Palantir’s CTO, and 13th employee, has become a secret weapon for Valley defense tech startups
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar is determined to help Palantir become a driving force for defense tech startups.
On August 5, Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar stood in front of about 20 nervous new employees at the company’s Washington, D.C. office and gave a speech you’d expect at a new hire meeting: company mission, Palantir’s history, etc. But there was one part that would’ve seemed unfathomable a few years ago: Sankar evangelized the importance of a new wave of defense tech startups, spun up by Palantir, Tesla and SpaceX alums.
The significance was more ideological than financial. Any business Palantir gets from startups is dwarfed by its government contracts, after all. But you can’t put a price on philosophical bedfellows.
Palantir likes to remind the world that it’s not like other publicly traded companies, i.e. buttoned-up and appropriately distanced from its cowboy private days. Sankar ends his orientation by cheekily inviting the new employees to shout “f–k off” at him — a way, he says, to encourage a flat structure. And as he walks out of the event room into the office bullpen, he passes a sign referring to employees as “founders” and “trailblazers.”
The sign is fitting: Sankar, who’s been at the company for over 18 years, is determined to help Palantir become a driving force for defense tech startups, a sector that’s been flooded with over $129.3 billion in venture capital since 2021, according to PitchBook.
“To have this class of new champions who have all cut their teeth in Tesla and SpaceX and see the world in completely different ways, it’s providing a huge amount of energy internally for us as we build for them,” he said, referring to startups like Apex Space and Castelion, whose founders hail from those companies.
That is why, in late 2023, he started a program that provides guidance and tools to defense tech startups called First Breakfast. He referred to it in his writings as Palantir’s “Amazon.com to AWS moment.” Basically, it’s a play for Palantir to get in at the ground level for the next Palantirs. It’s a business strategy, but also a philosophical one for Sankar, who spends hours a week on the phone consulting with defense startups and venture capitalists.
Like his longtime boss Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Sankar likes to wax poetic about protecting Western values and how America’s industrial base stumbled after its WWII glory days (though perhaps prime defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, would disagree that the industry has been resting on its laurels for 80 years). Sitting in a conference room lined with white boards, and a constant stream of commercial planes flying over the Potomac River behind him, he reiterated his darkest fears: that America may not be ready for whatever great conflict comes next.
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