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Reflections on Palantir

A retrospective of an eight-year stint.

Going onsite to your customers – the startup guru Steve Blank calls this “getting out of the building” – means you capture the tacit knowledge of how they work, not just the flattened ‘list of requirements’ model that enterprise software typically relies on. There are plenty of good critiques of the ‘flat hierarchy’ stance -- The Tyranny of Structurelessness is a great one – and it largely seems to have fallen out of fashion in modern startups, where you quickly get CEO, COO, VPs, Founding Engineers, and so on. Partly this was the aggressive ‘mission focus’ type branding back when this was uncommon, but also the company was loud about the fact that people worked long hours, were paid lower than market, and had to travel a lot.

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