Well, thank you.
I'm hugely honored to be here on stage in front
of people who serve our nation.
And Palantir, most of our customers are commercial.
Most of our revenue doesn't come from Intel and Defense.
And we're pretty global.
I think first part of our history
was both being born in Silicon Valley
and then leaving Silicon Valley.
I think the first thing industry needs
to do is affirm that if it's going to work with adversaries,
it should always supply at least as good
a technology to our services and the people who are defending
our nation which in the past has not been the case always.
America, one of the things that is we forget
because it's so obvious to us --
to the rest of the world, but often not to us -- is,
in software, America is the number one nation in the world,
bar none.
There is really no number two.
Number two is Israel because there has to be a number two.
But we are number one.
I spend a lot of my life abroad.
I speak German.
I wrote my dissertation in German.
I get people baffled all over the world
asking me, how can it be that America is so much
better at this than we are?
Take Germany.
It has a lot of smart people.
But the delta between what America delivers in software
and what everyone else delivers is very wide.
And so the key question for me is, how do we make sure
that people doing the most important work in the world
like people on this stage have access to the resources
we already have?
Some of that is educational.
People who are in industry in leadership positions
must tell their employees if you are developing software
in this country, you are going to give it
to the people on this stage and people in this room,
and explain why.
That I think is actually the most important thing.
We're in our little myopic perch in the Valley.
The background in the Valley is we've
been fighting the Valley aggressively pretty much
since we started our company in 2004.
And we've been battling the Valley on two issues.
One, it is my deep belief and the belief of my company
that it's pretty odd to be able to sell your product abroad
under very fair terms.
Essentially, because our allies are
willing to go along with your pricing
because they're being protected by people over here
and then not ship your software to them, A. B,
I'm very in favor of free speech.
If people disagree with working with the US military, great.
They should be able to voice that.
But you as a leader should explain to them,
I would hope, what the history is of especially the US
military.
Not that I have to lecture anyone here,
but it's surprising how many people
I have to lecture in the Valley about the positive effects
and what the world would look like without the efforts
of people in the US military.
But be that as it may while they protested my house every day
and put barbed wire around our cafeteria, we at Palantir,
not just me but engineers who are 22 fought through that
to be able to do something that is more important than just
working with the many companies we work with.
And so we're already on the unpopular side.
And by the way, we say in public what
we say in private in this context, which you're also not
supposed to do according to Valley rules.
And so--
[APPLAUSE]
So we're a little used to being unpopular.
I actually had a very minimal standard which is lower--
in the interview, I tell people in the Valley.
If you want to do something, that's your right.
This is America, by the way, fought
for by people on this stage.
But be that as it may, but you do have a responsibility
to articulate, what is it you're doing?
And why are you doing something with an adversary you're not
doing with the US government?
That is your responsibility to this country
and to everybody in the Valley for which I'm a pariah.
AI is equally as transformational.
And you need this combination between people
that know the material, that's the people on stage,
and people who can extend what they're doing,
and also people in my case--
I'm really good at managing really complicated
difficult people.
And so that's what I do for a living.
And then, you get this thing where nobody can--
and of course, there are these enormous--
where no one can imagine they're not number one.
And that should be our standard.
And if that's the standard and then-- most of the issues
we have in America are not actually
because of adversaries.
It's because of internal divisions
and not being able to agree on certain things.
This is why the shift here--
agreement-- America having consensus on anything
is very powerful.
And we haven't had that for lots of reasons you can debate.
But we do have it now.
And then, there's the cultural--
I mean, why is America so good at software?
Well, we actually play fair in teams.
We have highly technical people.
We're goal oriented.
And we are willing to admit we're wrong
and not be stained by failure when we screw up.
So I think what we need to do is continue on this trend.
I think US government officials should really
say loudly to people they want to work with who are developing
software that they must supply the best software in the world
to them.
I think we in industry--
by the way, it's often framed as how as you framed it.
But I would say from my vantage point,
there are certain technical issues like,
how do you do AI at the edge?
How do you actually create an all-encompassing environment--
which was what we're doing with a lot of industry
in the Western world, but where the data is segmented?
So if you have a global industry,
you're not going to be able to hit the data store in France,
Korea, America.