Garry Tan was employee No. 10 at Palantir. He regrets that it wasn’t single digits.
On “The A16z Show,” the Y Combinator CEO said that he was offered a place on the company’s founding team — but he turned it down to stay at Microsoft.
Tan was in Stanford University’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. His frat brothers included Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, two Palantir cofounders. Both were interning at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Tan said.
He described one of Thiel’s strategies: “When you start a thing, you write down on a piece of paper all the smartest people who you need to go and hire.”
Tan was on both of their lists, he said. So, Tan said that Lonsdale and Cohen flew him down from Seattle to have dinner with Thiel.
Thiel said, “I’m so sure this is the right thing for you,” Tan recounted. He also offered Tan a $70,000 check, Tan said, which would have matched his Microsoft salary at the time.
“I said, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year,'” Tan said. “Which I did.”
He called it a “$2-4 billion mistake.”
Palantir has since become a $420 billion company. It popularized an entire job category — the forward-deployed engineer — that is now replicated by many Big Tech companies. Palantir’s stock opened at $10 per share during its 2020 direct listing; on Thursday, it was trading at over $175 per share.
Tan chalked his mistake up to chasing what looks hot. He compared it to an early career move in which he worked on Windows Mobile rather than sticking with web development. Then, the Facebook boom happened.
“Joe and Stephen were among the smartest people I’d ever met,” Tan said. “If not them, who was I going to be a cofounder with?”
The universe was speaking to him, Tan said, but he didn’t listen. “All I cared about was what was cool, what was hot, what would a really good investor say,” he said.
Tan eventually made it to Palantir, of course. He learned: “Everything that’s awesome in my life is kind of a cult.” That cult should start with “some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy,” he said.
It’s “very punk, actually,” he said.
Do you work at Palantir? Contact the reporter from a non-work email and device at [email protected], or on Signal at henrychand.30.
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