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Electric bills are climbing almost everywhereand in some states, the increases have been staggering. If you live in the Bay Area, your average utility bill from PG&E went up nearly 70% over the last five years. Between 2024 and 2025, alone, bills grew by double digits everywhere from Utah to Massachusetts to Tennessee. The surge in AI data centers often gets the headlines as the main cause of the increase, but they’re just one of many factors. Heres whats driving soaring utility bills, and what could help fix it. Its not necessarily data centersyet In a Berkeley National Lab report published last year that looked at trends in electric rates from 2019 to 2024, researchers found that states that had the biggest growth in electricity demandfrom customers like data centersactually saw costs go down. Thats because the electricity market isnt just about supply and demand; its expensive to maintain equipment, and if costs can be spread out among more customers, everyone pays less. But thats starting to change as data centers use up the remaining room on the grid and start to need new power plants and other infrastructure. We are seeing utilities run out of that spare capacity, and new investments will need to be made to accommodate for the growth, says Ryan Hledik, a principal at the economics consultancy Brattle Group, which worked on the Berkeley Lab report. An analysis from Bloomberg News with more recent data found a strong correlation between higher energy costs and locations near data centers, with prices in some areas as much as 267% higher than they were five years ago. Still, new data centers dont automatically have to mean higher utility bills for households. A lot of this depends on what rates utilities are charging to those new data center customers, says Hledik. If the utility is charging them a rate that covers all of those incremental costs that theyre imposing on the system, then that protects other customers from rate increases. Microsoft recently announced that it plans to voluntarily cover the cost of any grid infrastructure thats needed when it adds a data center. Several states are considering policies that would require all data centers to pay their own way; some states, like Oregon, have already passed laws. Other new policies under consideration would require data centers to cut their power use when the grid is stressed. “They can connect to the grid, but they’re going to be interruptible,” says Jackson Morris, director for the state power sector at the nonprofit NRDC. “So they’re going to be the ones that get shut off first, not Grandma’s house, and not the hospitals.” If data centers can avoid creating new peaks, they can also help avoid the need to build as much expensive new infrastructure. The aging grid needs updates Data centers arent the only problem. The Berkeley Lab report pointed to outdated infrastructure as a widespread issue. Basically, our entire grid is getting older, says Hledik. Portions of the distribution system are 80 years old at this point. These parts of the grid need to be replaced just to continue to maintain the same level of reliability that we have. At the same time, utilities are struggling to deal with more disasters, from hurricanes to wildfires. As we’ve got more extreme storms, you’ve got more grid infrastructure that’s knocked out of service that has to be replaced. And then you have to harden existing infrastructure, too, says Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at the nonprofit Public Citizen. In California, for example, 40% of the increase in energy bills over the past five years came from wildfire-related costs. Upgrades have been delayed in the past. Now, thanks to inflation, supply chain issues that started in the pandemic, and Trumps tariffs on critical materials like steel, equipment like poles, wires, and towers is expensive to replace. And it’s customers who are footing the bill. One thing that could help somewhat: pushing back on the rate of return that utilities earn as they build new infrastructure. Regulators let utilities bill customers for capital costs, but then they’re also allowed to make a profit for their investors. In California, that rate of return was recently dialed backjust by a tiny amount, 0.3%but that’s going to help slightly shrink home energy costs. We need more power The electric grid needs more access to power not just for data centers and other large customers, but as households begin to shift to heat pumps, induction stoves, and electric cars. Unfortunately, the process of adding power has been painfully slow; it can take five years for a new power plant to get connected to the grid. “When electricity demand is relatively flat as it has been for quite some time in this country, you can paper over the cracks pretty well,” says NRDC’s Morris. “You can afford to have a broken [interconnection] queue. It’s not ideal, but you can kind of limp along. What’s happening now is in the face of exploding load growth on the system, all those cracks are turning into canyons. And all the things that were broken about the system are now coming into stark relief.” Helping speed up the process to get permits would obviously help. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been actively slowing down the process to build new wind or solar plants. “At the very time when you are seeing exploding load growth, [Republicans] just tried to kneecap the cheapest, quickest technologies to get on the grid to meet that demand, which is solar and battery storage,” Morris says. (New gas plants face long delays, with 5-7 year waits to get some parts; newer technologies like small modular reactors still aren’t ready for deployment.) A new analysis from the American Clean Power Association found that in the PJM grid, a region that sprawls from Illinois to Virginia, households could spend as much as an extra $8,500 over the next decadeand have less reliable access to electricityif new renewable power plants don’t keep growing. The Berkeley Lab report notes that states that have access to abundant solar and wind generally didn’t see their electric bills rise as quickly as in other areas. Onthe other hand, state with policies that require them to buy a certain amount of renewableseven at times when the price is higherdid see a slight increase in costs. “That’s to be expectedI think we’re developing those policies realizing that there’s a cost associated with dealing with climate change,” Hledik says. As large-scale infrastructure struggles, there are also other ways to add power more quickly. A technology called dynamic line rating, for example, can make better use of existing power lines, unlocking 40% more capacity from transmission lines. Heimdall Power, a Norwegian company that has been quickly expanding in the U.S., says that theres a huge opportunity for more deployment of its sensors and other technology, which make it safe to let more power flow through existing infrastructure. By making better use of transmission lines, utilities could avoid building as many power plants. Other companies are finding creative ways to build virtual power plants. Base Power, a Texas startup that recently raised $1 billion, owns a fleet of batteries that it installs at homes. Customers can save on electric bills by using the batteries when demand peaks; the system also helps utilities cut costs by easing strain on the grid. Similarly, companies like Renew Home use smart thermostats and other devices to let customers automatically tweak energy use to save money, while helping add new capacity to the grid. It’s far cheaper and faster to promote energy efficiency or shift when customers use energy than to build a new gas plant, and it also helps customers. Data centers could help pay for solutions like this. For example, states could “ask data centers to pay for energy efficiency improvements for low-income customers in the community where they’re developing a data center,” Hledik says. In some cases, large customers like data centers can also build some of their own power. That’s starting to happen in creative ways, like a new data center in Nevada powered by solar panels and used EV batteries. The catch, of course, is getting those projectsand new utility-scale power plantsto focus only on clean energy. As utilities struggle with making the grid resilient to extreme weather from climate change, they need to look at the long-term challenges, Hledik says. “When I look at this from an economist’s perspective, it does provide support for the idea of going out and continuing to invest in clean energy and decarbonization measures, even at a time when federal policy is not necessarily supporting that,” he says. “We have two options. One is to continue invest to invest money in the grid to make it more resilient in those situations. Two, try and address the bigger picture trend that’s driving the underlying cause of those wildfires and other natural disasters.”
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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. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/fc-feature-palantir-infographic-horiz-v5@2x_970213.jpg","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/fc-feature-palantir-infographic-vert-v5@2x.jpg","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"","paddingTop":0,"paddingBottom":0,"paddingLeft":200,"paddingRight":200,"mediaType":"image"}} 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. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"#EFEFEF","paddingTop":40,"paddingBottom":40,"paddingLeft":30,"paddingRight":30,"mediaType":"ceros"}} 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. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});
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E-Commerce
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.
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E-Commerce
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.
Category:
E-Commerce
It’s Friday afternoon, and a potential client just emailed, asking about your services. You scramble to find your pricing. (Where did you save that document?) You dig through old emails for a proposal you sent six months ago that you could adapt. You piece something together and curse your past self for not being more organized. This scenario plays out constantly for solopreneurs. Most chalk it up to the chaos of running a business alone. But constantly scrambling will start to cost you as your business growsand eventually hold you back. Most solopreneurs think that “operations” is something only real companies need: businesses with employees, office managers, and HR departments. But the absence of basic systems wastes your time, causes unnecessary stress, and makes you look amateurish to potential clients. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-mobile-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Work Better\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn\u0027t suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.workbetter.media\/\u0022\u003Eworkbetter.media\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457605,"imageMobileId":91457608,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} 3 systems that make a difference You don’t need the same complex software or complicated workflows that teams rely on. But you do need systems and processes for the core functions of your business. 1. Sales and pipeline management If you dont have a way to track potential clients or deals, youre potentially losing money. You need a system to store contact names and email addresses, along with information about the person/company and why theyre interested in working with you. To avoid feeling frantic when you put together a proposal, make a template (and a few variations, if you have different bundles of services). I have three PDFs stored on my computer to easily retrieve whenever needed. Or if you offer more complex packages, software can make it easy for you to drag-and-drop different options into a proposal. You also need a way to track follow-ups. Potential clients say theyll get back to you within a week, and they dont. You need to know when to email againeven following up on deals that may have gone cold months before. 2. Project templates Theres no reason to reinvent the wheel with every project. Project templates might include Google or Word docs you use repeatedly, an onboarding questionnaire, or a project management tool with a list of specific tasks. Every one of my clients has the exact same set of folders in my Google Drive, and the same setup in my project management tool. Even though each project is slightly different, I know, at a glance, what I need to work on and when its due. 3. Income and expense tracking Lastly, you need a way to keep track of your income and expenses. You dont want to be reconstructing a years worth of finances come tax time in April. You should know how much each client paid you, and how much you spend on different categories of expenses like software, insurance, and marketing. In addition to tracking, your system should include a way to invoice clients and make it easy for them to pay in their preferred method. Payment friction can be a huge headache for solopreneurs (e.g., the client wants to pay via credit card, but you dont have a way of processing credit cards). Payment-processing tools like Stripe or QuickBooks can handle multiple payment methods for you. They can also send automatic payment reminders to help you stay on top of outstanding invoices. Build systems earlybefore you need them When you don’t have basic operational infrastructure, you’re constantly rebuilding the parts of your business. Every proposal, every client interaction, and every project takes more time than it should. In addition to your time, the other cost is mental load. Without established systems, you’re making dozens of mini-decisions throughout the day. Where do I save this file? How do I structure this kickoff call? How can I collect project feedback? Each decision requires some of your energy that could be better spent in your business. When you’re figuring things out as you go, it shows up in delayed responses, inconsistent communication, and forgotten details. Its better to build systems earlybefore you feel like you need them. Its much easier to build when your workload feels manageable than when youre drowning. Operations will multiply your effectiveness. Every template you create will get reused dozens of times. Every workflow you document makes future decisions easier. Well-run solo businesses have invested time in systems that make smooth possible. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-mobile-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Work Better\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn\u0027t suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.workbetter.media\/\u0022\u003Eworkbetter.media\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457605,"imageMobileId":91457608,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce