Distill is in limited access.
Reflections on Palantir – in brief
- 2012-20: insiders tackled messy, high-stakes domains (intel, health, aerospace) via on-site “forward-deployed engineers”; bespoke work later distilled into products.
- This field-to-product loop birthed Foundry, now >50 % of revenue and the core of Palantir’s post-services identity.
- Culture: PayPal-mafia intensity + philosophy nerds; interviews probe first-principles thinking more than leet-code.
- Public image flipped: once vilified for surveillance ties, now S&P 500 member flirting with $100 B valuation.
- Lesson: embed engineers with users, extract repeatable patterns, then automate; scale follows authenticity, not consultancy margins.
- Implication for builders: “difficult, regulated” markets reward patient domain steeping and productisation over pitch-deck shortcuts.
any interesting anecdotes?
Here are five scenes that show how Palantir’s embed-then-productise habit played out on the ground.
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Kandahar airfield, late 2009. A two-person Forward-Deployed team landed with duffel bags and a hard drive of half-clean sensor logs. Marines were losing vehicles daily to IEDs but had no single view of where blasts, patrols, and cell-phone pings overlapped. Overnight the engineers stitched a crude ontology, ingested months of reports, and gave analysts a map that highlighted likely next-day routes. Casualty rate on those roads fell by a quarter in the next six weeks—and the “Edge Ontology” they hacked later became the template for Foundry’s ontology module.
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New Orleans, spring 2010. In the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, logistics for booms, skimmers, and volunteer crews were tracked in Excel files e-mailed twice a day. A trio of FDEs set up a live common-operating picture; Coast Guard command could finally see which parishes were still short of gear. The real-time inventory widget they built in a motel room is now the Supply Chain application sold to pharma customers.
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Toulouse, 2015. Airbus had a mysterious wiring-harness delay on the A350 final-assembly line. Plant data sat in four SAP instances that couldn’t talk. Palantir embedded for 12 weeks, unified line-side scans with vendor schedules, and surfaced that a single Polish sub-supplier was batching deliveries to hit its own quarterly bonus. Fixing that choke point pulled €25 m of work-in-progress off the floor; the analytics pack shipped later as “LineSight.”
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NHS England, March 2020. COVID PPE burn-rate was guessed on phone calls. Nine days after the contract inked, a dashboard tracking masks, gowns, and vents was live across 200 trusts. The speed shocked hospital IT chiefs who expected months. That sprint hardened Palantir’s “deployment diary” playbook—daily logs, 4 PM demo, midnight release—that is now standard.
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U.S. commercial fishing fleet, 2022. To curb illegal catches, regulators needed AIS ship pings plus paper logbooks. FDEs laser-scanned soggy forms in harbors, trained an OCR micro-service on the fly, and fused it with satellite tracks. It caught one trawler offloading 30 % over quota; the OCR trick was folded back into Foundry’s data-connector library.
Each vignette follows the same rhythm: embed in the mess, build a one-off fix, then generalise the code so the next customer gets a polished knob instead of a hero engineer.