The company’s chief technology officer has co-authored a book which is rallying cry for bold leaders and risk-taking entrepreneurs to rearm western democracies.
Shyam Sankar is talking, in contrarian Palantir style, about “crazy things” that are also “empirically true”. The chief technology officer of the US data analytics firm, gives an example of how building a software giant is actually about culture, not about technical skills, in his view.
He says: “It’s crazy to me, as an existence of proof, that neither India nor China has an enterprise software company that’s competitive on the world stage.” Europe has also struggled to build companies anywhere near the scale of the American tech giants, despite the bloc’s technical competence.
“The spiciest way to say it is: all your crazy people came here,” Sankar tells me in his office in Washington. “And a trillion-dollar company requires a crazy person. We call them founders.”