PALANTIR CEO Alex Karp: "WE HAVE A SECRET"

about how to use a German Engineers are the best in the world among the best among the best in the world why didn't we why didn't we invent palantir why isn't Google coming from uh well because why isn't Facebook coming from Germany why is it that the US Army that the Israeli let me let me let me give you an answer to some of this so first of all there was the first phase which clearly Europe did didn't win so but Europe kind of didn't engage now Europe is engaging but again America's solving a problem that is differently America's solving the problem of how can we build Innovation where it doesn't matter how many people lose their job that's not the problem Europe has to solve Europe has to solve the problem of how can we have an innovation where people keep their job this is a very different problem and so like if you're solving the second problem which is the problem really that has to be solved now you need to have software plus people who are trained Europe has the people that are chained it will have to develop or purchase or co-partner to with other people me others to to build the software but the combination of fact crafter and software is very very powerful and again your Europe is not solving the same problem Google I mean without bashing it doesn't matter the American platform model presupposes you may have five companies and 500 000 people that have a job and all the money goes back to them that's not something Europeans are going to accept in my humble view nor should they you feel it if you're always under funded in an organization then you don't do you're not on top of innovation and you're not the one who's the driver of innovation you need a crisis and the crisis in my view exactly in Europe is that you're going you need an economy that has both Innovation and jobs this is a crisis situation because if you don't solve this you'll have populism everywhere and so that there's a that's a crisis moment in Israel is a classic thing I mean every single person has to go in the army every single person gets tested every single person knows they're going to have to serve in some way if you had the same thing in Germany you'd have a really strong wound despair but that's not that's not that's not there's no crisis what is palantir doing better than other companies uh you know I think the the central secret of palantir was actually um it's something that I've kind of redis been rediscovering that was also our in some ways a great disability Peter who's my co-founder and Buddy and I ironically had a what you could call classically the German approach to Billy building our company which was that there was a a superficial issue which was visualization um but then when you looked much deeper there was the issue of integrating data and then if you looked at integration of data not from a linear thing but from trying to get rid of contradictions the contradiction we thought between fighting terrorism and what you civil liberties or Dot and shoots and we were very much affected by by this idea of removing that distinction and actually quite frankly by Hegel because you had this idea of alfaim De Savita spokes you don't have this in English where you the contradiction is removed and because we were trying to solve not just the problem of integrating data to get the data to the analyst but doing it in a way where they only saw what they were allowed to see we solved a bunch of problems that were worthless at the time um like how can you purge data how can you keep data how can you show to a third party the data is only being used right there how can you guarantee security across the whole the whole the whole company or um or or military organization how can you collapse how can you give the person in the final mile what the ability to act what you'd probably call in your room alphatox tactic how can you actually get that to work in a military context while not violating the intention of of the person in charge and all these problems at the time looked crazily stupid and not valuable but we were pretty fanatical in trying to solve them and that took us three years and and a lot of money and and a lot of explaining to investors that they're going to have to wait which is hard I'm sure everybody in the room knows but for those who don't you studied in Frankfurt and you love to speak German we will speak English because the e-book had decided it decided what's the ebook so um and because English is probably the easier language first Universal it is one thing the ebook can decide still what language we're talking tonight and he even does know the term ebook which is really great you already mentioned it Alexander you were fighting terrorism a lot you were fighting Isis is it actually true that you tried that you helped to find Osama binlan uh we obviously don't talk about um our successes or failures but um I can say that um you know I have I come from a family of kind of left-wing intellectuals and really only had contact with war Fighters because my parents were protesting them and uh and I uh I I believe for me like the the single what's been really motivating for me and I think a lot of people are volunteers to the product has been very useful that that I can say like many other companies big tech companies uh that are successful nowadays your company palantir became successful in the Silicon Valley uh would a company like palantir had the same success if it was founded in Germany we you'd want to find you know I mean first of all it is a little bit weird Pete Peter was born in Germany and came to America I would have stayed in Germany had I uh my mind is uh uh and um so I I'm quite I think the central issue in Germany is just um that there's enormous talent and I know from my experience in my colloquium that the talent we had was in this colloquium in Germany was it definitely is good if not better than anything we have in the valley the the the thing is um one of the things that you learn at Stanford where I went you actually learn less than I learned it my at Wolfgang University at Frankfurt but you learned to believe you knew more and this is a this is one of the great secrets of Silicon Valley that I think one you know that like the talent pool in Germany in my maybe biased view is among the highest in the world the the the the system it functions there's obviously a rule of law and one of the great advantages you have in Germany is that people are very honest which is something that one forgets the value of but to building a company you need sort of live advantages a little less modesty uh that's like you really um you know while the German engineer is likely to be the best in the world if asked if they're best in the world they'll say well you know whereas The Clique it's a little bit of cliche but if you ask the Stanford grad may not even be an engineer they're the best in the world and uh and so there's I think that would have and I think things are quite different now I think there will be very big companies here I'm hopeful that they will what silicon Valley's done well is take a cultural moment in America and build companies around it to make something really big you have to take something that's special here and build on top of that so it'd be different if you had to advise German politics German government about how to use deal with the challenges of the digital world how to speed up digitization over here in Germany and tonight is a chance what would you tell government what would you tell politicians is commonly known I'm a huge fan of of the minister and uh I think she's doing a really good job I think what you need to do is it's like a love story yeah of course um but uh I think you know you need to create space where people can be free to make mistakes and she said this is really important you know you need the ability to fail and stand up and fail again and continue getting things to work um you need to bring people from outside from different areas that you know it doesn't just have to be commercial areas but you have to have some kind of crosswordilization you need a high degree of honesty um you need a little bit of money but actually not too much I think one of the big disadvantages America has is that's too much money so it's it's like too much money is antithetical to to software development less money is better um because you then you you need rigorous tracking if something is working or not one of the biggest problems in software is a project um it mostly software doesn't work so you have to and if it does work it's mostly useless so you you have to really somebody with a business mandate has to sit and say okay well this is my business mandate I'm pretty open to however you do it um within you know the constraints of in in Germany it would be data protection or Dot and shots um and then create using a fry home and and that I think is beginning to happen here I'm quite quite bullish again I think there's as everyone here who's either from German or lived in Germany there's a tendency in Germany which is very valuable to be very self-critical we do this at palantir so if you ask palantir about any anything inside Talent you'll be like but actually it might be the best thing out there so you need to simultaneously be very optimistic and very critical and um and and I think I think those things are beginning to move a much more optimistic than most most Germans are uh minister vanderline digitalization is not only a challenge for an organization like the bundeslaire but you know even the big corporations uh the car industry the idea was the big challenge how to digitize themselves and how do you think a government and a organization like bundeswear is really able to do what is necessary for this change yep I first of all um Alex said one thing that is uh very interesting about self-confidence and attitude in the United States versus Germany I remember um when we lived in Stanford the mid 90s and my children were small when we came from Germany when they had a soccer training and they missed the ball or something like that it was always don't do that no this is wrong no no don't do that you can't do that this way then we moved to the United States and I remember that the children started to learn baseball and my little son five or six years old was at the first training and he was supposed to hit the ball and of course he missed it once and twice and 10 times and 20 times and even at 30th time he was missing the ball the trainer was saying nice try so this I I was in such an awe what what this attitude difference was and I understood this this is what I think you're talking about this I work we work almost in every Western Country in in the world in one form and 70 of our our Revenue now is commercial and but what I idea is very hard to find someone two prominent people talking about the real problems the way they are and the most important thing in a startup is to know how bad things are and if you can have that dialogue you're very likely to solve the problems and then you know look German Engineers are still among the best in the world and so it's like if you know what the problem is and you have the engineers very likely to solve it if you don't if you lie if you have to in many including it I mean I you know like in America there's this problem where you would be very hard-pressed to identify some of the problems and because they're stuck in some PowerPoint then uh and uh it's uh and so that that this is a this is a really important advantage that that you have you're dealing with big data since many years how much of a game changer is artificial intelligence right now especially in that regard if we are talking about cyber security inside of a war so it's the next big thing autonomous not driving but autonomous weapons what's going to happen over there I'll make it very short because we're being told but two points one on the commercial side now the abundance Fair side you'll have a lot of money if once you have big companies the money will show up um the the uh and then in artificial intelligence there's really a confusion artificial intelligence machine learning pre-total Ai and AI we're actually in a pre-total AI periods machine learning and partial AI plays a role the primary cyber threat to an organization is it doesn't really understand where the data is anyway and therefore you have cyber actors manipulating the whole system without you seeing it but in the future you'll have these other threats last thought no matter what the threats are one of the most important things is the state decides what to do under what circumstances what you do with the data who pays when you make money and this is also going to be a big battle in the next couple years when you found your company the first contracts were coming from government could you give us a reason or can you tell the German startups why it makes a lot of sense to work together with an organization like the bundeswear yeah um actually this is so um it you know first of all just to give some context people really all most investors in the valley didn't want to fund a company that was going to work the government the single reason we succeeded is we went to what amounts to special operators especially in Haydn and we gave them our software and we said look we're not particularly their usual kind of people who had real problems navigating proxy but we can we will give you software that will save your life and you go to the generals and tell them this saved your life and what was very important for us is we believed we could actually save someone's life and because we believed it we worked day and night and day and night we had people living with people we had one person in pounds who lived in the office for three months none of us had salaries none of us had anything we really really believed we are going to give this to the people and they're going to their chances it was about improvised explosives and so improvised explosives and predicting where they are is actually a software problem because you have to integrate figure out the patterns figure out where the explosives are likely to be and we gave them the software we installed it we did the models for them and when they started noticing that their chances of survival went up um for that made us feel really good and it motivated us to do a lot more and it also meant that we could get through the bureaucracy which was really really tough and we they did they did that for us because we did a lot for them and this this whole the neck becomes part of your culture and once you kind of have done that for a couple years when you go and you're working with in a pharmaceutical context you have this extreme motivation that you believe well if we get the software to work you'll actually do something that's really important uh and the person will help navigate and change their system for you but it was it would never have worked had we not started with the military

Channel: Arny Investing

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Keywords: palantir, pltr stock, palantir stock, pltr

Id: 9IXW1ZBa7DE

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023