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Reflections on Palantir
Personal writing and other things by Nabeel Qureshi.
This is, and was, highly unusual for a Silicon Valley company.There’s a lot to unpack about this model, but the key idea is that you gain intricate knowledge of business processes in difficult industries (manufacturing, healthcare, intel, aerospace, etc.) 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.
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