Hi and
I am happy to be here.
Alex, where are we?
Do you want to comment on this?
I’m living a sort of Karl May fantasy,
that is in the middle of the woods,
not far from Canada in New Hampshire.
And when I’m not in Denver working with my colleagues or somewhere else in the world,
for instance, in Germany or in London, where we have big offices,
I sit here and work on things that interest us.
And this is my barn
and here we welcome many colleagues from Palantir and we work together.
And yes, to put it casually, it's a bit of
a convergence between German inwardness
and Karl May.
So things that I would have rejected as an academic,
that became important to me as I got older.
Okay, that’s right on cue,
I'll take you on a journey from the USA back to Germany.
You have a very strong affinity with Germany,
you lived in Germany for a long time, you did your doctorate in Germany, you have many German friends.
What is it that fascinates you about Germany?
When I went to Germany, it was just out of academic interest,
but of course I rediscovered how much
of Germany had flowed into my upbringing.
On my father's side,
our ancestors came from
Western Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland,
and immigrated to Germany and then to America.
And so of course we lived with German culture in a very clichéd way,
but I very much underestimated how German my upbringing was.
And then, that is, when I arrived in Germany,
to talk and think about German thinkers and poets, to put it in a kind of clichéd way,
in the end that meant much less to me than my friends.
And also the feeling that, wait a second,
I don't always have to say I'm fine,
I don't have to say I love you after meeting someone twice,
I’m allowed to have an opinion that’s not about the same as everyone else’s
and you're allowed to be alone and go deep on many things.
So these are halfway clichés about Germany, but that impressed me very much,
I felt very much at home
and returned to America more by chance than anything else because
my job at the Sigmund Freud Institute came to an end
and instead of living broke in Germany I thought, well, maybe I'll get a job somewhere in America
and halfway immigrated again.
And part of the success of Palantir, I think,
and of me too, was to immigrate to America again,
to look at America from the perspective of a foreigner, so to speak,
and to incorporate these impressions into Palantir.
Yes, this is really apparent with you.
How much of this fascination with Germany or this way of thinking is part of Palantir?
Palantir after all is an American company.
So what we do is we build extremely complicated products
and in America if you build a business like Palantir
you would first try to develop the thinnest possible version of a product and sell it right away.
So you would have 4000 salespeople and 300 software developers
of whom half really are sales guys.
It's a cliché about doing business in America,
but instead, for example, we spent three to four years working on our first product.
This product also took into account data protection
20 years before people understood it.
So, going into such depth,
working so thoroughly,
having such fidelity to truthfulness as we have internally
is extremely peculiar
and is what you find in Germany rather than in America
and that has helped us a lot
and that is one of the main reasons why we have so much success.
Okay, let us now talk a bit about digitisation.
In Germany, it is a huge topic right now,
simply because, by virtue of Covid, but also because of other things, everyone has become aware that we are lagging behind on digitisation to some extent.
In Germany, I think many people feel like Heinrich Heine
‘When I think of Germany at night I am deprived of sleep’,
when it comes to digitisation.
I would rather turn this around and put it in more positive terms.
Why do you think we should be more confident
and what contribution can Palantir make?
‘Because we already want to reach the kingdom of heaven while we are still on earth’,
which is also by Heine from the same poem.
The greatest problem overall in Europe and also in Germany
is that software, software development, software business
are considered scientific projects.
So German businessmen go to America,
look at what the Americans are doing and say, well, we're more clever, to put it bluntly.
Whether that is true or not, it is generally considered as such.
But what happens in America and at Palantir and other businesses is rather art.
Yes, we are artists in business,
not scientists in business.
And then you have the problem –
not always, but often in Europe, especially in Germany –
that what is built is screwed together,
but the magic, what holds it together,
what should hold it together, namely the belief in something, is missing completely.
And then, you don’t have a real, thriving business
but something that has no or little value for mankind
That is something that can be fixed in Germany,
and hopefully that will be fixed,
because Germany needs a different software culture
to power its industry.
Okay, culture is totally important, I'll return to that in a minute,
but nevertheless, I think we agree that we can bring added value,
nevertheless, it is often the case that many people know Palantir, but don't really know
what we actually do.
Well, I think many people find it difficult to categorize us, to place us.
It that intentional?
It’s just hard to categorize us,
not just for Germans.
Let us take the example of the products that are used in Germany.
As you know we are working with the police in Hesse with a product called PG, which was the first product.
Yes, the main feature of this product is that you have access to all the data
that you are allowed to have access to,
which means that you can work for the police
in accordance with the most meticulous rules
on earth in terms of data protection.
And it allows you to work so effectively that the police
think that you are more successful with the investigation than without it
This means that you are more successful at the investigation
in conformity with German rules, which are very strict in terms of data protection.
That's one product, but that's just people having an idea, ‘yes,
software is something I can’t understand,
that's a data octopus,
the police type in my name
and without regard to regulations and without transparency they get a name.
Of course I don’t want to be knocked down by some gangster in the street,
but that’s not worth it.’
Yes, that’s what this was about.
Incidentally, this is also how it’s presented at the movies,
but it is simply not possible to sell software to a European society
without regard to data protection.
But this is something that humanity does not yet really understand.
And then there are other products: Foundry.
Foundry basically is a kind of platform
where you can integrate the data in the corporate space
so that people who can’t write software can
suddenly act as if they were software developers.
That is you can write software on Foundry.
People who would not know how to develop such complicated software can,
while respecting data protection and the sovereignty of the country,
work as if they had studied at MIT,
and develop the best software, and even better, because all the hard work has already been done.
And you can do incredibly many things.
By the way, the trajectory, what we are doing with Foundry
is more or less what Germany had done in the Metallic and Chemistry industries.
So in the beginning people were just thinking about energy.
Energy is something that a car drives with, just like you think about data.
But actually chemistry is what you wear,
it's in the car,
it's the paint,
exactly like the data are the things that power everything.
Yeah and with Foundry you can do that.
But the normal person thinks,
‘Hey, they work with so much data,
the results are so big,
there must be skeletons in the closet’
and then, if you are from abroad,
and maybe there are people who also want others to think that,
that's hard to understand.
By the way, we have also made mistakes here, I would even say this is a bit German.
We work every day to build new software products
instead of learning from our compatriots here
a little bit more selling,
explaining what are the things that are good,
what are the reasons, a little bit like filming a Disney movie,
showing we are the good guys, we are Bambi, not the hunters,
we don’t do that.
So and that’s something we might have to learn.
But that, yes, we totally messed up, as you know.
Yeah, that’s why we’re standing there.
Yes.
Okay, but you once said something that has always stayed on my mind,
or that immediately struck me when I started familiarizing myself with Palantir, which was
that you said we develop software 7 years before
organizations or companies realize that they need it.
And at the time I thought, okay, I don't understand.
No, you thought complete nonsense.
Yeah with this American business. Where are all the white teeth!
Yeah why aren’t they building products we can sell now?
But please explain, because I think when you work at Palantir, you understand it very quickly.
But maybe explain it again.
Data protection is almost such a good example,
I don't always want to use it.
But in a nutshell: So, 20 years ago
after 9/11, all everybody cared about was that you catch the terrorists, whatever.
So we said no, we don’t do that.
So we will work in a Hegelian way,
so to speak, that is to dissolve the contradiction, which does not exist anyway, between data protection and the fight against terrorism.
This is an idea that was not only incomprehensible 20 years ago,
but an idea that almost resulted in us not getting the funding.
That is one idea.
Then we have the idea, so hey,
how can it be that basically all the added value of any business
is software, the management of software, the products that come from software,
what a business produces.
It's not the production of cars anymore,
it is not airplanes anymore, the added value comes from products that are powered by software.
But if that’s the case, how can it be that only 10,000 people in the world know how to use software.
And then from that came the idea of building a platform with certain features.
These properties, in layman's terms,
we make a product out of all the things that only 500 people in the world
can understand and another 10 people in the world could make a product out of.
And through these products we're going to make sure that
almost everybody can work with it,
so that their businesses can have the added value of Silicon Valley
without having to quit their jobs,
without having to work basically just at the mercy of Silicon Valley.
And out of that, Foundry was born.
And that, by the way, is an idea that is still not understood.
The product does sell very, very well,
but the idea behind it is not completely understood yet.
Then we have three, four products,
for example how do you work in a room where you don’t have access to the enterprise.
So it’s these insidious problems that haven’t been understood yet,
that aren’t understood now, but in the future it’s not like all the data
can just be hosted in a central place,
it’s going to be hosted on your phone, for instance.
So you’re going to be working with your mobile phone, you're going to be working with your robot or whatever,
it will not go back to the core enterprise.
These are all interesting questions that we're working on now
that will power the business of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
Okay, before we get to the art aspect,
maybe one other thing. So our motto in Germany is
‘Patience is for those who have time’
and in fact we also see impatience as a force.
Impatience is actually always rather negatively connoted,
but we see something positive in it.
Why is speed a value in itself in the world we live in now?
Because of the way you build software, well there we are rather not German.
So the depth with which we work and the quality of the products are extremely heavily influenced by Germany.
But one thing, which is different, in tech overall and software,
you have to deliver something relatively quickly, check if it's good, if it's not good.
The other thing is to just build.
The Germans, from a conceptual standpoint, this is how one learns to think in Germany
think about the concept for a long time, the concept becomes perfect,
and then you have an implementation which takes a long time.
That's just not the way software companies are built.
The concept has to be deeper and more differentiated than most businesses
and so, but after you deliver that,
it has to be worked out relatively quickly
and also with full certainty
that sometimes it’s just complete nonsense what you're doing right now, that’s completely okay.
But this interaction between the overall concept,
which is perhaps better, a little more German than not, but this interaction between the overall concept and its implementation
should not take so long that this interaction between overall concept and implementation
takes so long that in the end you don’t realize it’s worthless
shouldn’t take so long that you can’t change it.
And that interaction between depth
and relatively shallow work
is a core methodology
of all successful tech companies
and something where I think
Europe can still learn relatively much from America.
That's the point that I think you actually feel when you work here,
and that is totally important,
to conceive of technology not as a science but as an art.
That is something that you always emphasize.
You say ‘We are a colony of artists’
we are not interested in developing software in some kind of template-like, schematic way.
What can we, what can technology learn from art?
First of all, you need artists.
But in what way does an artist think differently about software than a scientist?
A scientist waits until he has all the points
and he can analyze them from all the perspectives.
But then it is much too late.
An artist collects impressions
and says ‘Well, based on those impressions I think you have to build abcd,’
of course, goes relatively deep and then you’re up and running before people even have a science.
I'm very biased, of course,
but most software businesses are building now
what we built 7 years ago.
So and why have we been able to do that and not just once,
but five, eight times?
Yeah, because we don't wait until we have proof,
you can’t wait until everybody understands that.
‘The scholars are everywhere believers, but never succeed in being weavers’
So yeah wait until everybody gets it, and you have no business.
Do something nonsense because it doesn’t go deep, and you have no business.
If you merely work with a concept based on scientific facts that can be proven already,
then it’s simply too late.
Yes.
And we don't do that at Palantir and that and yes.
Yeah, okay.
Exciting.
Alex, thank you very much.
Thank you.