
Jacob Kasner
473 posts

Jacob Kasner
@cloud_cowboy
3X AWS Consulting Intern, 8X Certified: Empowering Cloud Talent to Break Into the Industry with Confidence and Certifications








This is how desperate Apple was in the early 2000s.











Incredibly excited for this year's Hill and Valley Forum Over a short few years we've made it the pre-eminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather Jensen Huang, Alex Karp, etc and 30+ Senators and Representatives This year's agenda here:


NEW TODAY: During the aftermath of October 7, Alex Spero was in his sophomore year at Cornell, and protests had started to consume a fair bit of daily life on campus. People would barge into classrooms and libraries, yelling into megaphones “‘From the river to the sea’ and all that good stuff,” Alex told us. Most of it was peaceful. But one day, the computer science major was eating mac and cheese in a kosher dining hall — his cherished “dairy Sundays” ritual, as he put it — when he got a barrage of texts asking if he was okay. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m doing great — I’m having my mac and cheese,’” he said. Alex and his friends looked online. Someone had just threatened to shoot up the Jewish dining hall. “And it was just like, ‘What do we do? Do we just leave? Do we go hide downstairs?’ And I was like, ‘Nah, I want my mac and cheese,’” he said. “So I just kept eating away, whatever.” The student who made the threat was arrested. But, as Alex put it, “the environment at that time was just not great to be in.” So after seeing Palantir’s announcement about Safe Haven, the internship program for college students tired of the dysfunction and antisemitism on their campuses Alex applied immediately — and got the offer on January 2. Soon, he started working for Palantir’s healthcare team. He learned to run meetings with clients and understand their problems in detail before coding solutions. “I would go to the hospital and just sit there with the people who are using the stuff we were building and be like, ‘Hey, what makes your life easier? What do you want to see?’” he said. It was a refreshing change from Cornell. Even the most relevant coursework seemed silly in retrospect. “Algorithms,” a famously rigorous class, taught Alex how to design algorithms, helpfully — but for esoteric purposes. Like assessing whether something was a Turing machine. “Yes, [those algorithms] can be applied, but if you’re not applying them, you just keep learning and learning and learning these things for no reason, and the majority of it you don’t even need,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll prove anything’s a Turing machine ever again in my existence on this earth.” Alex opted to continue his internship at Palantir through the summer. In August 2024, he accepted a full-time role — and dropped out of Cornell. He loved the work. He’d found a social home; the people were smart and kind. And he’d already finished almost all the CS requirements, so the rest of his time at university, at $90,000 per year, would’ve been filled with electives. So Alex took a step back from the societal expectations and, at 19 years old, made the decision for himself. Plus his mom approved — a bonus. “I don’t think there was much school had left to offer me,” he said. Today in Pirate Wires, @dodgeblake looks deeper into Palantir's early talent strategy with conversations with the company's Head of Talent Marge York and former Safe Haven intern Alex Spero. Inspired by the success of the Safe Haven program, the company's Meritocracy Fellowship goes one step further and invites high school grads to intern at the company. Blake is on the beat. Link is threaded. 👇




















