palantir for 11 years now, including the internships. The first 3.5 years was in Palo Alto, and while I missed my girlfriend terribly I loved my life there and the people I met. Some of my best memories are eating a delicious dinner at the cafeteria, then going back to the office with co-workers for drinks and cornhole, or video games, or watching an episode of a show we all loved. Sometimes we would go from there to the gym to work out, or to the basketball court to shoot around, or back to someone else's house to watch basketball. If not I would go home and often play video games with those same people. It was a fantasy life for a young guy. Friends with common interests, often also far from home, and disposable income with a lot of fun things to spend it on. We would go hiking on weekends, go to the ocean, eat at great restaurants. The company did my laundry, fed me on weekends if you include all the drinks and snacks I would take home, had a company basketball team. My roommates also worked for Palantir, so I was in this perfect little bubble.

Trivia Night

The last 6 or so years I have worked remote, which is completely different. All those friends from the early years have moved on to different companies, or different offices, and we no longer work together. It is difficult to make personal connections working remotely, and in the past 3 or so years I have felt this very acutely, having no connections outside of the work day with anyone. The friends I did share common interests with have moved to other teams, which means we have no reason to carve out time to catch up in our full work days. I think this is the first big factor in me leaving. Working on cool things is all well and good, but doing it in isolation is lonely and less exciting. When I would visit the office I felt like an outcast, and there would be great moments of conversation around a table or walking back to my hotel after work, but nothing that sticks. I miss collaborative work, but even more I miss getting to know people personally, and feeling like I am working towards something with people I can call friends. There are a ton of benefits to being at home with my family, but none of those are work related.

Team offsite at The Met

Leadership has often described our workplace as an "artist's colony", and while that's flattering I also felt there was some truth in it. I felt very connected to all these people with very different backgrounds, and even though I still felt stupid in comparison to everyone the things I was good at were being used and appreciated. This feeling went away when I worked remotely, losing the personal connections to the people I worked with.

Apple picking in Upstate New York

Speaking of flattery, Karp and other leadership were and are constantly hyping all of us up as the smartest people in the industry, and that felt good! Just by getting in the door they had a high opinion of us, although I never lost my imposter syndrome. Karp in particular is so openly disparaging of places like Facebook, where bright minds go to make more money but actively make destructive things for profit. That was something I always believed to be true, and still do to some extent - that Palantir only cared about high-impact solutions, not things that are easy to advertise for a commercial audience. Every tech company believes they are changing the world, and they repeat this mantra to inspire their workforce. The show Silicon Valley came out while I was living there, and it perfectly represents a lot of the culture there at the time, especially this "making the world a better place" mantra.

But I believed it! I loved hearing Karp scoff at people wasting their talent on useless applications, because Palantir was "helping the world's most important institutions solve the world's hardest problems". And what could be more lofty than that! I drank the Kool-Aid and came back for seconds. We worked with many different clients and industries, which I also loved, solving problems in a way that can be generic across domains. The tools were powerful, and I was directly involved in building them.

Art class team event

Palantir is mysterious, since its basically a data analysis platform combined with engineers that embed with the client to help them use the platform to solve all their problems. The most moving demos were from our work the the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where analysts would show how they used the hotline tips and public data sources to rescue children. I would get teary eyed thinking about how code I had written played a small part in saving lives. But this is just one example. During COVID we were so heavily embedded with the national institutions rolling out vaccines or allocating hospital beds, the work felt urgent and important, and I am incredibly proud that I got to take part in that. I remember working over the weekend to implement a feature that the head of the Coronavirus Task Force of America specifically requested, rolling it out, and seeing them present a slideshow to the president that included those changes the following week. Karp has always said that Palantir thrives in those moments - when terrible things happen we can respond quickly because of our awesome tech and our access to these prominent institutions.

Team dinner

Obviously this is a double-edged sword. Palantir has always worked with the US government, and specifically in defense. I was pretty isolated from that work, since I am not American and don't have clearance, but as someone from a pacifist background I was always a bit uneasy about it. I have being doing moral calculus for years, and always felt that the good outweighed the bad. I don't disagree with defense, and I always liked that Palantir was involved in these challenging areas. It is important work that is nuanced and not steeped in the black-and-white polarity of internet discourse. I challenged my own beliefs around the things I didn't disagree with, and while I still don't feel great about the army I have more understanding for those that do support them. Of course this leads naturally to America's present leadership...

Karp held the belief that we have a duty to our country to support our government, and if you disagree with the government you should vote differently, not just pull support. That's an argument with a ton of flaws, but mainly, what happens when that government breaks every rule and no longer feels like a democracy? Over the years Karp's mantra around "solving the world's hardest problems" became "upholding Western democracy", and now its just "supporting the West". As Trump becomes a full on dictator, making unilateral decisions to round up minorities like animals or deploy troops in American cities or on and on and on, when do we pull our support? We can't because we are completely entrenched, but also for financial reasons of course. Shyam Sankar, our CTO and a person I have always despised at the company, wrote a disgusting piece praising Trump for his "founder's mentality", a bootlicking think piece that made me want to quit the day I read it. Our leadership has gone from having a moral backbone they were proud of to bowing down for a cut of the reward. Palantir is sponsoring the current White House ballroom renovation, for example, a ridiculous ego-driven vanity project for a child playing at king. But he writes the cheques!

The week Trump was elected all mentions of the phrase "DEI" were removed from our website, something they tried to convince us was semantic and everything it stood for is still place. Gender-affirming bathroom signs were removed, and while this is something that doesn't affect me at all it was a clear signal of the de-woke-ification of the company, something Karp was all of a sudden obsessed with. He has always called Palantir a meritocracy, which I believe it was, but my own journey into the company felt riddled with good fortune. It's a story for another time, but I won a ping pong game at a prior internship that meant I got the top score on my review, and I believe that score is what made me even get on the recruitment radar for Palantir. That was a game where I was carried by a coworker, and is one of my favourite stories that I can tell another time. This is certainly not DEI, but claiming that every person is here, or anywhere, purely based on merit is insane. Karp has also always shown disdain for places like Stanford, where people pay a ton of money to be told what to think, in his opinion. While I found this funny, since I came from a smaller Canadian university, it has now turned into an argument against them as woke institutions. The books talks a lot about Karp's beliefs and experiences as a Jewish bi-racial man, and the Hamas attacks were flagged as pivot point in his conviction, which aligns with what I saw at the company. I am certainly no expert, and antisemitism is certainly real, but condemning campus protests against a genocide is not brainwashed students parroting liberal talking points.

Phew, it's getting heated. Another funny point before I take a step back, the book talks a lot about Karp's dyslexia, his self-consciousness about it, and how he didn't let it stop him from succeeding. Admirable stuff. But now every time Karp goes berserk in an interview and says something crazy, which he has always done but now it makes headlines, its played off as neuro-divergent passion. So much so that he has introduced a neurodivergent fellowship, basically a scholarship for people like him to come to Palantir and use their gifts despite aspects that make them atypical. DEI much?

At a high level, the company has lost its true North. I know for a fact many people high up in the company used to heavily weigh each contract with each client, with a privacy and civil liberty (PCL) stance that was unyielding, and they still hold that. If you think Palantir is collecting your data, you are wrong. If you think Palantir is spying on you, you are wrong. It's a mysterious company, but that's because they don't make an app for your phone. Most of the work is so a data analyst at Wendy's can optimize their shipping route for their fresh-never-frozen patties (a real demo I have seen). The problem is that the clients that make us most of our money is the government, and there used to be open and honest discourse about this internally. Our legal and PCL team were frank and upfront, and I had faith that those people would guide us in the worst case. Well, ICE is now in its worst case, and we still have a contract with them, which is unconscionable. Palantir as an entity is not harvesting data for nefarious purposes, but it's no longer true that our clients aren't.

A rare Toronto event

This is the point where I should mention what makes my moral stance more complicated, and that's the stock price. When I started at Palantir it was a private company - we got paid less than our friends at the bigger tech companies, and our stock grants were Monopoly money. Talent was retained because of our "mission", which worked for me, but I know many people that left after not getting raises over the years. We went public at the end of 2020, and suddenly these things I had been collecting were worth something. We often reminisce at Palantir that there was an internal dashboard to see the value of your stocks at different share prices. There was a slider where you got to drag up to higher amounts and see your overall net worth grow. When we went public it started at $10. This slider's minimum was $5, and the maximum was $50, and we got a huge kick out of that. Oh please, as if the share price will ever be that high, you just want us to see big numbers so we stay. The stock price hit $200 a couple weeks ago. The surge is completely unprecedented, and unfortunately is probably a sign of the success of leadership cozying up to Trump and this administration. Should I feel some level of guilt that my net worth has gone up because of the decisions of these people I completely disagree with? Palantir "Stands With Israel", meaning the government is using software I contributed to to enact a genocide. Certainly doesn't feel good when you boil it down like that. I used to always think, if I worked at Apple making iPhones, should I feel guilty every time a criminal uses their phone for something illegal or terrible? Maybe. This is a slippery slope, since every action we take in our comfortable lives has some impact, or is the result of some suffering. So when should I feel bad about my involvement? It feels strange trying to take a moral high ground when the financial success of the company has removed the risk of leaving it.

September 30, 2020

The book talks a lot about Peter Thiel as well, an unlikeable fellow, but who is also painted as quite opposite to Karp, so they made an interesting duo. He has never been involved day to day from what I have seen, although he is on the board and was certainly instrumental in getting the company off the ground. In the book he uses the analogy of Aragorn's usage of the Palantir versus Saruman's, which is funny for many reasons. Palantir is a name I love, and it's easy to be like "it was a good thing that was corrupted", but then its very easy to be like, okay, is our company corrupted too? What makes us like Aragorn, only using it for good? Reminds me a lot of the "good guy with a gun" argument you constantly hear in the states, that one righteous person can stop the bad guys using the weapons of the bad guys. This is exactly what they argue against in the books! Ever heard of Boromir?? We focus on civil liberties, but when leadership is uncivil all of a sudden these tools you have made for them become evil. Even with something like Facebook, which is easy to mock and I have always despised, I can completely understand its creation and the dream of a utopian world where it is a tool for good. But I am increasingly certain we do not live in that world, and never will. So is all technology bad? My life is better because of it, and I love learning about it, being a part of its evolution. These tech titans like Musk or Zuckerberg are easy to hate because of their mass wealth and disconnect from reality, but I admire their drive and vision. I elevated Karp because he has this, and is connected to a real purpose. Maybe money corrupted him? I don't really know, but all these things I've thought about forever become a much bigger deal when the company is no longer a scrappy underdog and is now one of the most valuable companies in the world with a direct line to a dictator president. 

The biggest boon for the company, and the actual reason for it's ballooning valuation, was the rise of AI over the past 2 years. Palantir has always had machine learning in its platforms, so we were well suited to capitalize on this AI boom, and honestly, I am bullish. I do think Palantir's platform is perfectly suited to utilize this tech, and the stock price has shown that the public feels this way too. This isn't some crappy chat bot or abhorrent art generator - this is AI using your wealth of data to help you solve problems better or faster. It's not replacing jobs, it's assisting people in niche positions who are sifting through data in a way no human can actually do well. There are some great demos on airlines, how flight schedules shift due to a sick pilot or unexpected failures, and how they can use Palantir to adjust their entire fleet, from the passengers to the all the machines you need to get a plane into the air. That's complex, and honestly a robot assisting in that web of decision making instead of an error-prone human sounds better to me. Maybe I am still drinking the Kool-Aid but I am very resistant to AI, and even I am optimistic about how well it can be used in the existing Palantir platform. Of course this could all be brought back to the military, AI making targeting decisions...

As a sidebar, another factor in me losing interest in my work is AI assistance when writing code. I always say a lot of my colleagues see code as a tool to solve interesting problems, but for me I have always been interested in the act of writing code! Writing something clean and reusable is so satisfying, and in a very short time frame that job has changed drastically. AI finding bugs, AI fixing bugs, AI refactoring code, these are all jobs I took a lot of pleasure in that probably won't exist in a couple short years. Coding has become a lot less fun for me, and I blame AI. I love the idea of understanding the instructions you are giving these machines right down to the 0s and 1s, it's basically magic, and is the reason I fell in love with computer science. AI is another layer that separates the intent of the author from a machine's output, and aside from worries that it might get something wrong I just think it loses its beauty. I am no artist, but I feel the same way writers or creatives probably feel about it.

Jess' first holiday party, NYC 2019

You might be reading this and its still unclear what Palantir even does, and that's fine. It's complex, and that's another thing I liked. We are mysterious in what we do, and we do a lot, and I found that mystery alluring. But at Palantir's current scale and scope of impact it is kind of embarrassing. I can only read so many articles about Palantir collecting everyone's data before I lose my mind. The company has tried to explain, put out blog posts, and denied accusations, but when explaining what we actually do, especially with these controversial clients, it is incoherent and riddled with technical jargon. Maybe there is no solution for this, or maybe the internet doesn't care to try and understand nuance, I just don't find it whimsical anymore that my parents or friends or wife have no idea what my company does. Often people I interview would ask what I like least about the company, and I would always say this (since I didn't want to get political). The company completely fails to advertise and present itself in a clear way. Again, I know they try, and it's hard.

Times Square Advertisement

Basically everyone that I work with I admire and respect, and I by no means judge them for staying. How could I - by the time I leave I will have been at Palantir for almost exactly half its existence. I have been there longer than 92% of anyone that is currently still at the company. I have friends that work with our hospital clients, or healthcare, or NCMEC, and what they are doing day to day is strictly positive, actually making the world better. Even with our commercial clients that might not be as lofty, like airlines, Palantir has become an operating system that allows them to operate more safely. There is so much good! All my time at Palantir has been spent building product, so it was easy to bury my head in the sand, not seeing the usage of what we make that would make me deeply question it, and I think a lot of these friends do the same mental calculus and the positive drastically outweighs the negative for them.

Final day at the NYC Meatpacking District Office

So I don't have regrets. I am proud of what the company accomplished in my time there, and what I accomplished. I'm not leaving with a complete hatred of the brand or the people, renouncing my time there. As I have tried to lay out here, there are many factors, the largest being that company success has enabled me to take a break. I am indebted to the people I worked with and learned from, and I will always cherish my time at the company as some of the best days of my life. My pessimism extends to all tech companies, and to the people running the world, and I am excited to disconnect from the technological world and the velocity at which it moves. When the AI boom begin Karp called this our "Oppenheimer" moment, a time when the West needed to claim dominance of this emerging technology so that our opponents could not hold us hostage over it. I am not sure he isn't actually right, but has he seen that movie? While he can play at being God with a sentiment like that, and feel that godly power that Oppenheimer probably felt, the soldiers on the ground and the scientists making the bomb and the civilians underneath it would be appalled at that comparison being made in such a positive light. I want my life to produce more good than bad, and for my children to be proud of how I used my gifts and abilities. The search for how I will do that will continue.