Why Great Builders are Heretics | Palantir CTO

Key Takeaway

Success requires embracing discomfort, not avoiding it. The maximum rate of learning is coincident with your maximum ability to tolerate pain. When you're thrown into problems you're not qualified to solve, you grow exponentially. Don't seek the comfortable path with clear career ladders—throw yourself off the deep end repeatedly. Your growth is limited only by your motivation and ability to endure discomfort.

Episode Overview

Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir Technologies, discusses the company's mission, its unique talent development philosophy, and the critical importance of re-industrializing America. He explores the concept of 'heretics'—founders and innovators like Hyman Rickover and John Boyd who succeeded despite bureaucratic resistance—and how their pathological obsession with winning drove American military and technological success. Sankar shares insights on unlocking talent by helping people discover their superpowers, avoiding their kryptonite, and creating environments where rapid learning happens through maximum discomfort rather than comfortable career progression.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Great Builders are Heretics | Palantir CTO from Invest Like The Best. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

My guest today is Sham Sankar, the CTO of Palunteer Technologies. I think you'll find by listening to Sham that the business itself, their mission and how they've built it and indeed him and his life are completely fascinating. We talk about his entire worldview, which I find personally the most interesting. This need to re-industrialize the United States after decades of moving so much of our production and as he would argue therefore our learning of how to innovate and make things off of our own shores. We talk about the history of heretics, people who have against the odds designed solutions that have driven so much of our success around the world.

Please enjoy my conversation with Sham Sangar. So Sham, I think the most fun place for me to begin because it's an it's an area that you're interested in that I'm fascinated by is a history of people in American military lore who you call heretics. You refer to them as heretics. People like Heyman Rickover and Andrew Higgins who designed 90% of the boats that landed at Normandy. John Boyd who invented the udaloop which one of the great biographies of a of a military figure that I've ever read.

talk to us a little bit about how you would define a heretic um in your use of that term and why you're so interested in that group of people in US history. Well, I think they're really founders, you know, they're founder figures uh and they get obsessed with delivering something that it makes no sense because they're fighting particularly in the military context. You're like fighting the bureaucracy. You're going to end your career. You pay extreme prices for it. So there's almost like a pathological obsession with winning which I really relate to both personally but also that's what I see in great founders.

I think in the present moment it's really important to like encourage the that the hidden heretics who are in there in the military today to recognize like your heresy matters. And frankly if you look back at history the only [ __ ] that ever worked the things that helped us win all the wars were the things that the heretics actually did. Nothing that went through the machine delivered anything. I think all change comes from these these heretics and they only later become heroes. If you think about like Billy Mitchell who invented the Air Force, you know, he was court marshaled and died penalous and depressed and only after his death did we invent the Air Force based on his original heresy.

I'm just fascinated with what motivates these folks to keep doing this. And I I guess I relish a little bit in in their rebellion and the victory that the rebellion brings about. If you could have people study any one heretic story to understand this kind of general idea, is it his story? Is it someone else's? Which one would you pick? I'd probably pick Rick Overs. So, Hyman Rick Overber uh born in a shuttle in Poland, came to the US when he was six, had one of these like near-iss moments where in those days when you landed at Ellis Island, you had 10 days for someone to come pick you up.

And uh his his mother gave someone money to go send a telegram to the father who'd already been here. And that guy just pocketed the money. And so it's like the and on the on the 10th day there was another guy who arrived at Ellis Island who said who like bought them one more day who knew them and then he like ran out got the father got them. So it's like this near miss where this guy almost didn't even end up here. He would have been sent back to Poland.

Um but he was he was kind of this feisty character you know I think he was like 5'2 very short. He went to the Naval Academy. He was so unlikable that like in the yearbook in the Naval Academy they had like torn out his picture. you know, he's just one of these like difficult people. In World War II, he drove a coal ship. He was not like some exceptionally high performing senior, you know, senior military officer commanding a destroyer or carrier or anything like that. But after the war, he went to Oakidge and uh and he observed the the vestigages of the Manhattan project and he had this idea like we could build nuclearpowered submarines.

and he'd had this experience on diesel-powered submarines which suck. They're basically surface ships that happened to go underwater for like an hour. This became this thing he was obsessed with. And talk about talk about hutzbah like Oppenheimer himself thought this idea was going to fail, you know? So you have Oppy telling you you're stupid and this isn't going to work and you're just going to go forward, right? Uh so he started on this project and he he built the first nuclear submarine in seven years start to finish.

The Navy hated him so much that his first office for this project was literally the women's restroom. They're like, "What can we do to humiliate this guy into quitting, but he just kept going." And if you actually look at his personal memoirs, you can see that the humiliation got to him, but in a way that he could channel it to be like motivating. It wasn't like he was somehow inure the to the pain of it all, but he could push through it. And I think recognizing like every major project you do is going to push you in these sorts of ways.

And like how do you dig deep? How do you grind through the pain? Um, and he created a really unique culture in naval reactors which is alive today. So I think part of what's really cool is that our nuclear submarine force is one of our last remaining asymmetric advantages against the Chinese and we built it in the 50s. What a legacy for this guy to have built. And then the engineering culture that he created um you know he was in this unique role of both being a human who would invent the technology and therefore was qualified to think about how to regulate it.

So whereas the the Russian submariners, they would send they would spend roughly six months at sea and then six months in Sochi recovering so their white blood cells could regenerate because the radiation shielding sucked. We've had no deaths due to nuclear incidents in our submarine force. And he designed it to a standard which is really he's like I'm designing this thing so my son could be in it and it's it's 100 times safer than what we believe the minimum standard to be. And that that sort of obsession it's like a you know it's not a manager's view of the world it is a founders's view of the world.

world. world. One of his legacies like he was an admiral for 30 years and even as an admiral he was very difficult you know Zumbalt who was the chief of naval operations for a while he said the navy has three enemies the Soviet Union the air force and himman Rickover Rickover Rickover most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. RAMP understands that no one wants to spend hours chasing receipts, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations.

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You don't seem to have that kind of personality. like you seem you seem very like by all accounts like very likable within Palunteer and outside of Palunteer. Say a bit about your own disagreeableness like where does it surface uh it seems like this is a field in which you have to have a very clear view of how things should be which we'll talk a lot about in a few minutes and then this sort of like disagreeableness and resilience and persistence to like make it happen. And that seems a little bit at odds with with your personality from what I can tell.

Curious how how you think about that. It surfaces in certain ways. You know, as as Karp would say, I'm not everyone's cup of tea where you can very clearly see it is like in the early days of Palunteer, you would you'd be dealing with the government and it's easy to think about as a monolith, but you have, you know, you have operators who want to use your software but are not in charge of buying it. And you have the IT people or the program who's in charge of building what you would be building.

So, you're you're kind of structural threat to them. The advice is to go along and get along like, hey, those guys are the people paying you. Why don't you just do what they want? The problem is if I did what they want, it wouldn't work. And so that's where the disagreeableness comes in. It's being ordinary about like, no, I'm going to deliver the thing that actually works for the operator. I'm going to piss off literally everyone along the way. They are knives out going to try to kill you.

You know, we have to sue the army to compete at some point. And I think in that that vein of being truly committed to is the product excellent? What else could it be doing? You could think about the whole udal loop of forward deployed engineering is that it's this continuously solving through back propagation of what should the product be and that like that's like the motor of of innovation. If I think about uh Palunteer's story and success and and your part of that story, your personal worldview seems really important and you having a strongly held worldview seems like a a key component of being able to do what you've done over the last you know 10 plus years.

I would love to hear the the formative experiences that contributed to that worldview. I'm curious just like at a high level what your worldview is, but but maybe even more interested in like how you came to it because you've got a very unique personal backstory. I think there's no kind of singular event. I think it's like there's a combination of family history, the environment that I grew up in. Uh and and so, you know, starting with the family history part, you know, we fled violence in Nigeria where my father, we frankly almost died to kind of settle in the US and that happened pretty young in my father's life in his in his like early mid30s.

It's a pretty jarring experience where it kind of gives you a whole new lease on life after that point where you think about you have you have a deep amount of gratitude and perspective on the trials and tribulations that may come ahead. But it also grounds you in a profound understanding of the counterfactual like what makes this country so special. Sometimes it be unmoring not to have those experiences actually because it's easy to take it for granted. It's easy to become cynical. Um, but that that's like a a really powerful rooting in because my father didn't have the classic immigrant story where he came here and became successful, which I think is is a great thing if it happens to you, but it's also a fil journey.

It's easy to appreciate. Dad started businesses that went bankrupt. It was very hard, but having that rooting experience that created a graciousness and perspective in him, he was always so thankful for the opportunity. And so I I took a lot away from that over time, especially as I grew up and could kind of understand and had awareness of what was happening. The second thing I think is really important is growing up in Orlando in the 80s and 90s, it was this profoundly optimistic period. You could say it was probably pretty optimistic everywhere, but in the shadow of the space coast, you were you were kind of bombarded with this idea that technology was going to make the world better, that there was a structural positive some view of everything.

Um, and it just it was so motivating, you know, and people had ambition around these things. Uh, and so I think that that really kind of set a frame for me for how I thought about things and how I want to spend my life and energy. I think that's really it. It's it's this commitment to building. Part of what's interesting about the heretics that I'm drawn to is that they're all builders of some sort. The conversion from heresy to heroism is a is a result of an empirical thing they built.

You know, like John Boyd was alive to see the success of his innovations for Gulf War I where the US destroyed the fourth largest army in the world. And it's it's hard to think about now because we think about it as almost a foregone conclusion. But leading up to it, there was a lot of uncertainty. So that that worldview is kind of centered in an understanding like look, I think the US is the greatest force of good that exists in the world. Um that um as a country, we understand that there's something special about founders.

There's a reason we called them the founding fathers. You know, if you think about just empirically, Europe has created zero zero companies worth more than hundred billion euro from scratch in the last 50 years. It's almost almost an astonishingly bad track record. We've created all of our trillion dollar companies from scratch in the last 50 years. The primacy of people and being in a culture and environment that allows that to happen, that doesn't subjugate the human, doesn't like snuff out human flourishing, that allows you to pursue these things.

That may seem trivial, but the heretics are all a version of that. And it's not like polyanish where there's no resistance to these creatives. It's like despite the resistance, you can succeed here, which is really not true, I think, basically anywhere else. anywhere else. anywhere else. What was your dad like personally? The kind of pieces of his personality that I said that always stuck with me. It's like every spare moment this man had, even though he was so busy and he was just grinding, he would be on the phone trying to help someone.

I had this weird memory of someone who almost my dad had this sort of engineering autism that I think a lot of us have, but he met someone who had totally disfigured teeth and he just had the actually profound kindness to tell him like you should get cosmetic surgery. And that guy is so profoundly thankful that no one else had the balls to say that, right? Like this actually changed his job prospects. It changed his life. And so he's he's just one of these people. you clearly can see the positive someness in him like hey I'm just going to keep paying it forward.

If you had to identify the component parts that make America the thing that you think is the greatest country in the world what are the key components obviously maybe democracy is one but I don't want to take for granted like the things given your life experience and your unique perspective that you think most add up to this being a place worth your life's work to you know extend their interest protect their interests etc. a belief in exceptionalism and greatness. No army that lost its morale ever won the war.

And so believing in yourself, believing that greatness is possible, is a precondition to being able to express it and realize it. And a lot of cultures don't have that. The other thing, which I know sounds really simple, but is is a complete plasticity of thought. You know, culturally, America is a place where people do change their minds. Like, hey, this isn't working. Let's do something different. Or I observe that thing working even though it goes against the orthodoxy of everything I've learned. We're moving. We're pivoting.

In Europe, people start arguing about [ __ ] that happened 300 years ago. And some of these cultures are so rooted in the past that they can't update their priors. And so, a culture that's capable of learning, you could call it plasticity, first derivative of learning. Um, but how can you make progress without that? What does greatness mean to you in general? And also, I'm curious how you think about it personally, like if you are personally in pursuit of greatness, what what has that meant? What does that require?

an aspiration that's substantially bigger than oneself. The focus of American greatness is on American prosperity and the American worker. Like how can we go do things that are actually enriching our civilization, our people, raising their own aspirations, uh inspiring them to go on and do great things. There's this unstable equilibrium in civilization um that pulls you towards nealism. Uh and greatness is the antidote that it's it's the counterveilling force to saying like no like actually it's worth investing in our institutions. It's worth going through this painful journey because what we're going to get on the other end is something better, something that we all aspire for, something that mo that you will be proud to pass down to your children.

Is there an example of greatness that you've witnessed in someone else firsthand firsthand firsthand that most stands out? Well, the obvious one to me is um is is Alex Karp. You know, I think his ability to really manage and unlock talent is something like I've never seen before. And those are some of the most profound lessons I've really learned about talentry. You know, from the very early days, he modeled our entire company as an artist colony. And um it's it's like we have more in common with like a Hollywood talent agency than we do with kind of a typical software company in terms of our approach to to looking at humans and this like first principled approach to the individual and how do you grow this deep resistance to a cargo cultlike process in every manner or fashion that kind of corrods all the things that actually create value.

And I think that's important because if you drive that to the extreme, you actually get something that looks more like the Soviet Union. And on the other end of this, how do you maximize the potential of the people in front of you and you're advocating for their growth and their ability? Um, which also involves a lot of um you have to have a structural personality where you're not threatened by other people's successes. You actually relish in the other people's successes. And that's the parallel between Alex and my father.

If I was running an organization where my key goal was to unlock talent in in the way you just described, how does he how do you and he do that? Like how what's the practice of unlocking talent? Maybe we could just start with the precept of like how how you think about the talent to begin with. So really talented people are highly uneven. Uh you know they're very good at some things, they're okay at another set of things and they're really bad at some other set of things.

And and usually the trick is where are they in their own journey of understanding what those things are? And particularly for high high achieving people when they're young, they misattribute what their superpower is. They think there's this thing they do that requires a fair amount of effort and therefore they get a dopamine hit when they succeed. It's probably something they're not even bad at. They're just okay at. Superpowers are effortless and therefore they're in some sense it's almost like not even rewarding to exercise your superpower.

My analogy for this is it Superman could fly. He could see through walls. But that wasn't some sort of arduous thing for him to do. It's just something he could do. And that's usually something you learn comparatively. Like you're like, "Oh, this thing that's like lizard brain effortless almost thoughtless for me other people who are really smart can't seem to do or I do just way better." And embracing that is the first step. And then rec and helping them understand like, hey, all of your contributions to the world are going to come from your superpower.

like everything else is basically a waste of time. So how do you figure out how to get into that configuration? So there's there's some releasing of ego around that as well is understanding that okay like this is what I need to focus on. The other part of this is kryptonite. You know there are some set of weaknesses you have that aren't just like hey I'm not like I'm kind of average or I'm maybe a standard de below average. It's like you're like six deves below average here.

It's not like something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it. Yeah. And so h can you can you be okay with that? Like as the as the artist, what is your process of accepting that? And how do we help you accept that? How we how do we help you understand that actually at the point of acceptance, you become more valuable? And um and we're going to be able to unleash you further to be able to do things. And then you have to create an environment that supports them through that because the discovery of kryptonite usually involves you being exposed to it.

You're going to make some sort of really bad mistake that probably will have real consequences. Hopefully you learn from that mistake. Um, and you know, it may take more than one time to get there, but you don't want to be you don't want to create a culture which is like, you [ __ ] this up, I gotta fire you. Right. It's like, oh, I'm I'm so glad you learned that this is not what you [ __ ] this up. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And and that I think was I I remember doing something that I really screwed up once that had consequences for the company.

And I sheepishly went into Alex and was just completely honest. And I didn't I didn't realize at the time there was no grand strategy behind this other than my commitment to just always being honest. He was very appreciative. He was also in pain as he internalized what this was going to mean. But you know he valued the fact that I wouldn't try to hide it. And I took away from that how important that environment was going to be and how do I scale going to be and how do I scale that through the organization.

What do you think your superpower is? I think there's actually kind of a narrow sliver if you thought about in the pounder context the intersection of forward deployed engineering and product. There's there's an there's a there's like an interface there. It's like one inch on both sides of that interface like owning that almost as a dictator. That's my superpower. I'm going to come back to forward deployed engineering, but I want to ask one or two more questions about the creation of an environment for the discovery of superpower in kryptonite and like so doing doing one's best work and unlocking the talent.

I heard a story once which maybe I wasn't supposed to hear so I won't I won't say what the exact story was or who the person was at Palunteer but this person joined Palunteer and was very quickly given an extraordinarily difficult project uh around which this person had no relevant experience and was given relatively limited resources to solve a problem which was truly global in scale meaning the impact if if this person didn't solve the problem would have been bad and they described it as the most formative and an and important profession and most stressful professional experience that they had had.

And on the one hand, I loved hearing this story cuz wow, how you can learn so much when there's high stakes and lots of autonomy. But it also struck me as quite scary that someone with this person's experience was given this uh this high stakes opportunity responsibility. responsibility. responsibility. And I'm sure that happens like all the time in Palunteer. So some of it seems like letting like kind of going straight into the deep end is a key part of this in such a high stakes business with militaries and governments and people's lives and things.

How how do you balance how much leash to give someone like that? that? that? Let me start with um an analogy. How did Bruce Banner become the Incredible Hulk? It wasn't like progressive overload. It's not like he lifted a little bit more weight every week, right? It was a near fatal dose of gamma rays. 50% chance he died, 50% chance he turns into the big green monster. And there is there's absolutely an element where we're taking people and just irdiating them. Perspectively, you're not sure if they're going to come out the other end, but you have some belief that they have the raw talent and potential.

And then you want to create an environment that has enough transparency and flow of information and exhaust that if you see that this thing is really going off the rails with without them having to seek you out, you're able to kind of push in and help them. And a lot of environments don't have that by default actually. Like you would have to like manage them. You have them do reports or check-ins or whatever. You got to create an environment where it's okay to ask for help.

The reason this model is really valuable is that I think the alternative model, you judge it by the counterfactual. the alternative model doesn't actually work. So this sort of structured career ladder with progressions, it's perfectly designed to make you feel comfortable that you are growing like it gives you some belief that there's a linear path to follow and you'll learn these things, but actually it's all fake. Um on the other hand, so if you're willing to just suspend disbelief, throw yourself off the deep end, how do you get, you know, your the maximum rate of learning will be coincident with your maximum ability to tolerate pain?

Uh, so now you're in over your head. You're working on a problem you don't even know. This is the environment that you're going to learn at the fastest possible rate. You're only limited by your motivation and ability to endure through the discomfort of getting there. Uh, Uh, Uh, then you will find that if you look back retrospectively, you're like, "Holy [ __ ] I grew in all these ways. I learned all these things, none of which you could have predicted, specifically Xanti." And then if you just are willing to do that serially, just keep jumping off the deep end, go after problems you're frankly not qualified to go after, but you, you know, there is some belief you have the raw potential to do, like you turn into a superhero.

I think that's actually why Pounder is a founder factory. factory. factory. Did you have your own gammaray moment? Like was there an an original moment like that for you where you discovered your own potential? The article talks about the the deployment at the KOIC. I think that was that was a seminal one where it was it was I was leading the deployment. It was all on me and it was never obvious until basically the last second whether it was going to work or not. And it it allowed me to learn a lot of the lessons along the way which is really where I internalized that like oh success looks like a lot of pain and that that instinct to figure out how to reduce the pain like how do I do this the next time with less pain is exactly the wrong instinct.

If you were giving a commencement speech to a group of people that that heard this conversation, how would you urge people to seek that out? Like if someone is pregamma exposure and they're interested in that sort of test for themselves, how can people expose themselves to to that test? I think this is the conspiracy of of the people around you who give you that chance. I don't know why Kevin Hartz hired me as some, you know, Stanford grad student coming to talk to him, but the fact that he took the bet and just threw me out there, like that was the first time I got to jump off the deep end in many ways.

And I think so I I really think the how can you find it? You're you're assessing the people who are hiring you as much as they're assessing you. And it's like, is this an environment that I think is going to bet on me or is this an environment that wants me to be a vecow, you know, and are they going to be able to tolerate my eccentricities and and um or are they going to try to squash that? How do you know someone's worth betting on?

Like the other side of that equation, equation, equation, new unproven talent. How do you know? At some point, it becomes like lizard brain. You get enough reps in doing it. But I think early on I think the early indicators would be like first derivative proof of some sort of suie generous like did they create anything from 0 to one that you know and then expression of agency and initiative here's the simplest way I'd say it if I give this person an inch can they turn it into a mile and the worst sort of bet to make is I gave this person a mile and somehow they turned into an inch it's an incredibly powerful idea and it seems like the culture palunteer I mean obviously there's tons of founders that have come out of this that have like mega agency.

If you think about Palunteer's future for the next 10 years, now 20 years in or 19 years in, what do you hope changes most in the next 10? Like obviously it's now a huge company. It's one of the bigger, you know, bigger companies by market cap in the country and in the world. Uh doing lots of really interesting work with lots of interesting customers, but generally speaking, like what what are your hopes for it over the next 5 to 10 years? years? years? I think culturally because like all value creation is downstream of the culture.

It's like continuing to be an environment where a new person can come in and just have huge responsibility, be in charge of people who've been here 10 years or not. It's like that that the that the org structure, I call it a quantum org structure. I don't think a flat org structure is optimal. I think that that doesn't actually work. I think what you want is an org structure that can crystallize is the right structure to solve the problem as it exists today and is able to reform as the problem manipulates tomorrow.

And you can kind of see the the pathology of big companies as they go through some sort of big reorg every five years. What even if you just steel man it probably most of them are wrong even at inception. But if you just steal man and say hey they just reorg this is the right org structure for this company today. Every day the entropy is against them and every day it's slightly more wrong than it was before. And if if you're so oified and committed to your structure that you have to wait until it's totally broken before you reorganize it again that's a fundamental weakness.

So that plasticity and how your your commitment to working backwards from the problems that's that I hope that's that is how we generate value and that has to be consistent and I think if we can protect that and and engender that you know promote that promulgate that culture in the future generations like we're going to keep winning. What critique of Palunteer do you take the most seriously? So when when you have a structure like this, you don't get to spend nearly as much time with people as you'd want.

And so the rate of in radiation is very uh heterogeneous. There's some sort of like biodal distribution for how long do people stay at Palanteer? Like the probability that you'll stay for like a decade plus if you've stayed three years is incredibly high. But, you know, roughly around the three-year mark, everyone faces this crucible where they look around and they say like, "This place is so [ __ ] up and crazy and and they have to understand like, oh, but that's the feature of it." And then they'll stay they'll stay they'll stay sign up for it or not, right?

Or they'll say, "This is the bug of it and I got to get out of here and like this is this is not, you know, it's not going to work." Um, and the the critique I take most seriously because I I think with a little bit of help, a lot more people can make that hump. And that's the future of the business. Those people, we kind of have you to blame for how many freaking pitches we have to take that involve some forward deployed something or other in a company these days.

You were the one that really pioneered the success of this model at Palunteer. Like everyone is saying it now that every company has to have forward deployed engineers or forward deployed so and so to be successful. Obviously I think that's not true for every company. It's true in in Palunteer's case for sure. Can you tell us the story of what this term means where it came from and and why it's powerful? We could start by maybe thinking about my critique of the conventional software industrial complex which is that you know you're sitting let's just say in Palo Alto and you're building this piece of software and your essential feedback loop on is this software valuable is can I sell it and if someone's willing to pay for it it must be valuable that's an okay feedback loop there's a stronger feedback loop which is is the software valuable did it deliver the outcome the only way you can assess that is actually in the field with the end user on the factory floor in the foxhole.

So in our case, it wasn't going to be enough as I, you know, I thought you have this weird division between the IT buyer and the operator. The validation is going to come from the operator. So the the idea was really almost to like build software through back propagation. Hey, how do you go to the person who has the problem? You're showing up with your best thesis of what you've built in the metaphorical powto, but then you are not just sending a sales engineer out there whose job is to try to like ring up the sale.

You're sending someone out there who is obsessed with whether it's going to generate an impact in the world or not and is willing to continuously solve backward and is technical enough to understand the full stack. How would we take the specific and learn how to generalize it over time in terms of the product? Uh one way of thinking about this is there really are two types of engineers. There are people who know how to build the right thing and there are people who know how to build it the right way.

And uh they're kind of dopamine hits comes out of different things, right? Like the people who know how to build the right thing, they're more like maggyver, you know, it like their high in life is like I solved the problem. In their mind, solving the right problem is 80% of the work. On the other end, you have engineers who are more like they're like they're like artists in the traditional sense. Like, don't you see how beautiful the thing I built is? And that's what the architectural elegance, the scalability of it.

That's what gives them the high. Never mind that doesn't solve a problem anyone cares about. Don't you know it's art on its own. It should be appreciated. And I think about this like vector math. So the four deployed engineers skew towards this hacker mentality. mentality. mentality. The product engineers skew towards this artist mentality. and you're trying you have an unstable equilibrium where you're trying to align these vectors in a way that you're going to go up upwind. If either side dominates, you don't really have a business.

And that's why that that seam between them, you actually kind of need a a dictator-l like figure to manage and decide. And many of the outcomes like particularly I think this model is super valuable when you think about your customers as existing as some sort of power law in terms of how useful the next marginal thing they're going to be asking for is in terms of the overall development of the product. So because if it's a Gaussian you should just like survey all your customers and average it out and figure out what to build.

That's like a traditional product development process. If on the other hand you kind of think you know some percentage of my customers are living in the future. Yes, only they or only a handful of people have this problem today, but I can assess that this is actually a really valuable thing to solve that no one else has solved. We should solve it now and effectively have a monopoly on the capability to do that. We'll be 5 years ahead of everyone else if we lean into this problem.

You can only surface that in this sort of forward deployed engineering way. The other thing about forward deployed engineers that's worth saying in the tie sense is is the importance of secrets. You know, Peter talks about the importance of secrets. If you're going to do something really impactful, there has to be something true about the world that you believe that other people disagree with you on. Warp speed is born out of one of those secrets. For the better part of 15 years, our software has been used to make things in the world.

The one thing you could not tell anyone before co is that their manufacturing software doesn't work. Like people would point at their ERP system and be like, "Look how great it is. I spent $5 billion, 10 billion doing it." But as a for deployed engineer, when I would go to the final assembly line on the factory floor, everyone's using Excel. So if your thing like there there's a contradiction here that no one is somehow forced to reconcile with, which is really what they're saying is the software is so illit.

I hit the eject button, I pull the data out to Excel and I'm like hand rolling my own solution. That should be an obvious sign that something's not working. What are the limitations of it in the sense of like if you have X Y or Z you shouldn't try this model or you need this to try this model. One one thought would be the product needs to be expensive because it sounds like an expensive process to deploy people on site you know highly trained expensive people and so on.

So you need to be selling a very expensive product but if you were giving advice about use or don't use this concept of forward deployed engineering in your software business how would you frame it up to other entrepreneurs? I would say this you have to believe that you're going to be able to capture meaningful value for the problems you're solving. So your pro the problems you're solving are really big and therefore imply there's a lot of value behind them. Uh and if you can solve them in in a deep way, you'll be able to capture that.

A lot of the problems we solving like to get at bat, you weren't going to get paid a lot up front. You were actually going to invest a huge amount into the customer to go do that. But you would do that because you believe that actually in the end we'll be able to capture the value a portion of the value we're creating. Our economics will be downstream of our customers economics. The other part is that your ambition extends beyond a linear box. You know, like we always struggled when we came into the commercial world where you had like the Gartners of the world and they have like well, you know, this is this sort of box like this is my enterprise architecture.

I've broken up in all these boxes. What box do you fit in? The answer for us is like, well, we don't fit in any box. We fit in all the boxes. It's it's some sort of heterox thing. You're solving for all the problems in the seams. Like you're basically solving for the fact that that architecture diagram was made by some mid-level product marketing manager. It's never been used or validated in anger. It's never actually solved a problem in the real world. But the cargo cult of the IT buyer just keeps believing they should buy it.

I think if you fit into that doing forward deploy engineering would be crazy. Why would you do that? You know, but if you're like us and you don't fit into it, you need some way of just like scraping and clawing to deliver enough value that the institution has to confront. But even though it's heterodox, even though it's heresy to my enterprise architecture, it works. It probably took until I read Jeremy's profile of you and of Palunteer that I really understood how Gotham and Foundry and and the sort of product and the business worked.

It's interesting how Palunteer has this sort of it's somewhat inaccessible from the outside unless you read a fairly detailed description of what is literally going on in the product. And I think the early years of Palunteer were especially exploratory trying to figure all this out, you know, with with with all your efforts with Alex and the team. Could you just like explain what Palunteer is? It's like such a basic stupid question, but again, until I read like a detailed account, I actually probably couldn't have done so.

And so I'd really be curious how you like to frame it or explain it. This is actually like the hardest question in the world for me. Um, we have built an enterprise operating system where our core thesis is what makes this stuff really valuable is decisions, not data. And it's kind of goes to John Boyd's udaloop. What we're really providing is an operating system that allows you to bring all of your enterprise data together. It solves for the impedance mismatch between like yeah look all this data I've collected it was collected and stored in a way that makes sense to the underlying transactional system or makes sense to some part of my institution but doesn't actually represent how the humans of my institution think about the problems that we're facing.

Uh so that we represent what we call the ontology which is not just a model of the data it's also a model of the actions. So we call that the kinetics like if you're going to make a decision you might be allocating inventory. How do you do that? So this ontology layer almost becomes like an API layer for the business. It makes the business programmable and that changes the rate at which you can compound on top of it. So now you have this abstraction layer that you can use to build applications that manage your value chain from the hand of your supplier to the hand of your customer.

You can call that a value chain. You can also call that a decision chain. There's a series of your whole business almost if you just squint at it is just a series of decisions you're making. Every one of those decisions you want to have an udaloop like I want to make the best possible decision I can have today but I want more importantly I want the first derivative to be good. I want to learn tomorrow how to make a better decision than the one I had today.

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Schedule a demo at ridgelineapps.com. Could you give an example of a customer where you showed up and maybe describe the circumstance of their data or their systems or something? then what you did like what the process is of establishing and building the ontology which is I think like a very good appropriate but fancy word for like mapping reality onto a system versus jamming reality into a pre-existing system and then what sort of transformation that enabled at that customer that would have been impossible with the former system just to like bring it to life with like a simple example example example two things I just want to put down that will make this make more sense the first is that is that is that we want to make software that makes makes you more different, not more similar.

We think about it as alpha, not beta. The second thing is that we are a wildly inductive company, you know. So, we would never show up to a customer with some preconceived notion of this is the aerospace ontology. I'm going to pick an aerospace example in a second here. It's it's rather like all the values and understanding what makes your aerospace company different than all the others. How do I make you more different there? That's the differentiation you're competing on. So when we when we first came to Airbus, Airbus was in the midst of ramping the A350, you know, the A380 was a a wonderful plane, structurally unprofitable program, you know.

So the A350 was this bet that the whole company was effectively riding on in 2015. The first time you make an airplane, um, you're always going to have issues. The there's a learning curve to the production. And one of the most important things to figure out as quickly as possible is what is what is an issue that is just a nonconformity that like hey I'll give this guy some training and he'll learn how to figure it out. It's teething pain it'll go away and what is a recurring issue that is actually a design defect that I need to go work with my suppliers or upstream.

How quickly you can solve that becomes fundamental to the shape of the ramp and the cost of the ramp. So the first thing we did is we just started sitting with users on the final assembly line in Tuloo. These are these are wrench turners effectively and understanding hey what makes your life suck what's hard about this? What's what's the challenge in working on these non-conformities and you look at like basically they're going through Excel they're looking at reports in SAP trying to figure out how do I bucket all these issues that are coming in.

So we just helped them automate all of that and the ontology at that point was really related to parts, sequencing of work, uh defect rates, like everything related to quality. quality. quality. Once you had this immense quality asset though, you were able actually to pivot it to realize, okay, so like now I'm not now I'm up the learning curve. It kind of naturally leads to the next problem which is production planning. So quality to production planning to then in service. Now you have the greatest data asset possible for this tail.

As this plane enters service, how do I help maximize the uptime of this asset for my customers? How am I going to compete against the other aerospace manufacturer? That's the natural evolution that we see with most customers. You start with one problem, but of course they exist in the context of this connected decision chain. What's the difference between dealing with military customers and government customers, which you did for a long time, and commercial customers? There's a lot more non-market forces in the military. The military is the only institution in the world that kind of profoundly divides up supply and demand.

You know, the beating heart of most companies is that integration, that sales and operation planning process, right? You have the combatant commands we call them, that deal with real world events. You're fighting Russia, that's that's the European Command, Yukon. And then you have the services like the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, etc. Their job is to man, train, and equip. That's the supply side. So you you have a group that has no responsibility for demand essentially deciding what to build, how how much to build, you know, how am I going to man, train, and equip this.

And then they present these forces to the combatant commands and say, "This is what you have to solve this problem." That adds an additional level of complexity. So if the demand side says, "Hey, I really want this. This is the capability we need." They they can't buy it. So how do you kind of square that? So I think you have all these other non-market forces to deal with. Um, but I think one of the things that is really advantageous to being both a commercial and government-oriented company is that the the intrinsic rewards on the government side are so high, so motivating.

It enables you to get through and solve really hard problems in a way that is kind of like a rising tide for the whole business. How would you define the state of our military today? Like I know it's a big question and but it's an important question. You've gotten to see so many sides of it and serve many aspects of it. What? Yeah. How would you describe the state of the US military? We are the best military in the world. Our uniform service members are better than we deserve.

Like every day actually had someone tell me like, "Hey, when are you going to stop stop being shocked at how good, you know, this E4 is at building this app or doing this thing and it's like the amount of talent is eyewatering. eyewatering. eyewatering. I think we encumber them in a lot of process. We deprive them of a lot of agency. And I certainly have a lot of critiques of of the bureaucracy. But I think the structural challenge we have is actually something that we just need to observe from a distance from the military we have today per se, which is the whole point of the military is to deter our adversaries from conflict.

If you look back over the last 10 years, we've not been able to deter a lot of conflict. We had the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the militarization of the Spratley Islands after they told President Obama, "We will not militarize it." They militarized the Spratley Islands. We've had a poggram in Israel. We've had the invasion of Ukraine. We have unprecedented gray zone phase zero operations by the Chinese and the South South China Sea. I would say arguably in the last year, we've started to restore deterrence.

Whatever you think about it, Midnight Hammer was a massively deterring operation. Maduro is massively deterring. You you have it on multiple levels. With with Midnight Hammer, it's obviously the overwhelming strength, the precision of what we're able to do, the incredible complexity of the operations. No other military in the world could have done that. But we need to view that as like a single strike, you know, and the deterrence capability against a peer adversary is can you generate that strike every single day until the enemy is submits to your will.

You think about Maduro, it also shows our capability like like like literally the raid happened the day the Chinese were in town. Maduro has all these Chinese and Russian weapons, Venezuela, and they don't seem to work at all. And that sends a very strong message to everyone who else thinks that their security is coming from buying Chinese and Russian weapons. Now I think we could we kind of trace back and this is what I really wrote about in the 18 thesis. So if we start we say we we've lost deterrence like let's let's be cleareyed about that.

I think in the last year we've started regaining it. What happened? Because we had it for a long time you know and we were the sole superpower in the 90s. How and we spend a fair amount every year on defense. So I think it would be a reasonable thing for the American people to expect like that we would trillion dollars, right? Yeah. I think there's something much more profound. People want to talk about narrow things like acquisition reform or the mix of weapons. I think it comes back to people.

It comes back to the heretics. So when we, you know, at the at the dawn of World War II, we were the best at mass production. Effectively, our country invented it. And in order to create an industrial base, we took the number two at GM who was previously the number two at Ford, Bill Kudson, who was a Danish immigr who uh who's really the perfector of mass production, and we direct commissioned him at threear general, and we put him in charge of war mobilization. And and Kudson was a worldclass engineer.

And what did we do? We gave him the authority to go meet other world-class engineers all around America. We had one key advantage in World War II in terms of timing, which is that we had len lease. There was a period of time that we actually mobilized mobilized mobilized production when we were not fighting. We were building stuff that we gave to our allies, to the Brits in particular and the Soviets. Uh but that allowed us to build factories and retool existing factories and hit a production ramp so that after Pearl Harbor happened, we were basically at full rate production and were able to to really go after these things.

A and put this in context of our adversary, the Germans. They were actually better engineers than we were. They just made a very small number of very exquisite things. Now, if you come to the present moment, we sound like the Germans. We make a very small number of truly exquisite, eye-wateringly exquisite things. And our adversary is the world's best at mass production. So, this should give us all a little bit of of discomfort here. Uh the second part of this is is the the nature of the industrial base.

Like today we call it the defense industrial base. I think it used to be the American industrial base. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall only 6% of spending on major weapon systems went to defense specialists, i.e. companies that only did business with the defense department. Most of that spending, 94% went to what I call as dualpurpose companies. Look, a missile is single use. There's no dual-use missile. But the idea that Chrysler would build missiles and minivans meant that all the R&D that they were doing on production, material, equipment, machine tooling could be leveraged and was subsidizing our national security that we recognized that freedom and prosperity were two sides of the same coin.

We're so far away from that world today, right? Like General Mills, the serial company, used to build torpedoes and inertial guidance systems. Kodak, the film company, also was a key a key supplier to Corona, which was our first spy satellite. But this is this is the industrial base that won World War II, won the early Cold War, and really deterred our adversaries. And it's only a consequence of becoming the sole superpower that everything changed. And it changed in two ways. One, that that 6% number today is 86%.

So 86% of major weapons systems come from defense specialists only. Uh the other part of it is the nature of the industrial base. We think about it as Northrup Grumman. It much more accurately it was Jack Northrup. It was Leroy Grumman. It was William Lear. It was Henry Ford. It was Henry Kaiser. You had founder figures. They were their own sort of heretics. They were their own like what we would recognize in the valley today. That's where this talent was. It was in the industrial companies of America.

And we were betting on these people, not just their institutions to deliver this sort of capability. In 1993, there was a very famous dinner at the Pentagon called the Last Supper. And you know, we we had won the Cold War. I think in a democracy, it's very reasonable for the people to say, "We want to spend less on defense. What exactly is our threat?" So, we slashed the defense budget. And in this dinner, the Secretary of Defense told uh a subset, I think it was 15 of the 51 primes.

We had 51 primes. Today, we have five. They told him, "You're all not going to survive. The budget's getting cut. We give you permission to consolidate. maybe some of you should exit the defense business altogether and know that some of you may go out of business and we're not going to save you. And this just set off a merger frenzy that led from the consolidation, you know, from 51 down to five. Now, most people look at this and I think they take away the wrong conclusion, which is like, oh, this is when we lost competition.

When we had competition, it was much more dynamic. I think the much more profound consequence is this is the moment of profound financialization and conformity in the industrial base. You lost the crazy people. you know, they went to tech, they went to other parts of our economy where there was enough kind of positive sum energy and growth and it wasn't just about dividends and buyback ratios and financial engineering. It was about real engineering. The worldclass engineers, it's like why why should we celebrate a Hyman Rickover or a Kelly Johnson, you know, Kelly Johnson was the founder of Skunk Works at Lockheed.

In his lifetime, he built 41 airframes. That is insane. Many of which we still fly today, today, today, you know, and he built the U2 in 13 months. months. months. The timelines we're talking about are just incredible. You you can't look at that and think anything other than this is an artist. Like this guy, this is like divine what he's able to do. And so much of what I think we've gotten wrong is those things were messy and chaotic and hard and frictionful. And over time, we've tried to install lots of process to make these things less messy, less chaotic.

As a consequence though, they end up not working, you know, and um we need a little more crazy back to get these things to work. How do we undo this? I'm reminded of the Churchill quote, won't get it exactly right, something like the US always does the right thing after trying everything else first. And and like a lot of what's happened is that we have shipped the capability to produce physical things off our shores uh because it to optimize for a variety of things, but it's much cheaper and more scalable and easier.

And we've become, you know, primarily a country with all the market cap that's that rests on technology and IP and extreme talent that the the small number of exquisite things, exquisite people, exquisite researchers. Like we've done an amazing job there. U but we don't make much here anymore. A lot of it happens in China and overseas. How can we reverse that? Like it seems it seems so imbalanced as to and so daunting as to seem impossible. Um but of course I know you think it's critical.

So like what what is even the first step in being able to do this? And what you said is exactly right. It is daunting but critical. So we have no choice but to lean into that and start. You know the best time to start would have been yesterday. The next best time is today. Let me also give the case for why it's critical because I think we're screwed if we don't do this. The biggest lie that we bought from globalization is this concept of we will do the innovation and they will do the production.

And what you have to recognize that innovation is itself a consequence of productivity. to put it in terms that I think our audience here would understand most directly like what motivated Google to write to do the research behind the attention is all you need paper in 2017 if you ask them they'll say it's like well the team was working on an incremental 3% improvement to Google translate you cannot think of something more benal leading to something more revolutionary than that so if you don't have the input stimulus on improving production you're actually not going to be able to capture the innovation and that's literally what we're seeing play out in the marketplace today which is like okay they went from making a battery to making the whole car.

Um they uh Wooi went from being a cheap you know basically a cheap pair of hands for pipetting contract research in the pharma industry to actually now 50% of all clinical trials are drugs that are created in China you know so we have seated the innovation it's not that it's not that it was taken away from us we just seated it because we had completely incorrect precept so now we have to reattack that now we shouldn't do this we should do this you know with some asymmetric advantage and I think I think we have a couple of them I don't think it's true that we're not great at building things in this country.

Look at Elon and the progeny of Elon. Like we do know how to manufacture things here and we're going to have to think about manufacturing things in new and novel ways. In addition, like it's not it doesn't all have to be new. It's like Ford, General Motors, these are worldclass manufacturers too. Like we have that capability, but we also have new ways of thinking about this with much deeper vertically integrated production. um thinking about the production process itself as something that's more iterative and software-like that you're going to keep upgrading, colllocating R&D with production itself.

So, I think these sorts of trade crafts are the things that we can lean on. And probably the the last piece I'd say is AI is David's slingshot here. You know, we can if we can give the American worker superpowers, if you can make the American worker 50 times more productive than a worker anywhere else, you're going to change the efficient frontier of what can be made here. And I think as a consequence we should be re-industrialization maximalists. Like the free traders out there like to say like maybe we can French shore or whatever.

I think that stuff can let us off the hook too easily and it fails to solve the problem. The other example I'll give you from Patrick McGee's book Apple and China great book right and you know people love to say something like well we don't have the machine tools engineers in America. You could hardly get two people in a room to talk about it. You could fill a whole stadium in China. But then you look like Apple has spent the equivalent on an inflationadjusted basis in the last five years of two and a half Marshall plans building talent and capacity in China.

How about we try to spend one Marshall plan here? I think the problem is we're not even trying. In part because we're daunted in part because parts of our economy don't recognize that actually this isn't going to keep working. Like you're going to lose everything, not just something. uh and and and it's why I feel a need to an urgent call to action to say like we are in an undeclared state of emergency and it's not just manufacturing the physical things we think about I even think about this in terms of drugs 80% of our generic drugs generic drugs generic drugs come from China in one way or another whether it's the APIs or the finished product themselves product themselves product themselves that is a huge problem uh today your child has an ear infection that's pretty trivial you think I'll have some generic antibiotics and it'll go away if you have great power competition with China and you're the will of the American people to fight when they have to really contemplate, hey, my 5-year-old might die of an ear infection, you know.

So, we we need to take these things kind of much more seriously and and further down the supply chain. I mean, I'm glad we're starting with rare earths, but there you could say we had to get punched in the face to mobilize around it. Maybe one of the gling things we should all think about is we we've been staring at this rare earths problem for the better part of 15 15 years and we more or less have solved it for like two billion bucks. It's roughly a rounding error relative to everything that we're doing and now we're on a trajectory to do it.

So I think part of it is just starting. I would love to bring everything back. You know, I think making a marginal improvement of even 10% dramatically reduces the adversaries leverage. Can you I just was reviewing my notes ahead of our conversation today from Graham Allison's book on on China, Destined for War with China. Can you give your perspective on um how you think about China as an adversary, as a country, as I mean the I highly recommend the book Apple and China. I mean it it really gives you this deep sense of how tightly integrated our mo maybe argue arguably our most important company is with with manufacturing there.

It's this very strange circumstance I have to admit where I've been to China. It's like it's another place filled with human beings and interesting things and amazing interesting culture and all sorts of positives. It's a hard thing to wrestle with, right? That they're an adversary in in the traditional sense. Um, but I think there are components of that and and the nuance is important. I'd love to just hear you describe how you think about China as a as a political entity, as an adversary, as a country.

Um, it just feels like an especially important thing to understand your view on. You know, when we won World War II, we spent our own money to rebuild Germany and Japan. and Japan. and Japan. Micro electronics moved to Southeast Asia as Apple and China documents and chip and chip wars documents uh because we helped move it there. Yes, we got cheaper goods in return, but the economic development of these countries they're flourishing in order to create global stability was part of the calculus. Same thing with admitting China to the World Trade Organization.

Uh the the problem is they cheated the whole way through. And even if you go back to pre- Dang Xiaoing era, they call us the big enemy. You know, I think part of it is our own naivity, our own belief that capitalism and human flourishing is a natural consequence of prosperity. So, okay, they're saying these things, but as they get richer, they're going to change their perspective on these things, and we're all going to find some way of having a positive some view on the world.

That's essentially what didn't happen. So, I think the challenge for us with the CCP is that it's not enough for China to be prosperous. America must fail. You know, you could just see this through simple acts like if you look at um agriculture, it is totally their prerogative. It's a business decision whether you want to buy American soybeans or not or you want to buy Brazilian soybeans. I do not begrudge them one bit. It's totally different thing when you're trying to smuggle in agricultural funguses. So, we can't grow soybeans.

Now, if you start going down through the laundry list of what's actually happening, that's that's the shape of what's happening. And they're very they're a formidable adversary in the sense that you know we our conception of of war is kinetic. It's like the lone heroic cowboy against the odds winning through heroism. Their conception of war is deception. It's the the general who tricked the adversary to get into the valley and then flooded it. You want to win without firing a shot. And so a lot of the things that are happening are below what we would consider the threshold of conflict.

But but it absolutely is conflict. It is in their in their system system destruction warfare. You know, it's waging war through all the means because they're going to wage it where they have symmetric asymmetric strength. And until you know the American Calvinist sensibility is structurally positive some like and we're going to we're going to turn the other cheek time and time again over and over again. There will be some line there'll be some point at which we just react. And when we react, the the best quote I have from the admiral that I like is it's no longer John Boydy's udaloop.

Observe, orient, decide, act. It's the American ud udaloop. Observe, um, overreact, destroy, apologize. destroy, apologize. destroy, apologize. What we want to do is prevent this from happening by having enough deterrence that we're not provoked to being in a position where we need we even need to react. You've mentioned that the idea of asymmetries a few times, nuclear subs being an example of one of our last huge asymmetries versus others. What are the most important asymmetries in your mind for the US and for China? Like where where do they have an where do where where do they have an asymmetric advantage against us?

Where do we have it against them? And what do you hope shifts in? This is a great question. So their their principal asymmetric advantage is long-term planning. Um they actually can't pivot on a dime. So, let's go back to Gulf War I, which we're talking about with John Boyd. They saw the devastating violence we were able to do in basically four days to the fourth largest army in the world, and they they said, "Okay, we have to systematically map all the critical dependencies of America's military technology and invest against it." And they have been doing that since 91.

Uh, and so we like the frog has kind of boiled in some sense. And it's a little bit of an easier game because they're playing a home game, but that's the map they've been on. And it's been a steady journey. And if you look back, they broadcast their intent the whole time. There's no surprises that were there ever. there ever. there ever. Our asymmetric advantages that were crazy. The AI phenomenon was not in their long-range plan. It wasn't in our long-range plan, but when it happened, we all our whole economy pivoted on it on a dime, right?

And even the Chinese models, those are a result of distillation. And so our ability then to be unpredictable be unpredictable be unpredictable because we ourselves do not know what we're going to do. That's that's our key strength. That comes back to the heretics. Where does that unpredictability come from? Because it's not our bureaucracy. Our bureaucracy is incredibly predictable, right? Uh it's not the steady Eddie managed decline. It's it's the crazies. How do we get more heretics in this part of the American uh story because there's obviously a massive profit and I would argue status uh motivator in the private sector.

all these companies that are popping up with amazing founders, the potential rewards are extremely obvious. The heretics that you described at the start of the conversation, that's definitely not true. You mentioned, you know, dying penniless or whatever. How do we create the right set of incentives for more of our most talented people to go be heretics in this part of the American story right now? There's two incentives. One is just like recognition recognition recognition that we need the heretics. I think Hyman Rick over en enjoyed his celebrity for a big period of time and just being known as the guy who did this is itself a sort of reward.

Then the second part of this is is definitely financial like one of the arguments I've been making is you the cynical view of of defense the defense industrial complex in particular is something like these are greedy wararm mongers well they picked the wrong industry then because like on the greedy side you should be in tech you should be in some other business. These are these are crappy businesses you know they have like 9% operating margins or something. It's they're not they're they're valued at like less than two times revenue.

So we actually need to make our primes more valuable and that would help us continue to attract the heretics. How do you make the primes more valuable? The fil critique of the primes is somehow they're the problem. The system's the problem. The primes are just downstream of the consequence of the incentives the government gives. And I think the the worst incentive is cost plus contracting. Your upside is is capitated. You're not supposed to take any risk. The government basically pays for your R&D. So you have no skin in the game.

And yeah, you're still able to make a small number of exquisite things, but that system is anti- heresy. Like you can only do the conventional thing that the government's agreeing that you should do. You think about the Higgins boat. Andrew Higgins built that boat on his own. There was no spec. In fact, that's why the Navy kept rejecting it. It wasn't the Navy's idea. But then 92% of all boats in World War II are the Higgins boat. The heresy is the boat that won the war.

You know, how do you create an economic incentive where that's the case? And I think companies like Andrew are pioneering that on the hardware side where it's like, hey, I'm building a product. These are my specs. These are my opinions. I'm absorbing the risk. You should buy it if you like it or not. Part of the reason for profound optimism right now is is like I would not have have started all this advocacy if I thought I was just screaming into the wind. It's like having done this for 20 years.

For for the first solid 10 years, we were alone in the darkness. It was like SpaceX on the launch side and us. And then if you look at the present moment, there are now hundreds of founders who are building in the national interest with a US capital stack. one of our other advantages of over a hundred billion dollars invested in the projects that they're doing that are actually changing how the department thinks about the future. Like this is the window in the moment for this stuff to happen.

I increasingly in conversations that I have in in in the in the Pentagon, I hear some of these new entrance are talked about as plan A. It's not plan B. It's not, hey, we'll see. Maybe this will work in the future. It's like, no, no, this is the plan and we'll we'll have to have backups if that doesn't work. that is unrecognizable from the world I started in in 2006. If you were the president for a day tomorrow, what would be your executive orders? Like what what would be the things that you think could carry the most freight to create some of the change that that you want to see?

I have narrow ideas. Like this is a narrow idea, but I would try to blow it up. Okay, you want to bring pharmaceutical production back to the US. US. US. If you try to do that for generics, the business case will never work. It's it's too hard. It's too much of a subsidy. Um, but what you really want is you want to redevelop a skilled workforce that understands how to make drugs again and you want the production capacity that in a time of crisis you could go from say making branded drugs to generics.

So why don't we manipulate patent length and say look drug companies if you make your worldwide supply of your branded drugs here in the US I will extend your patent length such that you recover 2x your capex investment to go do that. That's a simple business case that every pharma company would underwrite in a heartbeat and it provides the catalyst to go generate that capacity. I think there are a lot of things in the American economy that look like that. We go back to the story I was saying between prosperity and freedom that you know Chrysler built minivans and missiles and Ford built satellites until 1990, General Mills, Kodak, like you just go down the list that the entire economy looked like that.

I think it's a consequence of being the really the sole superpower and the Pentagon, the old Pentagon in particular, being the last bastion of communism except for Cuba. Like like every country gave up on communism, including Russia and China except for Cuba and the Department of Defense. That made it both a bad business and then seemingly no threat. So you could just be a prosperity company. You' be a single-purpose company that just cared about being a company. I'm not sure that's actually like a stable or healthy society or civilization that we have to recognize that we have obligations across freedom and prosperity.

You mentioned the uh the notion that we are crazy and can pivot and attack opportunity is an amazing part of the US culture. What do you think are what's the other end of that other side of that coin? What are the negative aspects of US culture in your view? And I'm gonna ask the same question zoomed in on Palunteer specifically of how to cultivate the culture that you want. Palunteer seems to have an incredibly distinctive culture. Um I want to ask about Sham bombs and and things like this uh inside the inside the company.

But first at the at the US level, what are things that you wish were different here about our culture? Some problems required sustained effort, right? So, if you can pivot really quickly, maybe you pivot it to solving the problem, but that means you can pivot away from solving the problem and get distracted and and lose sight of what you're trying to accomplish here. Um, so that it's like a feature bug, you know, it's it's not an unequivocal feature, but if you're go if you're in a competition, you want to play to your strengths and that usually involves things that the adversary is unable to do.

You know, it helps that we kind of the nature of populating the US was that all the heretics from the old world came here, right? Uh so we have an unfair advantage on that. And then in terms of maintaining a culture, the critical lesson I've learned over and over again is like the entropy of the universe is against you. Like if you don't invest in your culture every single day, you will lose it. There's nothing about culture that is self- sustaining. That's as true for America, the country, as it is for your company.

Uh and then the best cultures are really almost cultlike. You know, uh your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture. Otherwise, it's not a very differentiated culture whatsoever. That requires flag bears. It requires people who are true believers. You know, you need to So, it starts with recruiting. Like, not not even not every human has a disposition that they want to be part of a cult essentially. Some of them are just structurally mercenaries and they're evaluating everything in life really through the lens of what's my next job.

And you you want to try to build your company with people who really think of the present job as the calling and uh that engenders the primacy of winning. Like they're always thinking about how to win today because that's the whole game. If you win today, you have the right to win tomorrow. Uh rather than you know the the other side of that is getting lost in what I wish the world could be this I wish the company could be this way or that way or something.

Um which is unmed. It's an aesthetic of how you wish the world would work rather than both how the world does work and what is required to win today. In a company like Palunteer, what do you personally wrestle with the most? Like what are the tradeoffs that I'm always fascinated by trade-offs. It just seems like so much so much of what happens hinges on a couple key choices. Can't do everything for everyone. What do you personally wrestle with the most? The most important decisions from my seat is really what projects are worth outsized investment that we think are going to define the future of you know what our customers need customers need customers need and therefore the future of the business over the next 5 years.

Um and so then how do you get the right talent on those projects? How do you discover what those projects are? I like to think about it. It's like my backlog is something I rep prioritize dynamically relative to reality. So like yeah here's my road map. here's all the things I want. It's like a approximation at a point in time of what I'm what I what I think are the most valuable things to build. The second some new data comes in, I'm going to rip that up and rep prioritize it.

Having a culture that lets you do that because that is really [ __ ] painful. Like people don't like it, their world is shaken up, it it generates a lot of chaos, but it's the right thing to do. And so then managing that so that your culture enables you to do that and that the conviction of what that the cost of doing it is worth it because the return is so outsized. That's like the whole business. business. business. I'm extremely sympathetic to that point of view of changing plans very quickly.

I've also experienced the whiplash that it creates in a business. How would you coach someone trying that believes this but understands it's really hard on a business if you're constantly changing your mind and pivoting your resources around? What have you learned about like the ways to talk about that with your team of implementing it, you know, of communicating around it? I'm I'm curious how you do it. There always degrees of these things, but to to the the first order issue, I'd say say say um is it hard because you want to exist in a business that isn't painful.

You know, there's a great Greg Lemon quote who's a world championship cyclist and someone was asking him about a championship performance and he kind of almost looked incredulous and he was like, you know, it doesn't get easier, right? You just go faster. Uh, and so what do you think a championship performance feels like? It feels shitty. It's really painful. It's really hard. And your ability to win is basically, can you survive more pain than your competitors can? Uh, and so then there's this weird phenomenon where if you're doing something world class, it's really painful.

Also, if you're totally failing, it's really painful. So then having some discrimination to know which of these two worlds am I in? And and the worst world to kind of be in is where you have no signal. It's like you're just plotting along, but it's managed decline is really what's happening. So then is the pain we're experiencing resulting is it generating results or not? And orienting people to that? The other part I'd say is you can't move the whole company at once. Even a company as small as ours, there's only 4,500 people.

Every change is itself a mini insurgency inside the company. And I would think about it like you're campaigning and right and it's like who are the people who already believe what you're saying? How do you add incremental weight behind what they're doing? How do you help them succeed more? Are you trying to generate momentum or you trying to deal with the drag of bringing everyone along? And my experience has been momentum is the thing that aligns the whole company. And so you should be waking up every day in the in the midst of these pivots just working on momentum.

People will catch up. up. up. What are your favorite ways to do that? Like to create this is kind of a communication question. Palunteer gets so much attention now from public markets and everywhere. It's like an it's one of these exciting places. So there's more scrutiny on the company, its choices, what it does. You don't get to operate in obscurity like you did in the first, you know, the first batch of time. What are your favorite methods for that internally? Very tactically, celebrating the heretics, celebrating the successes, creating venues where everyone has some ability to revolt.

Every employes first AMA with me, I end it by telling them to tell me to [ __ ] off to my face. It's a way of, you know, it's very uncomfortable for them actually. They're almost not sure if this is like entrapping them in into something that's going to get them in trouble. But, you know, how can you say you have a flat culture if you can't tell the boss to [ __ ] off? It's like a small gesture, but it's trying to set the conditions to understand like, hey, we are a company that's committed to taking the very best idea regardless of where it comes from.

Um, and then putting all of our wood behind those arrows. And so, and most of those ideas are usually some variance from what we're currently doing. Otherwise, it'd already be the current best idea. So we've institutionalized like you got to be careful how much you institutionalize but minimally two times a year we have these these weeks of revolt where people are allowed to go build whatever they want where almost I like want the people to have a chip on their shoulder like the whole point is to prove that we've been [ __ ] up and doing it wrong and you know inspire us with the thing that you've built and then if you have a culture that is just profoundly truth seeking and it's like the truth is so charismatic that like now that I've seen it I can't unsee it like this is obviously the right answer let's go it's not As hard as it may sound to get to to move and pivot on these things, the AI time is so remarkable.

We all have to deal with this new thing at the same time, it's uh probably like any crisis, there's both opportunity and danger bundled in the coming of AI for Palunteer 2. How do you receive this new technology and make sure that you get better because of it and don't get disrupted because of it? like you were a disruptor with this enterprise ontology concept you know killing the old like rigid database systems you had an innovation now like if I wanted to create a palunteer competitor it would be much easier just by virtue of the technology that's available yeah the only way you can do that is by disrupting yourself so to the point of institutionalizing rebellion and holding that up it's like it is the perpetual motor of self-disruption I think about it as like the most valuable thing is not to defend demotes or something but it's to go charge after the new opportunity opportunity opportunity Um, and one of the things I think is unique about AI is how much it plays to the beginner's mind.

Obviously, the first adopters of AI for us were the youngest hires. And um, to the point of generate momentum, I didn't really bother with the people who were kind of cynical or cynical or cynical or dismissive of it. I let the young people generate just overwhelming productivity that almost in some sense humiliated or inspired other people to get on board. Uh, and and there's this a similar phenomenon. There was like a weird almost like out-of- body experience as someone who's been there 20 years or someone who had been in Palant for three years is like you know what the best people are doing this are really the young people by which he meant people who had been there like 3 months you know and that recognition of of okay so here we have someone who's not a gatekeeper he's actually trying to find the insurgents and empower them and place them in places where they can go forth and and do badass [ __ ] and we can all learn together by doing so it's been actually really fun with the rate of transformation for AI and what it's really enabled to possible.

Everyone's trying to answer this question of like, okay, we have AI, like who's gonna where's going to the value going to get captured in the in the whole like stack or chain or however you want to think about it. What's your answer to that question? We think that the value is going to acrew at the at the chips layer and at at the ontology layer. If you kind of squint at the stack, I'll skip over some parts of this, but you have chips, you have the model providers, you have AI infrastructure, which is where we think the ontology sits, and then you have AI applications.

And what you kind of observe out there is the model companies have to run up the stack away from just providing a pure model because the model is commoditized. It's really everything they build around the model that is a solution that they're going to try to build value off of. When you look at the AI pure play applications they're running down as they start to scale their businesses have to deal with more customers more of their customers data they're reinventing the AI infrastructure essentially AIP from first principles recognizing why they need it.

Now, of course, through some divine intervention, we've built this platform over the last 20 years, and you can say arguably the meat of it since 2015 with Foundry leading to AIP. That gives us a huge head start on these things. And even if these models help you code faster, there's there's there's the code and there's the the secrets that actually is behind why we built the code. So, where are we going to be in two years? We're going to be in two years after that. So, I think that's we feel like we're in a very great position there.

that's expressed by like the way we measure this is how quickly can I deliver value for my customers. You know, how quickly can I deliver enterprise autonomy or fundamentally change my customers businesses? And not only has that number been awesome, like I'd say two years ago we could do that inside of eight weeks. Now it feels like a week, you know, so like that that rate is compounding dramatically. One thing I'm really fascinated about you is for so long you were sort of like an if you know you know guy very much behind the scenes you know if you asked around like the person or one of the key people making this business work the forward deployed thing you know lots of examples and it seems like you've chosen to be a everybody knows guy what is behind that choice like why why make that shift I'd say I'm a bit reluctant about the shift but shift but shift but I can't look my kids in the eye and not say that I'm ringing the bell that we're in an undeclared state of emergency.

That really the first major public thing I put out there was the 18 thesis which is to say like we're in emergency. We've lost deterrence. I've been doing this for roughly 19 years at that point. Here is my diagnostic of what's wrong. The shot clock is ticking. Like we've got to coales around this problem. Now on a note of profound optimism, I've seen more change in the department of war in the last year than the prior 19 years. And I think there to the point of Americans do the right thing having exhausted all the other options like we are definitely in the place where we are starting to do the right things and the first derivative and even the second derivative is positive going faster and faster here.

faster here. faster here. Uh how would you sum up the 18 thesis and I know we've talked about lots of component parts of it already. Is there anything from that that was your first kind of big public thing that we haven't talked about that you think is important? important? important? But if I was to synthesize it is we've lost deterrence. The reason this is not going to go the way World War II did is we don't have the industrial base we had in World War II.

We have to recognize what are our unique American strengths. The person is the program. Like don't forget that Edward Hall built the Minute Man and Shrivever was the Air Force general that oversaw our ICBMs and that we call it the Apollo program, but it was actually Gene Crance's program. And the primacy of those people and getting the right people in those roles is determinative to the success. It would be like thinking you could found a company by recipe as opposed to like the company's future is determined by the founders.

Uh that's like almost the congenital limiter on what is actually possible. Um and of all cultures we should understand that. And then downstream of that we should recognize that there is no process out of this. The reason we're screwed right now is we we prayed at the altar of process. We thought if we follow this requirements process and we do this thing, if we just let the bureaucracy work, it will lead to a good result. And the only thing that leads to is decline. Uh and that if you look at all the great military innovations through history, like Churchill built the tank as the head of the Royal Navy because the army, the British army wasn't smart enough to realize that horses were not going to win the next war.

So he called it a land ship because he could only build ships. So it was a land ship, you know. But that's not a one-off. like literally every major military innovation, including the Sidewinder missile, which was like a rogue project that some guy kind of built with lighters with a new sort of seeker that totally humiliated the Air Force's missile in Vietnam and became now we think of it as the standard. You know, when Bill Perry uh became the the assistant secretary of defense, he was staring down this thing.

It's like, hey, I can either try to fix the system and lose implied, or I can take the two things I really care about and make sure they work, GPS and stealth. at every crossroad it's the person who just wants to engage with the system we lose and the person who's willing to just put it all on the line to make it work and it was kind of a call to like if you're a latent heretic in the department if you're a latent heretic in defense tech this is the moment to express your heresy is there anything about uh your worldview palunteer etc that you think is would be surprising to an outsider that we haven't talked about first of all we don't really think of ourselves as a defense company like we're a software company.

I think the fact that like half of our business is in government, twothirds of that half is in defense is actually more normal to a historical kind of pattern that we've talked about here than the present. Um, but the part that I think a lot of outsiders misunderstand they somehow think we're either in the business of collecting data or doing surveillance. And that is is probably the part that's like least well understood about what we're doing. And I think the part I I so we're we're engaging with the problems as they exist.

And so you can say what is the problem that exists? The core problem that we're set up to solve is the legitimacy of our institutions. Why do doors fall off planes? Why does it seem like our basic government services don't work? If you don't address those problems, if you don't build that state capacity, private sector, public sector, if you don't help these institutions get better, it breeds nealism. breeds this sense that we should just burn it all to the ground. There's nothing worth investing in and that doesn't actually work.

You know, it's strictly a worse world. But that sort of energy is what you're fighting against. Our diagnosis of this problem, if you thought about these institutions, these institutions, these institutions, let's give the seauite government or private sector the benefit of the doubt. They have this steering wheel and they're diligently trying to steer the steering wheel. What they don't understand is it's a Jungle Cruise prop from Disneyland. Like, it's not connected to anything. And then you have the people down below who are kind of looking up and saying, "How could my leaders be so dumb?" You know, that is where that nealism starts.

And so the the what is the point of this operating system? Why are we trying to make these decisions better? We're trying to create something that's more responsive for the people who are leading these institutions and the people who do the work. And so much of the 20th century has been this wild managerial revolution that has concentrated power away from both these ends to an amorphous middle blob. That's where all the disconnection happens in the steering wheel. So reasserting that in a way that like our institutions work for the people that they're designed to serve and that our companies are actually the best in the world and functioning and competitive.

That's that's how you underwrite freedom and prosperity. and prosperity. and prosperity. This idea of like you have all this data, you're doing surveillance, you're this like ponopticon in in you know in America or something. Does that weigh on you? Does it weigh on you that like you are sort of cast as like uh as like an easy enemy or villain in in in certain people's stories? people's stories? people's stories? It used to weigh on me. Part of it is like, okay, you've been doing it for 20 years.

Like, okay, how long can this stuff keep weighing on you, but I I think it would be fair to say it weighs on every new employee when they come in. There's some journey of dealing with this. But that's I think it's also the the lot of the man in the arena. Like John, we can end with John Boyd like to do or to be. Are you trying to be someone? Are you trying to do something? You know, we're trying to do something. something. something. That was one of my favorite lines from that book.

Expand on that one bit more. So, John Boyd's advice to to other officers, uh, other uniform service members always like, look, you can either be somebody or you can do something, but you can't really have both. And if you're going to be somebody, you got to play this game and it's all kind of theater, but you're going to get promoted and you're going to get the accolytes and you're going to get the rewards of doing that and you're going to feel good about yourself. where you actually do something and it's going to feel really shitty and no one's going to appreciate it, but you're going to have the intrinsic reward of knowing that you did something.

You mentioned your dad earlier in the conversation. There's this visual story where I think he's held up at gunpoint or something early in his life. Went through a lot. I'm curious for you to reflect on the nature of of fatherhood and this whole story. It seems like such a key your relationship with your dad seems like such a key part of your story. Yeah. story. Yeah. story. Yeah. From the outside and you're a dad yourself. Would you be willing to just like reflect on that a little bit?

I mean, it would be hard to overstate the impact that dad and his example had on me. Um, you had such a selfless man who just gave everything to his family, could could weather any humiliation in service of his children and his wife. And, um, I think when you're a kid, you don't you're like you you you learn this stuff subconsciously. And you're like any normal kid, you know, this thing dad did is annoying or you don't you don't fully appreciate it, but it's like the culmination of all these events over time actually profoundly shape who you are.

And I hope I can set an example that inspires my kids to do the same sort of thing. And I think a lot of fatherhood is is is being a man that inspires your family to be better. When I do these, my closing question is the same for everybody. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? The greatest thing which is covered in um in the story is uh Miss Ethel Danhoff was the head of admissions for this private school in Orlando. Uh and you know my my dad took me for a tour of the school having learned that it's the best school and like that was that was the other fixation my dad had that education was how you were going to achieve some prosperity and he's like I'm going to give my son every opportunity I possibly can.

Turns out we'd missed the admission window by a mile and everything was kind of done. And you know I I was actually very reluctant to go even on this trip and see the school. I was very happy at the school I was at and but I was when I saw the science facilities there I was like I need to go here. I need to learn this stuff. This is inspiring. And you know so now I was all spun up and excited and of course I'm learning.

Hey you totally screwed this up and you'll have to wait a year. and Miss Danhoff I no data like you know it's not like I had some standardized test scores or something she's like give this kid the admission test just do it and maybe she had a modicum of data after that test but we we were a family that needed financial aid so it's like here it is like let's admit a kid that we're going to have to subsidize to come here and that opened the entire future and I think you know if you look later in life okay maybe maybe people have cynical reasons to help you you're further along they think there might be something like there's nothing in it for her it's Just a profound act of kindness that fundamentally changed my life.

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