Want to work at Palantir? Or maybe you’re just curious about the vibes at the company whose stock price skyrocketed 600% over the last year?
Well, there’s a whole trove of videos on Palantir’s YouTube channel to dig into— and I did the work for you.
Palantir smashed earnings expectations on Monday, reporting $1 billion in Q2 revenue. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Alex Karp thanked the company’s “unapologetically specific” culture. He analogized the company to an “artist colony,” one that has “plenty of friction and disagreement.”
What is so “specific” about Palantir’s culture? I dug through 174 minutes’ worth of corporate YouTube videos in an attempt to find out.
And while the videos likely present a more polished and curated view of the company’s culture, I still found some interesting takeaways.
Palantir’s “anti-authoritarian” culture
Palantir’s buzzword is hierarchy. The company is divided into micro-teams, and many employees report only to their teammates. One hiring manager said that, for a project that a Big Tech company would assign thirty engineers to, Palantir normally assigns three to four.
In one video, a Palantir boomeranger — one of the company’s 75 employees who left and have since come back — said he only lasted six months working somewhere else.
“I just got so frustrated with how a normal company operates,” he said. “Why does hierarchy matter? Why does process for the sake of process matter? Also, these people aren’t smart or interesting at all.”
When describing Palantir, this boomeranger used words like “funny,” “smart” — and “anti-authoritarian.”
These stories were common among Palantir employees in the videos. An intern named Aarushi described interning at other tech companies, where hierarchy made her work feel small. Palantir employee Vruthik Thakkar described a previous machine learning job as “oriented around doing things that someone in the hierarchy told you to do.”
Thakkar compared the rigidity of his old job to a marching band. Palantir, he said, was more like a “jazz band.”
The jazz references popped up multiple times. In one, a university fellow explained to Karp that his background in jazz and improvisation helped him with Palantir’s feeling of “not being trapped in a single box.”
Who is the Palantir employee?
Palantir employees have a bit of an informal dress code — at least, judging by their attire in the videos. From what I saw, they mostly wore black, with occasional whites and beiges popping up. Wire-rimmed glasses were popular.
They also lean casual in dress. In one video, an employee described being rewarded for traits like “passion and intensity” that would have been punished elsewhere — while wearing shorts and flip-flops.
On Monday’s earnings call, Karp said that Palantirians who come from universities have “just been engaged in platitudes.” At Palantir, Karp said that “no one cares” about your educational background.
The anti-academia spirit seems to run through Palantir. Multiple employees describe dropping out of college to join the company — in fact, Palantir devoted a whole video to it.
“Now I’m not going to have a degree, where does that leave me?” one employee said. “I’m going to be at Palantir, who cares.”
Other employees reported feeling a loss returning to college after their Palantir internships. Former employee Mark Bissell described his thinking when returning to Williams College: “Why am I doing this? What’s the value of what I’m currently spending my time on?”
No strict job titles, no corporate ladder
When Tiger Cross joined Palantir as a “forward-deployed operations engineer,” he didn’t 100% know what his job title meant.
“I got assigned a mentor who was also an FDOE and he wasn’t really sure what an FDOE was meant to be either,” Cross said. “His main answer that stuck with me was that roles mean nothing at Palantir. Everyone forges their own path.”
Palantir’s freeform, anti-hierarchical culture also means loose job titles and teams. Employees across videos described being able to jump project-to-project and tackling issues from abstract positions.
One boomeranger described being frustrated with how the “pendulum would swing” every few years, entirely reorienting the company’s direction. She said she later realized it was the cost of experimentation.
What unites the company, then, appears to be a love of Palantir itself.
A recruiter named Verity described their ideal employee as “low ego people that really care.” When Patrick Howard began referring people for Palantir roles, he looked for “people who only want to be here, and are obsessed with it, and want to throw their whole weight behind it.”
Howard described other positions in tech as “very very relaxed,” where Palantir employees “take on the world,” and must “put in the work to do that.”
For some people, that culture doesn’t stick. John, a Palantir recruiter, said that applicants looking to climb the corporate ladder should “go and apply to Big Tech.”
“The reason that people boomerang is the same as the reason people leave Palantir after six months and hate it and never come back,” one boomeranger said. “We don’t do mentorship. We don’t do career progression. Everything has to be oriented in first-principles thinking.”
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