Here we are in in New York.
De facto we derive in PG from New York.
So special place because we're not talking about PG.
Who are you?
What do you do here?
Where are you from?
What are we talking about?
Thanks, Alex, for having me here.
My name is Eran.
I'm originally based in Israel, before joining Palantir here.
Based in Israel?
You're Israeli?
Yes, I'm Israeli.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm based and also live in Israel.
It was an expression in German: Mein Name is Hase, which means 'I have no name'.
Oh, no, no, I do.
I do.
Okay.
Before joining Palantir, I was the CTO of various organizations.
The last one of them was the CTO of the Prime Minister Office in Israel,
where I actually met Palantir for the first time and kind of as a CTO,
my role was to kind of identify the right tech that fulfills the business-
Just a minute, many people incorrectly think of CTO as a somewhat, you know,
erudite profession, which is obviously changed quite a bit in America especially, maybe less so.
But when we met you, when you were doing your work,
one of the interesting things was you were very far ahead of the world on it.
It not being just like stitching together things that may not work.
It was very operational.
So when you CTO in your context, it basically meant getting operational products to the front line.
Exactly.
And I think part of my mantra as a CTO is when an I.T.
professional in your organization is deploying their people,
doing something that they you know, other people outside of their organization can do better.
They're not deploying them in the right place.
And my view was that we need to use the people,
that we have to basically close the gap between the off the shelf product and the specifics of of the business need.
So it needs to be very, very connected to what the business needs and but also very
connected to what I can do and I cannot get outside.
So it sounds like you were what the reason we liked you was.
You know, what you see in America now is a move from CTO has happened over the last year
that's like not maybe adjacent to the business to CTO that de facto is driving business decisions.
And you were, you know, Israel, in fact, in many ways was on the forefront of that transformation.
Yeah, I, I agree with that.
Like the fact that, that you that if the CTO is not just,
you know, writing papers but actually know how to talk to the real developers,
get them to kind of implement the vision and go and test it with the, with the business.
Almost like the forward deployed engineer,
you take the I.T. professional and you put them
in the business division and they see whether it works or not.
That's that's a key part of being successful.
So given how operational you are,
why are you in love with a very academic term called ontology?
I think the the the real thing is that we've seen a lot of companies investing millions of dollars in time,
in kind of building software or buying software for kind of a niche use cases.
But the end result of that doesn't accumulate to like to a better business outcome.
And I think what's unique about the ontology and Foundry in general is
that it's not like an I.T tool and it's not an end user product.
It sits in between, it sits in the middle between the IT and the -
given, it's a high end academic hard to define topic that in your view can define whether a business succeeds or fails or thrives.
What what is isn't an ontology?
What is Palantir's Ontology?
Why is it important?
Why is it differentiated?
To me, it's the intersection of three disciplines in the organization.
It's the business.
Language is the way the business analysts understand the way the business works,
connected to the IT person that knows the data and needs to basically
hydrate that these objects or fill them with the real data.
So the model doesn't become theoretical.
It's actually the real data that that the business has.
And the third one is the data scientist.
It doesn't work.
Those people may believe they have something like that.
What is the technical challenge that it's solving that is
hard to solve that that may not exist without an anthology.
So people have invested huge amount of money in building these data leaks,
but they still need the IT professional to run the queries for them so
they don't get what they need out of that kind of effort.
And with Palantir, with the ontology, you actually get a much,
you know, a usable thing that could self-serve the business that console serves,
that the the business professional and actually work with that.
And we've seen that in various places.
With another way to put this be that many people assume that you read right.
Function or the decisions to data like distinction,
meaning you can read and then write to the underlying database
or that you can make a business decision and
then change the underlying way in which the data are structured, i.e.
control how your business run is something
that actually cannot run without an ontology.
Yeah, I think the ontology, the way we think about the ontology is,
is not just through the nouns, but also through the verbs,
the fact that you can actually codify the the swapping of an airplane and
then not just being able to perform that in your screen,
but also having that to write back to the to the-
Why why is that a difficult?
So it professionals will look at this and understand why this is difficult.
Non-IT non-technical people may not completely appreciate why this is very difficult to do.
Why is this why is it difficult to develop an ontology that gives you a rewrite function across a large organization.
Starting just from the fact that you have enormous amount of systems that that,
you know, each one of them has their own view.
And that swamp thing.
Their own view, meaning it in in simplistic terms,
each part of the organization has its own ontology.
Yes, exactly.
But the CRM department, the operation department,
whatever, the customer service department,
each one of them has their own view of that of that ontology,
but they don't speak the same language.
And without connecting them into one place,
you can actually apply the CEO strategy.
So imagine the CEO wants to change the balance between customer service and cost of maintenance.
How does they do that?
Like today, they will send an email to all of these people hoping that they will apply that each one in their own systems or actually around the system with an ontology,
they can actually change the weights that will impact the way the recommendation
is given to the and operational in the field.
Yeah.
Maybe a more layperson's version is without an ontology.
You never are without an ontology, you just end up with a thousand ontologies which mean your read function is broken.
Because when you try to read what is going on with the business,
you get disparate, highly inaccurate data sets because they're
they're created in each one is own framework, i.e., a ontology.
And the right function doesn't work because they're all disconnected,
actually, even if they're connected because even if they're connected, the underlying worldviews are disparate.
And therefore you cannot control your own business.
If you assume the software is eating the world,
then obviously business, you know, first you say we're going to manage
data as if it was software, then you're going to.
But in reality, what we're saying is the reason why this is selling like a weed
and in the United States of America is that businesses are actually code.
Or do you agree with that?
And like and why is that the case?
I think that everyone would agree today that that data drives the business.
And then the way you treat data is not through Excel is through code.
So I think that that actually works really well.
Like you need to codify your business.
Yeah.
Although I might be the only one who doesn't agree with that.
Why that?
Because data drives your business to the extent you have a rewrite function with your data.
Otherwise you are.
You believe you're driving your business with data, but in fact it's completely disambiguate it.
And so what ontology is really doing is allowing you
to do what you know you have to do but can't actually do so without an ontology.
You say the data is running your business,
but actually you're running your business with a stale version of the data.
And the data is not being impregnated in any way with your conceptual categories
that are determinative for your success in your business.
Sure.
Yeah, I like I took it for granted because if you if if you were saying that your
data runs your business but you have ten copies of that data,
then you don't really run the business you need.
You think you think you need that thing to be like a single source of
truth that actually reflects what your business has.
Okay.
Given that you're on the cutting edge in your past life
and we would like to believe on the cutting edge in this life.
And you've been here for how long?
Six years.
Why?
I mean, I'm sure my charming personality is one of the main reasons you stayed.
Obviously.
But why?
Why are you here?
Why are you planning, hopefully to stay?
Um, I kind of, I hear Palantir talking about the mission and a lot of that time of that time,
it's in the context of, you know, fighting terrorism and, and all that.
But to me, even in the commercial business and not just the government business,
the fact that you kind of train people to take decisions based on truth is what helps us,
you know, build a better world that is not based on, you know,
fake news and demagogues and all of that.
And to me, it's really important just for my kids,
It's not just internally.
It's also externally.
Like if you give an organization like the tools for them to,
as we said, you know, make the decisions on your on their business based
on what's really happening in their business and not by who is shouting louder or their view of the world and all of that.
Then then they start to think like that.
You know.
One of the things I really admire and actually love about the power of your product
is in a lot of organizations, you have someone in the corner who's unpopular,
who's doing all the work that creates Alpha, and they do not get promoted.
But if you're using a power of your product, it's very clear he's creating the Alpha.
It's like, yes, this person actually is really valuable.
And we've seen this across the government contacts, commercial contacts.
And it's something that I find and I run into people who are,
you know, we're like, you know, 25 when they first used our product and
now we're doing very important things.
And I believe we've played a minor role in making sure they advanced.
Yeah, I remember the story about this aircraft engineer
that always had this theory about what's wrong with one of the things
in the airplane but could never actually do this.
I think I see him as this person in the in that corner
and was was Palantir and Foundry he was actually able to test his theory
proved that is right and actually fix the problem.
I think that's well that's.
Yeah I and of course were very enamored with the fact that this problem got fixed and it launched a huge business and preventive maintenance across the globe in numerous heterogeneous industries.
However, my version of it is also and that person probably advanced in their career
and may would have probably been locked in some corner because they happen
to be too quantitative and they don't quite know how to make everyone happy at the coffee shop
and therefore do not advance.
And then the company doesn't advance.
In any case, I'm happy you advanced to Palantir.
Thank you.
Had a great time.