Michael

Shyam Sankar is Palantir's chief technology officer and the man most responsible for making its business and technology work. He joined in 2006 as employee #13, when Palantir was one of Silicon Valley’s freakshows: a small and somewhat demented chickenhawk of a startup with a buggy demo and no customers. For 20 years, largely from the shadows, he has brute forced it into the spearhead of "defense tech" and a $320 billion company. He embedded with intelligence analysts in Virginia, special operators in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the factory floors of some of the world’s biggest companies—building and rebuilding software in the field, sometimes with phones taped to his head so he could give and take feedback while keeping his hands free to code. He invented the “Forward Deployed Engineer,” which has since become the object of both skepticism and imitation. Alex Karp, Palantir's mercurial co-founder and CEO, says the company would not exist without him. The same can be said of the modern defense tech industry, many of whose founders cut their teeth working for Shyam. In this deeply reported profile, @JeremySternLA tells the story of the most pivotal but hidden figure behind America’s most controversial company. He also gives the clearest explanation you'll read of what Palantir actually does, whether its valuation is justified or absurd, and what any of this has to do with the company’s mission to save Western civilization. It begins in the Grand Ballroom of The Pierre hotel and winds through Nigeria and India, Florida and California, Iraq and Afghanistan. It ends with a rabbi, a monkey, and a lesson in what it means to buy time in the face of a coming fire. Only in Colossus:

You can want to be like @elonmusk, but do you really have the stomach for it. corememory.com/p/los-angeles-…

I am forever grateful for the impact Shyam has had on my life. He is single-handedly responsible for exfiltrating me from the government and helping me realize how I could better leverage my strengths instead of remaining trapped in a concrete basement fighting bureaucracy. He taught me how to manage my time, track action items, and organize/prioritize (actually kind of crazy that no one taught me how to do that until he did when I was 25 yo). During my time @PalantirTech, he would playfully chastise me for being "too much of an ideologue", while simultaneously penning treatises about how Palantir could change the world. He proved that it was possible to stare down a seemingly impossible problem and dream up a new reality. What a joy to have shared such an incredible ride the last ~18 years. Love ya, @ssankar. You are an inspiration. Another absolute banger from @JeremySternLA. colossus.com/article/the-pa…

Last month we demonstrated our ability to communicate in/out of faraday cages and RF denied environments @LosAlamosNatLab. I'd like to put one of our devices on a drone and put it against a jammer. Anyone down? Shoot me a DM if you want to chat.