So the company specialises in Big Data Analytics software, which is based on Machine Learning, heavy math and other Computer Science topics.

Co-founder, Alex Karp, is kinda the face of it, doesn't have a bit of computer science in him:I don't doubt his intelligence at all but wouldn't Palantir run on the Comp Sci researches and software engineers, what value does he bring that much to garner 2billion USD?

He manages etc but the developers have the skills. How do he and Peter Thiel convince the people who make the software to work under them to make the products happen?

Might be a dumb question but I hope you brahs can understand where I am going with this.


reps for srs responses

pls srs respawns

By aligning incentives to motivate engineers and other technical resources to work there aka paying people.

The company was founded in 2004 so he had the foresight to start it. All the engineers who joined him early are filthy rich after IPO, all others who joined later are heavily incentivized by cash and stock moving forward same as every other big tech companies. There are a thousand AI/ML companies not many have the marketcap of Palantir.

Common to have a technical co founder and a non technical co founder.

Mr. Karp is hardly unique in his bloated compensation package.

If you dig into the financials of any company you will see the CEOs garner absolutely absurd compensation. Often something like 20% of the company's yearly profit.

Executive compensation in the USA is completely unhinged from reality. But then what do you expect when most publicly traded companies have a "compensation committee", a committee of board members who decide the salaries of the C-suite and the board?

You don't need to have deep technical knowledge in order to hire smart people.

At least he doesn't steal the accomplishments of his employees or competitors and pretend he is some sort of genius like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc.

As for convincing people to work for you, the answer is pretty simple: Money.

So, he had the idea and just knows business/connections and leveraged the technical people to make the product?

Follow-up questions:

a) Why don't engineers do something on their own? Best incentive possible.

b) How did he have the foresight and knowledge it can be done given that he is not technical in that domain to know what can and can be possible?

a) The engineers or technically skilled people work in a team. Anyone can start their own business, but people like that are typically trained to spend their lives serving a corporation as workers and not to build and manage their own business.

b) People hire technologists all the time for advanced products like software. They can tell you what's possible, how long it will take, and how much it will costs. As long as you pay them for their time.

Look at someone like Jim Simmons, he has one of the highest performing hedge funds of all time. He is pretty smart, but his fund is only successful because he is good at hiring smart people and getting them to work together. He even says that the reason they come to his company is to make a lot of money.

Or look at someone like Tom Sosnoff, hired some technologists, built some software, and made insane profits from it. Being able to hire highly skilled people and sell advanced products like software is the basis of many first world economies. Second and third world nations are still focused on industrial and agricultural economies.

The key element here is capital. Capital gives you the power to exploit almost anyone on a physical or mental level for profit. And they will gladly do it if you pay them well enough. That is the core idea of capitalism.

I nearly chit my pants when I saw a demo of it. Makes me want to become a data analyst just so I can work with it in the future

Plus the smartest guy I ever knew works for them. Definitely going to be a big name.

It takes alot of IQ to be a great engineer

It takes insane amounts of EQ to be a great leader

Steve jobs had garbage levels of technical knowledge compared to the people he was hiring for 100-400k annually (which were worked like dogs at apple) but still considered one of the greatest business leaders of our time

Palantir is the worst example to address this question, I'm surprised you picked them or how do u even know about them. They are a huge bubble and running on less than 30 customers, yet have a billion dollar valuation, recipe for disaster

Thiel is a super investor now, he invests in teams and their ideas, just that, he isn't some technical guru or a serial entrepreneur, he hasn't been one for 20 years.

Now, most tech start ups which grow and become unicorns have a strong tech co-founder who can atleast provide direction. Theres no other way around it, a team of purely business people will hardly get VC invesments, the alternative is for this team to be very well funded to be able to hire a CTO + technical team on RSU packagesJobs had Wozniak around to build the first product, once you get off the ground and have funding, u can disregard people like wozniak and hire a large team of engineers to keep the business running