Most sales pitches fail for one simple reason: they try to say too much. It’s natural to be passionate about your product or service. Of course you want to showcase the features and benefits. But if you want your audience leaning in and listening, less is always more.
We live in what I call an AHA world. AI-focused, hyper-connected, and always-on. Distractions abound. If you cant capture your prospect and customers’ imagination immediately, youll lose them to their emails, Slack messages, and TikTok feeds.
The good news is theres a 90-second fix that will help you craft a pitch or presentation that keeps your audience on the edge of their seats. The structure is so simple, its almost too good to be true. Its the same framework the world’s best journalists use to keep their readers coming back for more and the same approach I teach leaders, sales teams, and founders who want their message to cut through.
Lets dive in.
Find Your Headline
Most people start creating a pitch or presentation by opening a slide deck and dumping content into it. Or worse, opening an existing slide deck and trying to rearrange it. Dont. Before you write a single word or think about your visuals, you need to strip your pitch down to a single sentence.
Imagine it appearing on the front of a newspaper or at the top of a social feed. What words would you choose? Keep them short, punchy, and memorable. Ten words or fewer is a good rule of thumb.
This single line of text becomes the anchor for your entire pitch. It forces you to stay disciplined. If something doesnt support your headline it doesnt make the cut.
When you look at the newspaper industry, the best headlines have an emotional element too. They dont just present information, they engage the target audience. A weak pitch headline is forgettable: SaaS Product Seed Round is accurate but bland. $10 million Opportunity To Revolutionize Fintech is much more compelling.
A strong headline creates energy. It signals to your audience why they should care. But its most important function is as a yardstick for your content. Test every slide, story, and statistic against it. If its aligned with the headline, it stays. If it doesnt, it goes.
Distill It Into Three Key Messages
When you look at the text of a newspaper article on the page, youll see the headline and a number of subheadings. If all you do is skim those, youll have the gist of what is being said. You dont need to read the whole thing. That structure is a great shorthand for pitches and presentations.
Your audience cant absorb unlimited information. Most people walk into meetings already holding a handful of important thoughts in their heads: deadlines, dinner plans, unfinished tasks. If you give people 17 reasons why your product or service is a good fit, theres no hope theyll remember all of them.
Id like to suggest that three is the magic number. Not seven. Not five. Three.
Three ideas feel complete and satisfying. Three creates a sense of structure. Three gives your audience a map they can follow without working too hard.
When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone back in 2007 his headline was Apple reinvents the phone. His three key messages were as follows: An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator. Eight words, three ideas, total clarity. His whole presentation was built around those unifying messages. He covered a lot of ground in his 1 hour, 42 minute presentation but those were the things he kept coming back to.
Your three key messages are the organizing ideas that sit beneath your headline. They are what your audience will remember long after the details fade. Ask yourself: If they only kept three things from this pitch, what must they be?
This is where you need to be ruthless. Speakers often flood their audience with data points, product features, or historical context. But doing so only creates overwhelm. It is not your audiences job to decide what matters. Its yours.
Decide How You Want Them To Feel
With a headline and three key messages, you now have a pitch structure that is simple, repeatable, and memorable. The final step is to think about how you want people to feel.
This is the part most people skip entirely. But its the one that separates forgettable communicators from compelling ones. Decisions are rarely made on logic alone. Even the most analytical audiences are influenced by the emotional resonance of the message.
Before I became a communication coach, I trained and worked as a professional actor. One of the first things actors learn is the power of emotional intention. Before stepping on stage, or in front of the camera, you decide the feeling youre trying to generate in the audience or the other character. That choice influences your breath, your voice, your posture, and your energy. It changes how your words land.
The same principle applies in a sales conversation. Ask yourself: What emotion do I want to leave them feeling? Should they feel excited? Reassured? Educated?
There are thousands of options. Choose one. That emotion becomes the current that runs through your delivery. A pitch with emotional intention not only sounds and feels different but is far more memorable too.
Heres the whole technique condensed:
20 seconds – write your headline 60 seconds – choose your three key messages 10 seconds – set your emotional intention
Thats it. In 90 seconds, youve clarified your message, sharpened your structure, and supercharged your delivery. Its focused, clear, and engaging.
And if youd like to see this technique in action, just look at the structure of this article. Its built exactly the way I encourage people to build their pitches: one headline, three key messages and a single emotional intention guiding the tone.
In an AHA world, simplicity isnt a compromise. Its a superpower.
The metallic fringe hanging down from the edge of Anishnawbe Health Toronto’s community health center near downtown Toronto is the biggest indication that something different is happening here.
Created to provide centralized health care and traditional healing to the 90,000-strong Indigenous population of Toronto, the clinic is the centerpiece of a unique city block of development that was intentionally led by the Indigenous community and designed to reflect its culture.
[Photo: James Brittain/courtesy KGA]
The wraparound fringe of more than 12,000 strands of stainless steel chainthe kind of aesthetic flourish easily targeted for elimination by the value engineers of a typical developmentis just one of many elements of the project that put its Indigenous roots on full display on this block.
From its services and its building forms to the orientation of its landscaping, the development embodies Indigenous traditions, practices, and principles in a way that’s wholly uncommon in most urban environments.
[Photo: Riley Snelling/courtesy KGA]
Named the Indigenous Hub, this city block of development includes the aforementioned health center, along with an Indigenous job training center, two mid-rise residential towers, and public and private plazas. Indigenous iconography and material references can be seen across the site, from building facades that reference sacred blanket designs and healing rituals to wall treatments that evoke the bark of trees that once stood as forests on this site.
It’s a project that goes to unusual lengths to put these elements on display. And it also required everyone involved in the project, from the developer to the architects and the landscape designers, to rethink their approach to urban development.
[Photo: James Brittain/courtesy KGA]
‘A place of indigeneity’
Located in a part of the city that was once the floodplain of the Don River, and before that the ancestral lands and hunting grounds for Indigenous people for thousands of years, the site holds deep resonance for the community. The designers of the project, including an Indigenous architecture firm headquartered in a nearby First Nation, put great effort into drawing those connections in the look and feel of the project.
“The intent was all about how do we ensure that when people are in this block, they understand that it is a place of indigeneity, and also understand where they are within the city,” says Matthew Hickey, a partner at Two Row Architect, an Indigenous architecture firm that advised on the design of every part of the project.
[Photo: James Brittain/courtesy KGA]
Working closely with Stantec Architecture, Two Row helped create the plan for the block, and then worked alongside Stantec and the architecture firm BDP Quadrangle to guide the design of the buildings and outdoor spaces within the block, including building facades inspired by traditional dress, traditional healing spaces that connect directly to the earth, and a central Indigenous Peoples Garden plaza where medicinal plants are grown.
This ambitious, Indigenous-led development has been decades in the making. The charity health care organization Anishnawbe Health Toronto (AHT) had been searching for a place to consolidate and improve services it had been providing to Toronto’s Indigenous population since the 1980s. Then in the late 2000s, when officials in Toronto put in a bid to host the 2015 Pan Am Games, this former floodplain was targeted as a potential site for redevelopment. As part of the plan, and in line with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, a two-and-a-half acre section of the redevelopment area was set aside for Indigenous uses.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. This bonus newsletter from Davos explores the strategic relationship between CEOs and chief technology officers. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
In my previous life as a technology journalist, I wrote and edited countless stories about corporate chief technology officers (CTOs) emerging as key partners to their counterparts in the C-suite. When marketing functions became more data-driven, chief marketing officers clamored for attention from product and engineering. Today, chief financial officers (CFOs) push tech leaders to drive companies productivity gains from software and automation even as they scrutinize tech buying decisions.
Now, as artificial intelligence (AI) and agents become pervasive at companies, CTOs have another executive to collaborate with: their bosses. In an interview with Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince and CTO Dane Knecht made the case for technology chiefs as strategic partners to CEOs.
The C-suite syncs up
Prince says Knecht has been instrumental in pushing him to adopt AI beyond fun use cases, such as creating amusing images for company slide presentations or invitations for his kids birthday party. The best CTOs in the world are going to be the ones that are saying to even the 51-year-old or 61-year-old or 71-year-old CEOs, You can do this too, says Prince, whose company provides customers with tools to protect and improve the performance of their websites. And if you can do that, its going to actually help you build better companies.
Its a sentiment echoed by Nacho De Marco, CEO of global software development company BairesDev. (BairesDev partnered with Fast Company on the event featuring Prince and Knecht.) He says his clients, who turn to the company to help scale their engineering teams, see AI as essential to their future. When the CEO and CTO are aligned, that transition usually goes really well, he says.
Knecht, who started out as Cloudflares first product manager, eventually took a role building and leading the companys emerging technologies and innovation (ETI) unit. Prince carved out 10% of the product and engineering budget for innovations that arent on any customers road mapand might even challenge Cloudflares existing business model. Prince credits the division with propelling the companys growth, saying: If Dane and the ETI team hadnt existed, Cloudflare would be yet another CDN [content delivery network].
Knecht, in turn, says Prince always nudges him to be more ambitious. You really dont ever bring Matthew an idea where he says, Thats a good idea, Knecht says. Hell say, Eh, think bigger. Its always, Think bigger.
Two roles, one strategy
Prince says he was somewhat reluctant to promote Knecht to CTO because Knecht was doing such a good job running the innovation skunkworks. However, Prince was impressed with how well he interacted with customers. Knecht has, for now, retained the ETI team as part of his responsibilities.
Indeed, the ability to build relationships with customers is essential for CTOs intent on proving their strategic value to their CEOs. Tal Cohen, president of Nasdaq, says CTOs need to be able to understand how clients use the products their tech teams are building. He also encourages CTOs to become tech translators for their CEOs, helping their bosses understand major technology shifts, whether its the latest announcement from Nvidia or a breakthrough in their own industry. You need to demonstrate that youre three-dimensional, adds Cohen, who leads Nasdaqs Market Services and Financial Technology divisions.
Working with your tech leads
CEOs, how do you engage your CTO on strategy? And CTOs, how do you make sure that you are included in strategic conversations with your CEO? Send your examples and anecdotes to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. Well share helpful examples in a future edition of the newsletter.
Read more: the evolving C-suite
Whats behind the surge in CFOs becoming CEOs
Why so few human resources leaders become CEOs
Im a CMO whos friends with my CFO
People know when a brand genuinely cares about well-beingfor employees, customers, and humanity at large. In many cases, its an intangible truth they can simply feelin how theyre treated, how decisions get made, and whether a companys stated values actually show up in practice. Plenty of brands talk about purpose and people. Fewer live it. And the difference is increasingly obvious.
That gap is why brand well-being is emerging as a meaningful framework for companies that want to build durable growthnot just short-term performance. At its core, brand well-being recognizes that a brand isnt a logo or a campaign. Its a living ecosystem made up of people, culture, purpose, and consumer relationships. When one part breaks down, the entire system weakens. When all three are healthy, the brand becomes more resilient, trusted, and relevant over time.
Importantly, this isnt abstract. Its a leadership choiceand one companies can control.
What Is Brand Well-Being?
Brand well-being is a holistic concept that encourages companies to prioritize wellness across three critical dimensions. Employee well-being asks a basic question: is work designed in a way that supports peoples physical, mental, and emotional health, or does it quietly drain them? Culture well-being examines whether a company operates with meaning and humanityand whether employees feel genuinely connected to each other and the work itself. Consumer well-being focuses on how brands show up in peoples lives: are they improving them in tangible ways, or simply competing for attention?
If well-being is the equivalent of organizational health, the logic is straightforward. Healthier employees perform better. Purpose-driven cultures retain talent. Trust-based consumer relationships last longer. No business would argue against those outcomes. What company wouldnt want its workforce to be healthier, its culture more purposeful, and its consumer relationships more authentic? Yet many still treat well-being as a side initiative rather than a core strategy.
The Business Case: Wellness Drives Work
For years, wellness initiatives were framed as perksa nice box to check and a headline to score PR points. Too often, a companys wellness strategy is a daily app reminder that feels more like an annoying interruption or chore.
The data tells a different story when well-being is approached consistently and strategically. A Cigna-commissioned study found that employer well-being programs delivered an average ROI of 47%, returning $1.47 for every dollar invested. According to Wellhub, 99% of HR leaders say wellness programs improve employee productivity. Meta-analyses show reductions in absenteeism and healthcare costs with ROI approaching 148%, saving hundreds of dollars per employee annually. Companies investing in well-being also see meaningful drops in turnoversometimes by as much as 25%.
Well-being is no longer a bonus. Its a business strategyone that drives loyalty, retention, and performance at scale. One of the strongest validations comes from Indeeds Work Wellbeing 100, a data-driven ranking developed with Oxford University that evaluates publicly traded companies based on extensive employee survey data. Many of the companies that score highest on employee well-being also outperform the market and regularly appear on the Fortune 500. The correlation is hard to ignore: organizations that invest in well-being tend to outperform those that dont.
Well-being isnt a costits a competitive advantage.
Bringing Brand Well-Being to Life
The challenge, of course, is moving from intent to impact. Brand well-being doesnt come from a single program or campaign. It requires expertise, lived experiences, and real feedback loopsinside and outside the organization. Done correctly, it can play a transformative role not only in deepening consumer relationships, but also in boosting cultural energy within the company itselfand yes, ultimately, productivity.
Forward-thinking companies are starting to treat well-being as an integrated ecosystem. They bring credible experts into leadership and employee learning, focusing on sustainable performance, stress management, communication, and burnout prevention. They engage consumers through real-world experiences that foster connection rather than spectacle. And they create safe, personal environmentsevents, retreats, and small-group forumswhere people not only learn about mental and physical health, stress management, personal sustainability and nutrition, they feel comfortable sharing honest insights about their lives, needs, and expectations.
Those insights, when fed back into product design, workplace culture, and brand strategy, become far more valuable than traditional surveys or focus groups. They allow brands to understand not just what people say, but how they actually feel.
Importantly, the most effective brands integrate well-being naturally. Products and services show up as part of the experience, not as forced marketing moments. The goal isnt to sell wellness. Its to support it authentically.
Ive seen brands like LOréal, the NBA, BlackRock, Bayer, Morgan Stanley, Volvo, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Wells Fargo experiment with this model through internal offsites, community experiences, and retreats hosted in well-being-focused environments. The result isnt just better moraleits stronger relationships, higher trust, and clearer insight into both employees and consumers. Over time, the impact drives increased happiness long after the event ends.
The Leadership Question
Every company says it wants to evolve. But evolution requires trade-offs. It means leading with care, connection, and long-term thinking in a system still optimized for speed and short-term returns.
Some leaders already understand that investing in well-being is inseparable from investing in brand performance. Others still treat it as an optional expensesomething to revisit when margins allow.
The market is increasingly clear about which group is winning.
Brand well-being isnt about being nice. Its about building organizations that people want to work for, buy from, and believe inagain and again. The question facing todays leaders isnt whether well-being matters. Its whether theyre willing to lead knowing it does.
A century ago, work was unsafe and openly adversarial. Strikes were common. Turnover was extreme. Productivity suffered. HRthen called personnelwas created to manage this instability. Its job wasnt to make work fulfilling. It was to reduce friction between employees and the company, keep people on the job, and protect output.
As companies matured, so did HR. The function expanded to include hiring, pay, benefits, training, grievance handling, and legal compliance. On paper, this evolution gave HR a broad view of how people experienced workand the potential authority to shape it. But that authority was never fully claimed. Instead, HR generally settled into administering systems and policies designed by othersespecially the C-Suite.
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, University of Virginia business school professor Allison Elias explains how this history is experienced today. Employees dont see HR as a driver of better leadership or a healthier workplace. They see a function that listens but rarely acts, collects feedback but seldom follows through, and lacks the authorityor the courageto intervene when leadership behavior is the root of the problem.
Employees today doubt whether HR has the power and standing to influence how individual leaders actually leadespecially when leadership behavior openly undermines trust, clarity, dignity, or psychological/emotional safety. Over time, that gap between listening and acting has become the narrative.
The good news: HR now has the opportunity to reinvent its role in organizationsbut it must step fully into it.
Well-being drives performance
Over the past year, remarkable research has shown that employee well-being has a direct and profoundly positive impact on organizational performance. The newest study comes from Irrational Capital: drawing on more than a decade of public and private data, they found companies ranking highest in employee well-being significantly outperform their peers in long-term stock appreciation. Over an 11-year period, firms in the top tier of employee well-being outperformed those in the bottom tier by nearly six percentage points. By contrast, companies that excelled primarily on pay and benefits outperformed by just over two points.
Whats now empirically clear is that how people feel about their day-to-day work experienceand their direct managersmatters far more than what they are paid to tolerate it. And, if well-being drives performance, then feedback must be continuous, actionable, and tied directly to leadership accountability.
A real voice
What employees are craving is a real voice. They want to be routinely asked for honest feedbacknot once a year or even semi-annually via traditional engagement surveys proven to have little if any impactbut through focused pulse surveys that capture how they are experiencing work week-to-week. They want to know that their input is heard, considered, and has real influence. That feedback should flow not just to individual managers and senior leadership, but also to HR itselfso the function can monitor patterns, hold leaders accountable, and ensure employee well-being is protected at every level of the organization.
When survey results show managers are consistently uncaring, unsupportive, or otherwise undermining employee well-being, HR must willingly intervenecoaching leaders to improve or, when necessary, removing them. This is where HR can finally claim the role it has long been empowered to play: shaping how leaders lead, embedding well-being into daily work, and ensuring organizations operate for people, not just for goal achievement.
The ‘How’
The tools for this already exist. Pulse surveys can be deployed one day and summarized the next, delivering real-time insights to managers, senior leaders, and HR. This immediacy creates a rare opportunity: HR doesnt need to wait months for engagement reports to act. Every piece of feedback becomes a lever to correct course, reinforce positive leadership, and make tangible improvements in how people experience work.
Whats critical is that HR canand mustbe the true guardian of this ecosystem. That means more than administering surveys or running reports. It means owning the operationowning well-being. It means creating a culture where employees know their voice carries weightand consequences. It means ensuring that workplace leaders understand the practices that contribute to well-being and that there are real teethaccountabilityin its oversight. It must celebrate managers who excel, coach managers who fall short, weed out those who dont improve, and embed well-being metrics into how leaders are evaluated and rewarded.
It must be clearly understood that this is not merely a moral imperative; its a business imperative. When people have their needs consistently met for belonging, safety, growth, appreciation, and respect (the key drivers of well-being), organizations see measurable gains in retention, commitment, collaboration, creativity, and profitability.
Claiming power
The truth is workplace leadership practices are in dire need of transformation. Evidence abounds that traditional methods deplete people rather than energize themand HR has both the access and authority to lead the needed change throughout their organizations.
For HR leaders, the question is simple: will you fully claim the power your role affords? Will you leverage real-time feedback, hold leaders accountable, and transform the employee experience? Doing so will not only improve performance and profitabilityit will permanently elevate HR from a back-office function to the strategic force every modern organization needs.
The moment is now. Employees are speaking. The data is clear. The tools exist. HR, step into your power! Shape how leaders lead. Protect well-being. Drive performance. Make your mark: ensure work is safe, meaningful, humaneand create organizations that truly flourish.
Economists increasingly describe todays economy as K-shaped: Households with higher incomes and assets are pulling ahead, while many middle- and lower-income families struggle to keep up. Prices for housing, healthcare, and everyday necessities have risen faster than paychecks, leaving millions of Americans feeling squeezed, exposed, and uncertain about the future. For many families, affordability is not an abstract concern, it is the daily challenge of covering essentials while trying to stay afloat.
You would expect that reality to shape what Congress prioritizes in response to economic anxiety. Instead, affordability is being invoked to justify making crypto market structurethe rules governing how digital assets are regulated and integrated into the broader financial systema legislative priority, rather than addressing the more pressing sources of financial strain facing most families.
Crypto offers a story about upside and progress, but it does not answer the underlying problems of unstable incomes, fragile savings, and rising exposure to risk. Affordability is not about access to new financial products. It is about whether households can reliably pay for basics, absorb shocks, and plan for the future without taking on more volatility.
Supporters argue that regulation can turn risky markets into engines of opportunity, especially for communities long excluded from traditional finance. But while regulation may promise harm reduction, it cannot turn speculation into a vehicle for broad-based wealth-building. Congresss focus on conferring legitimacy on crypto reflects a troubling substitution of financial speculation for the harder work of rebuilding the real economy.
Wealth that lasts
The reason becomes clearer when you start with what wealth-building actually requires. Wealth that lasts is built on stability, not volatility. It looks like a paycheck that covers the mortgage, a retirement account that compounds quietly over decades, and savings that remain after a medical bill or a layoff. For most households, its accumulated gradually through retirement savings, pensions, and home equity.
These systems are deeply imperfect, and trust in them has eroded for good reason. While wages rose after the pandemic, the cost of housing, healthcare, and other necessities rose faster, leaving many households feeling less secure. But the failure of existing systems does not make volatility a solution. It makes stability more, not less, important.
Falling short
Measured against those standards, crypto falls short. Crypto markets are organized around speculation rather than value creation. Tokens do not generate cash flows like businesses or bonds; their prices move on hype and momentum rather than economic fundamentals. An economy that already feels precarious does not need more ways for households to absorb financial risk.
That speculative structure tends to reward those who can enter early and exit first. When crypto prices surge, new investors rush inoftn drawn by recent gainswhile larger, better-positioned holders are more likely to sell into the rally. Many ordinary households arrive later, buying at elevated prices amid extreme volatility. Research shows that lower-income investors in particular tend to enter later and at worse price points. Over time, this dynamic functions less as a wealth-building system and more as a wealth transfer from late-arriving households to earlier and more sophisticated participantsreinforcing the same uneven gains that already define todays K-shaped economy.
The limits of regulation
Regulation is often presented as the solution, but not all regulation reduces risk. Strong guardrails can in principle reduce fraud, limit spillovers, and protect the broader financial system. The problem is not regulation itself, but how its being pursued. Much of the current market structure debate is defined less by nonnegotiable safeguards than by pressure to reach a deal quickly, even if key protections are weakened, deferred, or left unresolved.
Even strong regulation has limits. It does not change what crypto is or transform speculative assets into a reliable vehicle for long-term wealth-building. Even a well-regulated casino is still a casino. Rules can make gambling safer; they do not make it a retirement strategy.
That distinction matters beyond individual investors. When volatile assets are granted legitimacy without firm safeguards, risk migrates into retirement systems, financial institutions, and local economies. And when those risks spread, they do not fall evenly. Communities of color are especially exposed to systemic shocks because they have far less generational wealth to fall back on when credit tightens or savings are hit. Losses are harder to absorb and recovery takes longer, even for households that never touch crypto.
At the same time, these communities are often targeted directly by financial marketers and intermediaries promoting high-risk products. We have seen this pattern of predatory inclusion before. In the years leading up to the financial crisis, risky mortgage products were sold to Black and Latino households as pathways to opportunity, only to shift disproportionate risk onto families least able to absorb losses. Today, similar language surrounds crypto. Access is framed as empowerment, but access to volatility is not affordability, and exposure to risk is not safe wealth-building.
Stablecoins are the point where these risks become policy. Congresss recent handling of stablecoins offers a case study in prioritizing crypto expansion over the real economy. Less than two weeks after passing sweeping legislation that cut healthcare, food assistance, and student aid, lawmakers moved quickly to advance stablecoin legislation framed as a consumer protection measure. In practice, it prioritized industry growth and speed over downstream consequences for credit, banking, and communities, leaving key safeguards weakened or unresolved.
Real consequences
Those legislative choices have real economic consequences. If deposits migrate out of banks and into stablecoins, some economists estimate the shift could translate into roughly $250 billion less lending across the economy. If stablecoins function as yield-bearing substitutes for bank deposits, potential credit losses could rise sharply, possibly into the trillions of dollars. Those losses would hit community banks first, along with the small businesses, rural areas, and communities of color that rely on relationship-based lending.
Congress should not confuse legislative movement with economic progress. In an economy already split between those who are gaining ground and those struggling to stay afloat, lawmakers should be clear-eyed about what this legislation actually does. It does not make wealth more accessible or everyday life more affordable. It does not make families safer. It normalizes dangerous financial risk while leaving the real economys wealth-building failures unaddressedat a moment when ordinary Americans can least afford to lose.
A week is a long time in politics. But in Donald Trumps world, even a day can feel like an eon. On Tuesday last week, the United States approved the export of Nvidias H200 GPUsthe second-most advanced computer chips powering the generative AI revolutionto markets that include China.
The decision was granted with caveats. Supplies could be forestalled if the U.S. began running short, for one thing. But it was an approval. Then, 24 hours later, the White House levied a 25% tariff against the same chips at the point theyre imported into the United States.
That matters because, under the rules Trump instigated on Tuesday, all those H200 chips that could be exported to mainland China after being fabricated in Taiwan must first make their way to the United States to be tested before being re-exported to customers. That adds up to a bigger bill for Chinese tech companies wanting to import cutting-edge chips into their country. (To avoid this, China is building up its domestic AI chip development and manufacturing capacity, and recently issued its own counterban on the import and use of H200 chips.) But it also causes chaos for the chipmakers themselves. Because AI hardware is now the backbone of national competitiveness, even small shifts in U.S. trade policy ripple across trilliondollar markets and global supply chains.
The latest chopping and changing is a total overhaul of the normal way of doing business, says Willy Shih, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. Business, like sports, is conducted on a playing field, where there are rules and regulations, and also norms, he says.
These days, with the tariff situation changing almost every day, I tell people to imagine being a coach of a football team, and the rules change every minute, Shih jokes. Thats what it feels like. The impact on markets from such uncertainty can be significant, he adds. When you see people hold up investments waiting for some stability, thats why. Its hard to make long-term investment commitments when the rules could change tomorrow.
Because companies dont know the price theyre going to have to pay to bring goods into their factories, theyre often reluctant to splash the cash on new purchases. A series of chip-adjacent companies has previously complained about lower-than-expected orders because of unpredictable tariff policy. European lithography firm ASML missed expectations in the first quarter of 2025 by more than $1 billion thanks to tariff uncertainty, their CEO said at the time. And markets reflected the chaos of Trumps tariff about-turns this year immediately: Nvidia dropped more than 3% after the 25% levy was introduced, suggesting investors were jittery about the repeated policy pivots.
The issue is that it isnt just buyers who are making those long-term commitments on spending. Chip manufacturers rely on trying to understand future demand in order to build out their production capacitysomething that can be imperilled with quick-moving changes to tariffs implemented by Trump. My general belief is that most, or frankly all, semiconductor management and actual visibility of what is going on with demand is precisely zero, says Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior analyst at Bernstein. They have absolutely no idea. All they see are the orders in front of their face.
Being able to ramp up or ramp down production capacity in such a geopolitical environment makes things even more challenging. And Nvidias H200 chips are particularly tricky to make, meaning that the companyalongside other manufacturers of major chips affected by the Trump tariff changeshas to think carefully about how it plans the buildout of factories and capacities. Less than a month ago, Nvidia was asking its suppliers if they could step up demand to account for H200 demand totalling 185% of the firms current stock levels.
The situation puts more pressure on the people running chip companies, says Srividya Jandhyala, professor of management at ESSEC Business School, and changes the skills they need to navigate the constant changes. As companies find themselves and their products squarely in the midst of geopolitical tensions, the job description of their top managers has changed, he says, pointing to the way that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has had to mutate how he works. His job today is about being an effective corporate diplomat, crisscrossing the world to convince policymakers that his companys products have a place in the vision policymakers have for their countries, Jandhyala says.
But that vision may have to contend with rapidly shifting realities in a world where Donald Trumps whims dictate international trade.
Gold Zone, NBC Sports whip-around coverage of the Olympics, didnt debut with the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. As far back as the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, the network had experimented with the formatusing multiple screens to cover simultaneous live events, a technique that had been popularized since 2005 by RedZone coverage of the NFL. But Paris did mark the first time that Gold Zone had run on NBCUniversals streaming service Peacock, providing real-time coverage of all 39 sports with zero embargoes. Gold Zone will return on Peacock for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games in February.
Molly Solomon: We decided to create a new class of Olympics programming. We wanted to take a format that sports fans were acquainted with, NFL RedZone whip-around coverage, and pitch it to hardcore sports fans to watch the Olympics like that. Wed never given the audience a front-row seat to everything that was happening at once.
Amy Rosenfeld: NBC declared, We are not going to hold anything back. Nothing is embargoed.
Solomon: Ive never felt as much energy in an Olympics control room as I did in Gold Zone.
[Illustrations: Michal Bednarski]
Rosenfeld: That control room was not for the faint of heart.
Solomon: The first day I walked in there, you could see it was a unique product. It was fast-paced, frenetic. I thought it could appeal to younger viewers. It was almost like FOMO: Youre scrolling your social feed, where you feel like youre catching up with what happened that day.
Rosenfeld: A sports producers worst nightmare is when youre trending on Twitter. That is never good news. My sister texted me about two-thirds through day one and said, Hey, #Gold Zone is trending. And I thought, Oh God, Im going to have to go on LinkedIn and get another job and its all over for me and I should have gone to business school.
Cohost Scott Hanson is known for his on-camera exuberance. On day three, while tracking several Americans in different sports who were simultaneously going for gold, he got so excited that he began pounding his desk and lacerated a finger on a stray binder clip.
Hanson: I was bleeding all the way down to my wrist. It got into my dress shirt, splattered my notes. Sometimes I get carried away. The next day, everybody came to set with a Band-Aid on their right pinkie.
Solomon: The secret to the success of Gold Zone is energy. It helps drive the fun.
Hanson: I hope all of us have an injury-free Games in Milan.
On August 5, 11 days into its Paris Olympics coverage, Peacock delivered the moment fans had begun clamoring for, bringing together on-screen for the first time the two famous RedZone hosts: Andrew Siciliano, afternoon host of the Games coverage, and Hanson, who was covering prime time.
Rosenfeld: I didnt realize what cult figures those guys are and that the idea of the two of them kind of passing a baton and cohosting was going to shake the earth.
Hanson: I always thought the majority of the sporting public didnt know there were two RedZones. [DirecTVs RedZone channel, with Siciliano, launched in 2005; NFL Networks RedZone, with Hanson, launched in 2009.]
Siciliano: I knew it would resonate. My phone started blowing up. Not just with texts from friends and family but from people I hadnt heard from in years. The Spider-Man meme was popular, the two Spider- Men pointing at each other.
Conjuring Anchorman, Siciliano tweeted, Ron Burgundy and Wes Mantooth couldnt do it, but Scott and I can. Which of course begs the question: Who is Ron and who is Wes?
Siciliano: Ill let you decide whos Ron and whos Wes.
Hanson: Im not biting on that.
Siciliano: Theres not going to be a fight in the alley, and I dont think anyone is going to kill anyone with a trident.
Hanson: I keep a trident in the closet just in case things get out of control.
Several times during the mens final of the Madrid Open tennis tournament between Casper Ruud and Jack Draper last spring, TV viewers were treated to a remarkable camera perspective. They watched the match from just behind the baseline, effortlessly following the players movement step for step and glimpsing his perfect angle on the ball with every shot.
With no discernible blur or delays, the smoothly flowing live footage had the hyper-real feel of a video game.
[Video: Tennis TV]
I love the footwork by the cameraman, wrote one YouTube commenter.
The company now uses the comment in its investor pitch deck.
In reality, these uncanny tracking shots didnt involve any human camera operators at all. No robotic cameras or drones, either. Instead they were generated, in real time, with a software-based camera system developed by startup Muybridge, based in Oslo.
Founded by Hkon Espeland and Anders Tomren in 2020, Muybridge has spent nearly five years developing real-time computer vision technology that uses software to create a weightless camera, with no moving parts, that captures the speed and motion of live sports in a way that our eyes arent accustomed to. In the coming year, viewers of televised sports will get to see many more of these revelatory perspectivesboth in tennis and beyond.
[Photo: courtesy Muybridge]
Muybridge has shifted the paradigmtwice
“Four hundred years of camera history is ending here, explains Espeland, standing beside a framed black-and-white portrait of motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, the companys namesake, at the companys headquarters in Oslos hip Grünerlkka neighborhood during Oslo Innovation Week last fall.
I see a lot of resemblance [in what were doing] to what he did with sequenced triggers to actually create motion says Espeland. To create his groundbreaking images of a galloping white horse in the 1870s, the English American photographer set up a line of cameras that were triggered by a trip wire as the horse ran past them, creating multiple images that each captured a different phase of the horses stride; by overlapping the images, he made a picture that appeared to move. Its a similar way of thinking, says Espeland. How can you distribute sensors and use that data in a smart way?
Espeland had a long history with automated systems; he started working on them as a 16-year-old apprentice on oil and gas rigs in the North Sea. After getting a masters degree in cybernetics and robotics, he joined a Norwegian company building robotic camera systems for live TV production. While there, he had an epiphany. With computational photography, we could get rid of 300 kilos of metal and robots, he says. It was like removing gravity. Were not covered by any physical limitation.
Instead of using big, expensive cameras that you move to chase whatevers happening on the court or sports field, Muybridge puts hundreds of small, inexpensive video sensors all over the placeand uses software to create smooth tracking shots and conjure any angle on demand.
[Photo: courtesy Muybridge]
In practice, this looks like extra-long speaker bars packed with a row of oversize smartphone camera lenses. These arrays come in two-meter lengths that can be connected to form what amounts to a single continuous camera of virtually any length. We’re going to build future digital stadiums full-360, says Espeland.
And unlike traditional cameras, which can obstruct spectators views at live events, Muybridges clamp unobtrusively to any wall or structure, capturing the action on the court, field, or rink unnoticed. Our biggest issue at the U.S. Open was that the coaches of the athletes sat on it, Espeland says. They didnt realize it was a camera along the ad boards.
Made from commodity electronics components, the sensors themselves are relatively inexpensive. We are lucky that the consumer [electronics] and mobile industry consume so [many] cameras, says Espeland. Theyve taken the costs down. There’s a reason why there are three cameras on an iPhone now. Mobile phone makers have also advanced the capacity of computational photography, keeping the sensors largely unchanged while improving algorithms to create better pictures. Were piggybacking on that.
To meet the demands of live broadcast, Muybridge brings an updated approach to the reconstruction of 3D images. The rest of the world has been throwing more and more compute at the problem, running math on the GPU layer to try to fill in the blanks, explains Espeland. Thats led to something much faster than it was 20 years ago, but it can still take eight minutes to process the images for a replay. Our focus has always been [doing it] in real time, and we wanted it to be able to run on a laptop, in the cloud, or on a mobile phone.
Thats where all of those little cameras come in. We have more pixels, more angles, more overlap, says Espeland. That allows us to have a cleaner mathematical approach to determine exact color, perspective, and all of those things. Everything is backed by pixel datawe dont do any approximation.
[Photo: courtesy Muybridge]
Finding the camera angle
Tennis has been an effective launchpad for the companys technology. When we lowered [the cameras] all the way down to the lowest ad boards, social media just exploded, says Espeland. Muybridge systems were deployed last year at the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, and the U.S. Open. The company has an exclusive partnership with Sony, through its live sports subsidiary Hawk-Eye Innovations, to power all of the ATP Masters tournaments in 2026 (which kick off March 4 with the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California). I guess I can say that we will be seen in nearly every tennis tournament [this] year.
Now the company is targeting additional sports. The key is finding unique perspectives where the technologys value proposition becomes obvious, providing a vantage point that makes the sport better when you watch it at home than in the arena.
For soccerMuybridge recently ran a test that went live on air with Sky Sports in Germanythat could mean behind the goal and even in the goalposts. For Nascar or Formula 1, producers might actually ring the entire track with sensors (though early discussions have focused on capturing critical turns and pit stops). For baseball, viewers could look out on the field from the dugout.
For hockeyMuybridge is currently working with the NHL and Fox Sportscameras could be set in the dasher boards, along the ad boards, or up in the concourse to create a virtual drone that appears to zoom around the rink from above.
Crucially, theres no speed limitation with Muybridge, Espeland says. You can instantly move to wherever you want, and we’re creating all of the millions of pictures in between, just like our eyes do.
[Photo: courtesy Muybridge]
Muybridge inside
Sports, for Muybridge, could just be the start. The company is currently involved in a pilot program that installs its cameras on the ceiling and walls of ambulances, allowing a remote ER doctor with a VR headset to virtually move around a patient to evaluate them.
Security and surveillance represent additional avenues for potential VR expansion, as does an IRL version of the metaverse. “VR headsets never really took off because we always have to visit this virtual world, Espeland says. We jump into a room, you’re an avatar, I’m an avatar, but we want to interact with real people.
News broadcasting and other live studio productions are another developing use case. The CBS Morning Show ran a test of Muybridges technology on its New York set in December 2025.
Moving forward, says Espeland, he has an Intel inside philosophy: We have the core technology, and we look for partners who can represent the next strategic product and bring it into the market.
Chances are, you have an opinion about Palantir.
With any person, company, or concept, the general public really only has space in their head for one characteristic of it, says Palantir alum Marc Frankel, cofounder, board member, and former CEO of Manifest, which creates software and AI bill of materialsthink ingredient labels for critical software. Biden: old. AI: scary. Palantir: secretive.
Frankel worked at Palantir from 2013 to 2018, and whether the one idea in your mind about Palantir is secretive or something else, it likely exists somewhere in this band of public opinion from the past year. Believers: Palantirs a category of one company, according to Everest Group partner Abhishek Singh in a blog post last year, crediting its forward deployed engineering model where it embeds teams with customers to tailor its products to their business.Critics: Conservative comedian Tim Dillon calls it a shadowy military-CIA contractor building a digital prison.Investing bulls: Theyre the best software company, concluded Gil Luria, head of technology research at the financial services company D.A. Davidson, after Palantirs successful Q3 earnings report, where it closed 204 deals worth $1 million or more in those 90 days, 53 of which were worth more than $10 million as companies flock to build on top of Palantir’s Foundry and AI platforms.Investing bears: I just dont know how this company ever grows into its valuation, said Dan Nathan, a former trader turned financial media personality on CNBC and podcasts, referring to Palantirs market cap hovering around $400 billion, or 100 times revenue. As Frankel adds, whatever your one thing may be, it just becomes this trope.Are you thinking about your feelings about Palantir right now? Good.Now its time to add another idea about Palantir, no matter your beliefs. This is a story about what really underpins Palantir’s success. It’s not its products. It’s not CEO Alex Karp or its other high-profile cofounders.
The idea is Palantir: unparalleled talent magnet.
How has Palantir attracted such an astonishing array of talent?
How does the company get so much out of its employees?
How have hundreds of Palantir employees gone on to start their own companies?
What can any company that wants to build this kind of talent density and financial success do to emulate Palantir?
If your company envies Palantirs successfinancial, cultural, or otherwisethe story of its employees turned founders reveals:
how to hire the Palantir way;
how to build a dynamic workplace culture that delivers measurable results;
why traditional corporate structures can be impediments;
the ultimate secret behind the company’s success.
If you admire Palantir’s mission, this Premium story offers:
our exclusive list of 315 former employees turned company builders;
how these founders are advancing and adapting what they learned at Palantir for a new generation of businesses.
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If you care about Palantir as an investment, this story will give you:
a new way of looking at PLTR and what to look for when considering its future prospects;
ideas for both private and public-market investments via the comprehensive list of Palantir alumni-led companies.
If youre not a Palantir fan (to understate how many of its critics feel), this story explains:
the real sources of the companys strength;
exactly how and where the company’s influence is spreading.
Signing up for a mission
As recently as a decade ago, Palantir was largely unknown. It had offices in Silicon Valley and New York, not unlike Google or the other hot tech companies it competed with for talent, but it wasnt on most peoples radar.
So how did it attract people to work for it?
In a word, mission.
Multiple former Palantirians eagerly volunteer how the companys mission made them want to work there. There were different articulations over time, says Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, who worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2020 and then cofounded Chapter, which uses AI to help American seniors find the optimal Medicare plan at the lowest cost. The one that stuck the longest was Palantir solves the worlds most important problems at the worlds most important institutions which is the most amorphous mission but its great. Its exciting.
For any precocious undergrad, that sounds really appealing, says Howard Zuo, cofounder and CEO of Dataland, which builds AI agents for complex operations and customer support. He did summer internships at Palantir in 2015 and 2016 and then worked there full time from 2017 to 2020 before pursuing his first startup.
Ty Wang, CEO of the AI-native healthcare benefits platform Angle Health, came to Palantir after working for various U.S. government agencies thanks to his Stokes Scholarship. (Wang received a full college scholarship as a STEM major in exchange for work inside the Department of Defense and other agencies.) The beauty of Palantirs culture is that everyone had probably different reasons to be there and cared about different kinds of missions, he says, but you had the opportunity to work on the things that you really cared about and have tangible impact on real-world outcomes.
Perhaps no one articulates the breadth of how one could find meaning in Palantir’s mission better than Frankel, who was 27 when he started at Palantir in 2013, coming from working in consulting. It was absolutely make work, he says of his experience. Dig a hole and fill it in.
By contrast, at Palantir, with no background in financial investigations, he could support finding inside trading because of Palantir’s software. With no background in counterintelligence, he could support counterintelligence work. With no background in fraud, he could help teams discovering a quarter-billion dollars worth of mortgage fraud.
ÜI worked on an investigation of a homicide that was a wrong in the world that needed to be made right, Frankel says. I cant do push-ups. Im never going to rappel out of a helicopter. This was a chance for me to feel like SEAL Team Six. This was my superhero cape.
Like every tech company, Palantir offered both salary and stock (though as others tell me, often below market rates because you were signing up for the cause). It really paid me in mission, and that was what was most appealing to me, Frankel says.
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Luba Lesivawho worked at Palantir as its head of investor relations from 2014 to 2016 and is now the sole general partner at Palumni VC, a firm thats focused exclusively on backing Palantir-led startupscurrently has a list of 379 companies that are founded or led by a Palantir alum that are still active and private, she says. Some of them are so nascent, Lesivas tracking them as Ben’s startup and Jennys startup. Given that a Palantir spokesperson last year noted that the 22-year-old company had approximately 4,000 former employees, that means roughly 10% of all former Palantirians have gone on to launch a startup.
How to hire like Palantir
Palantir was not a company I sought out, says Matt Lynch. In 2014, he was a civilian engineer for the Navy, building software, when he decided it might be time for a change. Im just going to work at Google, he thought. Google seems like a great place to come up as a software engineer. Its colorful and friendly and they have free food.
During the process, Palantir also reached out, intrigued by his experience building for the government. I was like, I dont know what your company is, but Im going to be in New York, so Ill come by and check it out, he told them. During his Google interview, he says, it was effectively the meat grinder where they make you sweat for hours, youre grinding on the whiteboard without the interviewers really interacting with you at all.
The next day, he visited Palantir. I remember those interactions much more distinctly than I do the Google ones, he says, because they were so much more personalized.
Lynch didnt get an offer from Google but he did from Palantir, where he stayed until 2021 when he left to cofound Sage, a hardware and software platform to deliver better care in assisted living facilities.
Palantir’s hiring process hinges on providing candidates a real sense of the culture. We had to get [recruits] into an office, says Ross Fubini, founder and managing partner of the venture firm XYZ and a Palantir adviser since 2010. Theyd come in and see, Oh, this is a jokey, joyful technology company, not a boring consulting one. Theyd also see the intensity of the people.
No matter how long itd been since the Palantir alums I interviewed had gone through their interview process, they recalled key details. There were typically five interviews. Everyone is assessed on their technical acumen, but it wasnt dispositive. I remember basically getting punched in the face for 45 minutes, says Manifests Frankel.
I dont think I would be hired by Palantir today or any time in the last 10 years, says Zach Romanow, thinking about how he didn’t have the technical background that has often been required to get hired at Palantir in the last decade. He spent 11 years at the company, from 2012 to 2023, before cofounding Fourth Age, a startup that offers Palantir customers specialized forward-deployed engineering to build complex applications on top of Palantirs platforms. Romanow describes Palantirs hiring ethos at the time as Lets try and hire smart, hardworking people with the right motivations and we will figure out how they can be useful.
Multiple alums share their memories of whats known as a decomp interview. Sages Lynch says, Youd spend the hour talking through how you would effectively design an anti-money laundering system or something like that. Others say their challenge was to optimize the operations of an elevator bank in an office building to minimize the wait during peak usage times or to design a subway system where a seat would always be ready for you.
The whole idea is can you think abstractly about a problem and can you take something that sounds impossible on its face and start to add structure and rigor to it so that you can turn it into bite-sized chunks that you could actually then go execute or test hypotheses, Lynch says. I had never been put in a position to do an interview like that before.
Theres also a behavioral portion of the interview. They asked me pretty intense questions, says August Sun Chen, who applied to work at Palantir in 2021 after graduating from Harvard University and spending a year in consulting. Hes now CEO of Hazel, an AI solution for government procurement. They asked me to tell them the three decisions that made me who I am today.
All of it is designed to find people who have the grit to handle the challenges inherent in the way the company works. One of the things we took from Palantir is insisting on a really rigorous intentionality in the interview process, says John Doyle, who spent nine years at Palantir before cofounding Cape, a privacy-first wireless service. Each interviewer knows which facet of the candidate they’re testing, and they use the same questions to test that facet over time so they can develop a little bit of internal data about what good looks like, the range of outcomes, and also how people perform over time based on how they did on various facets.
As he notes, its a lot of work up front, but you can have a pretty high success rate.
Figure it out: Why Palantir mints entrepreneurial talent
You spend the first week just working on a demo project as part of your onboarding, says Alex Shieh, who dropped out of Brown University in 2025; he had applied to spend a semester at Palantir (one of the companys many unconventional programs to bring in and assess talent) but was hired full time. Then you get thrown into a deployment. The idea is that youll get the hang of it.
Palantirs forward-deployed model for its implementation teams is the defining element of its corporate culture and also the reason its produced an outsize number of company founders. Within the implementation teams, there are two roles: forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), who are the most technically adept; and deployment strategists, who are more the account lead. Or as theyre known internally, deltas and echos. We liked military technology, says Chapters Blumenfeld-Gantz.
Internally we kept inventing [titles], admits XYZs Fubini. Take lawyers. We dont call them lawyers,” he says. Theyre legal ninjs. Your job is not just to do the contract reviewand potentially slow things down. Thats what a lawyer might do. Legal ninjas ask, How can we help you move forward? How can we decode the contract to be successful and win?
Whatever the title, they all have the same goal: Figure out the customers problem and do whatever they have to do to solve it. Everyone who worked at Palantir at a certain phase of the company has a story about a customer needing something and it was pretty wacky, but you just did it, says Jason Hoch, a cofounder of Nominal, which helps hardware engineering teams, people who build such things as nuclear fusion reactors and satellites, test and deliver complex systems faster. While at Palantir, Hoch worked as a product developer, forward-deployed engineer, and a product development lead.
One of the things I really loved about Palantirs engineering culture, its whole company culture, was its bias toward action, says Pablo Sarmiento, CEO of Avandar Labs, which makes software for social enterprises and nonprofits to manage their data and who worked on Palantirs philanthropy team as an FDE from 2013 to 2017. If something is wrong or missing, just fix it.
Employees had been screened, of course, to
be mission-driven;
be intrinsically motivated, or in current tech argot, have high agency;
have what Manifests Frankel calls low ego, high ops tempo, meaning theyre focused on delivering good outcomes for customers;
be learning machines;
solve those decomp exercises, which are a simulacrum of what you do on deployments into government departments and commercial enterprises.
So yes, even new employees, often in their twenties and sometimes in their first real job, are given an insane amount of ownership when they start, as Sages Lynch describes it, and very little problem definition.
But when you hire people with these traits, it would be dumb to micromanage them, he adds, though at Sage he does seek to play a role in thinking through a problem before letting employees take ownership.
Not that theres no support structure for these deployments. There was a really strong culture of collaboration and sharing via the workplace chat systems, lots of public channels where people can freely share problems and challenges without fear of looking bad, says James Ding, CEO of Draftwise, which makes AI software for law firms and in-house legal teams to automate contract drafting, review, and negotiation. Despite Palantirs secretive image, within the organization people are ccd on hundreds of emails a day to stay in the loop, and Ding says he could email the New York office distro list to ask a question and get help as needed.
But on balance, the job is, in sum, to figure it out, even if one worked in product development or a back-office department like finance. They thought that I could come in and help do really unstructured things, says Sage CEO Raj Mehra, who joined the finance team in 2013, after founding a healthcare startup that failed. To be honest with you, that’s all I did at Palantir. I did the most unstructured projects, things that no one thought we needed to do and they just threw me in it.
If you found that exciting, then you would do well. If you wanted someone to check your work or give you a requirements document that you just executed, Palantir was going to be a really frustrating experience for you, says Lynch, Mehras cofounder and Sages CTO.
Or as Hazels Chen says, You either work three months and quit or youre there for years.
Extreme agency and its limits
Lets be frank: In too much of corporate America, This. Does. Not. Happen.
From Hollywood to consulting to finance, businesses are ever more risk averse to empower early-career professionals to take the reins on a big project. Their structures thwart it. Even in Big Tech, a young employee is going to be told what to build and how to do so. You dont have a ton of context about why, says Andy Chen, who had a number of experiences before working for Palantir from 2015 to 2020. You dont get to exercise your creativity as much. (Hes now CTO of Nira Energy, which helps clean energy developers, data centers, and utilities understand where theres available capacity on the electric grid for new projects.)
These kinds of circumscribed career paths can be limiting. When I was in consulting, Manifests Frankel says, somebody who was really trying to be a mentor but who scared the living daylights out of me instead, told me that you start in Excel and you spend the first two years of your career in Excel. If you get good enough at Excel, we move you to PowerPoint. And if you do PowerPoint well enough, you move over to writing proposals in Word. Then if you’re really successful in Word, eventually you move into Outlook. And Outlook is where you manage the client relationships.
He was saying this in all sincerity, Frankel continues. You can track your development and maturity as a consultant through the Microsoft Office suite of products. There was nothing more corrosive to me than that idea that I was going to chart my life [that way].
No worry of anything so stultifying at Palantir. Jack Fischer, CTO of the agentic AI startup Credal and who worked at Palantir from 2017 to 2022, recalls one assignment in a skiffin Washington, D.C.and everything is on fire all the time and nothings working, and it is a continuous, multilayered emergency that just needs nonstop creative problem solving. Those kinds of assignments, says Sages Lynch, were addicting, That’s how I ended up with so much [personal] growth, because I got addicted to that dopamine hit every six months of ‘Oh, here’s a new thing.’
For most of Palantirs history, the reason the company looked like technology-powered consulting, as XYZs Fubini describes it, is because the products were not truly ready for customers. That left it to those forward-deployed engineers and deployment strategists to do the requisite duct taping of the product, says Fourth Ages Romanow.
That process of taking software thats amorphous clay that needs to be shaped for a customer, as Draftwises Ding describes it, does two things:
It creates the opportunity for what Palantir calls repeatability, where one of those custom solutions can be offered to other companies. Ding says that he was the primary developer on a product for a banking client that was resold to seven more banks. These kinds of opportunities are how Palantir has been able to accelerate its growth and profitability in the way it has, increasing revenue 77% year over year and 20% sequentially in Q3 2025. GAAP net income in the quarter hit $476 million, a 40% margin.
Its also created a lot of future founders.
The lessons they carried
In the past year, as Palantir has been on a heater, corporate America has decided it needs to hire its own forward-deployed engineers, with the Financial Times reporting that the FDE role had become the most popular new job title in business.
This is, as you may guess, missing the point. The forward-deployed engineers, which people talk about, people still get that wrong, says XYZs Fubini. If the DNA of the company is already set, he notes, then the FDEs become basically technical support people. No, theyre your core engineers and theyre on-site with customers, theyre bringing cupcakes into the break room. Theyre there to get access to the problem and bring that kowledge back.
Companies want the cachet (and market cap) they associate with Palantirs FDE model, but almost every fiber of their being fights it. Even in Silicon Valley, says Nominals Hoch, there’s this agency that investors give to founders to build something. But very quickly, companiesits almost the state of natureput up a lot of boundaries and rules and processes. He adds, “Falling into the ruts of corporate organizational norms makes it hard to achieve 10x better outcomes.”
What counts are the underlying principles, not titles, and Palantir doesnt have a monopoly on them.
One thing Palantir did really well was what we called seeking truth, says Chapters Blumenfeld-Gantz. Are people actually using your product? What do they think? Are you actually talking to customers and embedded with customers? It’s shocking that most companies don’t actually do this well. They don’t get real feedback. Or, he says, they talk only to people who have had good experiences. They don’t ask, What sucks about my product? What can I do better? [Most companies] are more focused on selling their product to customers than using customers experiences to improve their product. Theres a fear that by continually pressing customers for critical feedback you are highlighting negatives and jeopardizing revenue.
“What Palantir understood, he adds, is that no product is perfect, sophisticated buyers generally prefer honesty to bullshit, and the best long-term strategy for customer retention and product development is learning the actual truth about your product and continually improving it. The first question we always asked was, What do you hate about this? That is a very valuable lesson, and it goes to having a thick skin. You have to be able to handle that.
This probing curiosity to unlock valuable insights also builds confidence, which definitely helps when pursuing a startup. As does cultivating diverse points of view and a willingness to express your opinion. Alex Shieh left Palantir last August after just a few months to cofound the Antifraud Company, which roots out corporations cheating the government using both AI and investigative journalism. Shieh recalls that during his onboarding, [CEO Alex] Karp said he likes to hire conservatives out of the Ivy League [because] they must be independent thinkers [overcoming] strong pressure to conform. It’s also not the case that everybody at Palantir, or even most people at Palantir, are conservative or something. That’s a misconception.
Avandar’s Sarmiento says, Whether you agree or disagree with Palantir, the one thing I always respected about them was that, at least during my timeI really don’t know about right nowthey were very adamant and open about if you disagree with anything, you can speak about it. Palantir always encouraged that ‘question what you are doing’ approach. I grew personally and professionally so much thanks to Palantir that, in a sense, Palantir grew me into the kind of person who would no longer want to work at Palantir.
What could derail Palantirs founder factory?
Ross Fubini founded his venture firm XYZ in 2017 on the thesis that he would invest in Palantir alums who wanted to start companies because of everything hed seen as a Palantir adviser. The whole point was that he anticipated something emerging that no one else had, thanks to his advisory role. You could just see it through these very entrepreneurial, very technical groups, and that was how the whole organization was structured, he says, adding, I was talking about [Palantir] as an authoritarian democracy. There’s no question that Karp, then and now, is in charge of this business.”
Karp sets a clear strategic direction for the company. But the democracy is “leaders and teams within the organization self-organizing around problems and opportunities, Fubini says. There’s something here, go find it.
If Palantir can maintain the equilibrium of that seeming oxymoron (authoritarian democracy), then its power will only grow, as will the network of employees turned founders.
Itd be far too early to suggest that anything threatens this hegemony now, but there are a handful of potential challenges worth watching closely.
The Palantir-diaspora relationship
Last year, Palantir sued two founding teams of its alumni alleging the theft of trade secrets and poaching employees. One source tells me that the company has sent other cease-and-desist letters to founders and reminded former employees of any non-solicitation agreements they signed.
Fubini sees both sides of the issue, given his dual roles. Ive been intimate through multiple of the cease-and-desist events, he says. To every one Ive seen, Palantir believed it was ethically correct.
As yet, neither Fubini nor Luba Lesiva, who backs only Palantir-led companies at Palumni VC, say theyve seen any slowdown in startup formation that would signal a chilling effect. We haven’t seen too much of the stepping on toes, Lesiva says, noting that she has not encountered anyone actively looking to compete with Palantir, but we’re also really open with our companies being like, Hey, don’t be a fool when it comes to making sure they’re abiding by their exit documents and seeking legal advice if necessary.
The current climate, though, does cast some shade on the sentiment many founders shared, best reflected by Angle Health cofounder Anirban Gangopadhyay: They would always say that the only reason you should leave Palantir was to start your own company.
Foundry eats the world
Thanks, then, to the product leverage Palantir has with Foundry and its AI platform (AIP), in theory, everything could be a Palantir project, Fubini acknowledges.
Lesiva says that of the companies shes invested in and that shes tracking, she sees three opportunities.
Pick a niche: Some founders choose to start small, [with] the specific part of a specific problem, she says, citing Tamarack, a company building mill management software for logging companies to generate more revenue. Thats just not going to be a giant focus of Palantir.
Do the opposite: Lesiva reminds me that Palantir doesnt collect data; Palantir handles the data that its customers already have. That creates space in data collection or what Lesiva calls the actioning of the data on the other side.
Partner: The company has programs for earlier-stage startups, including FedStart, to facilitate meeting government compliance standards, and Foundry for Builders, which forges a technology partnership. Blumenfeld-Gantzs Chapter helped start the latter program and was its first customer. Palantir alum-founded Hence and Adyton (see dataset) were also among the first startups to participate in Foundry for Builders.
What now constitutes a startup that wont compete with Palantir yet is something big enough to be worth doing? The answer could affect who leaves Palantir (and why) as well as who stays.
Keeping the talent pipeline wide open
Fubini ponders exactly what it was he saw in the mid-2010s bubbling up at Palantir and why those teams within the company were so successful. One is just a relentless focus on talent, he says. Back then, it was really just were hiring young people, highly tactical out of universities, and that was the goal: Be a premir place. And a lot of attention went to doing this, building that recruiting group. But, he adds, I have to tell you, we were shit atwe’re still largely shit atbringing in senior people because of this structure.
Fubini emphasizes that what’s most needed is Palantir continuing to bring in earlier career and elite technical talent.
As Karp has publicly expressed dismay at campus activism in the past few years, Palantir has opened up new vistas, such as the semester at Palantir program; the Meritocracy Fellowship its introduced for high schoolers; the Neurodivergent Fellowship, which it debuted after Karps restless appearance at last Decembers New York Times Dealbook Summit; and, most recently, the American Tech Fellowship for Veterans. Whether these programs can augment, much less replace, its previous campus recruiting efforts remains an open question.
I ask Fubini what he believes could slow Palantir down. Fundamentally, he says, people just need to come there for the mission. Still. That they believe in something is a very ego-rich thing. Were better, smarter, were going to solve these problems. And some of thats the Americana and some is Im going to solve a really hard problem in oil and gas or insurance that nobody else is doing. The second part is [Palantirs] got to stay on the technology edge. Its got to be a place working on the hardest, best, most interesting problems, with the platform or otherwise.
If youve got one or the other, youre okay, Fubini says. But the perfect intersection is deeply technical and mission driven. Those are the people you want.
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