How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)

47:54You're describing kind of the spectrum of people what people describe as forward deployed engineers if they were to try to do this What do you think they need a most to correctly for it to be successful? The key things that made our model work were one um, they were actually Real engineers who could build product themselves that's a very big difference right I think a lot of the time companies will say this person's a forward deployed engineer But actually then mostly that to be more of a solutions architect or they're not necessarily building anything to know though they're just listening and Trying to find a way of deploying the existing product that are not Empowered to do new product and so the really radical thing palinco said was no like go in and If you need a completely new product to do this you can go ahead and build it And and I think that's really the key difference the other stuff You know, I've already mentioned the value of being in person and I think building close Personal bonds with your customers.

48:51I do think the better founders do this anyway, right? Like they're on texting terms with That buyers they become friends with them outside of work and they see them as humans for their trying to help I think that's very motivating gaining a really deep understanding of the business that your Your customers are in and knowing how those dynamics work. So you know, a simple example might be You know like say hospitals in America, right? Like I think if you if you go into it It's very counterintuitive to think of a hospital as a business People think of it as you know, it's it's a place where you get healthcare right but actually like If you kind of view it the way a CEO or a CMO views it It's going to look very very different to you as a very simple example Sorry, this is a little bit dark, but you know how kind of restaurants Want to turn over tables as fast as possible in order to kind of maximize their revenue for the day Hospitals actually kind of want to do the same patience, right?

49:46They would like to treat you and then get you out of a bed so they can free up the bed to get a new person in there And so that's not super intuitive unless you kind of think hard about how the revenue for that hospital works But then once you think about it You're like oh this has a bunch of problems associated with it, right? And you start to go in really interesting directions So there's just like the words and memes and take you a long way working. Yes, and understanding it Okay, so essentially things you want to get right make sure it's in person Make sure the person is technical make sure they have a deep understanding of the business and the problems they're having The technical piece is interesting with AI tools these days making everyone technical in some sense You could argue this is going to become more common people Can just you know open up cursor windsurf and just start adding features I think this is a really interesting thesis you've just hit on and I expect to see a lot more startups that take advantage of that insight Basically makes for deploying engineers cheaper exactly What is the current state of forward deploy engineers at PoundTair?

50:45How much is the change of the past few years like if you join now or is this still something you can do? Yeah, of course, I mean, I should I should obviously emphasize that one I left the company in 2023 And so this is just my personal view and it speaks to them. I think that You know if you think about it right the the thing that one of the kind of metrics that the company had to measure its own success was Essentially revenue per Engineer right and so the more kind of quote unquote product leverage you had the higher that number was So if you had to throw a lot of people at every you marginal problem Then you weren't doing so well at that because you're basically building a new thing every single time and you are in a factor consulting business If on the other hand every time you encounter a new customer the product turns out to be kind of relevant to them Then then great and so this product leverage metric was actually a very unique Thing and kind of a north star for the company for the whole time I was there If you reason that out what that means is that in the early stage of the company you will have Hey customer and then you might have five to ten Engineers working at that customer right and so over time you want that ratio So you want it to be you know each customer because the product is so powerful Maybe AI coding's got a lot better each customer you only need two people And then maybe you actually get to a point where you can't have one person looking after multiple customers And I think that's how the job has changed is now it's a little bit more about You have multiple customers maybe you're spending less like deep time with each individual one of them But it's a lot clearer what problem you're solving across multiple customers and you have more of a kind of defined offering And so I do think that has been a bit of a change but The company remains a very interesting and dynamic place to be like in some sense the stories early starting right because One one lens through which you can view this company is they spent 20 years basically building The mother of all data foundations for every important institution world and Guess what's very valuable now that AI models are out is proprietary data that isn't public Suddenly you have access to that and you are in a very privileged position to Help your customers deploy AI in a way that makes them successful and that solves real business problems That is essentially the bull thesis for this company and why it's probably gonna you know Hundred X again, right?

53:06And so it's still a really interesting time to join but I do think the the kind of nature of the Ratio of people to customer for example is one big difference now Not investment advice, but it might 100x That's uh, I totally understand why that might happen. So let's talk about the data piece You said that this might this was one of the secrets of balance your success. There's early insight into the the power of ingesting data cleaning data being able to Analyze and work with it What what i'm working share there just like what they figured out about why this is so valuable white so hard and how they achieved it I think it's just very obvious as soon as you step into a corporation and spend a couple of days there right as you're like all right Like let's suppose your job is to Increase sales okay, so the first thing you want to do is get a clip picture of what's going on all right So like let me go and query the sales database.

53:55Oh wait, where is the sales database? I can't get access to this Okay, I need to file an access ticket all right now. I have to wait one week right it's so every everywhere we went This was the big paint point was we have to wait six a weeks just to get data access and then when you do get data access It's not like the data isn't easily queryable format you actually really have to know what you're doing in order to get the right Metrics out and so on and so forth and so it turned out like okay It's this iceberg analogy where the actual analysis is Actually, just the tip of the iceberg is kind of the last five or 10 percent and the 95 percent before that is I am gaining access to the data.

54:35I am cleaning the data I'm joining the data and normalizing it putting it all the same format and so Once once we spotted that then it's like okay. There's actually a lot of product to be built there just to make that process easier This is one way I think pound it does people don't think of Palantir is this Place where innovative new products and UX ideas come out But I actually think it's been one of the most generative companies for that specifically in the last 20 years It's just that most of that didn't see the light of day and so people don't know but if you look at the The product primitives that they Developed in order to make the things I just mentioned a lot easier.

55:13They're actually really valuable and interesting and could probably form the base of first of Independent companies themselves and so yeah like It just took like every single step of that process Became much much easier once there was a software solution around it right? So if you talk about data industry and there's essentially a kind of universal data adaptor that's part of foundry It can read anything so JDBC s3 buckets whatever you want and it can pull that it can it allows you to kind of look into the data Maybe preview the first 20 rows and then it allows you when you're ready to set up a schedule and just pull it in on some cadence That process alone for an engineer it's like used to take a long time especially pre -vibe coding and and managing all those Crown jobs and doing the son of Linux VM somewhere inside the customers Tannin was a huge pain, right?

56:04And so you productize that piece then it's like okay once you have the data It's like how do you actually join it? What if your non -technical is there like a is there a way for a non -technical usage to be able to Join tables and see what the result is and so there's all these like very fascinating Business problems that because I think the access was very difficult to get and people hadn't really solved before and so There was a lot of white space to do some product innovation So now I would say foundry is definitely the best data platform in the world just because it has all these different Applications within it that solve these discrete parts and it's just it came out of this years of painful experience Watching people have to Clean data and join it and figure out what this table name meant and so on and so forth You shared in your post this kind of a vocative story of some people jobs is just kind of gatekeep the data Like they're there to help you to give you access to this very valuable data within the organization And how hard it is to get like that was a lot of this work is just breaking through those political Battles of like okay, we need this data for the good of the company and took a lot of work I guess anything there you want to add it is Yeah, I mean, it's it's a it's a huge pain and there are good reasons for it right like it's not like folks and malicious here It's it's if you're IT or if you're an infosite type person then your goal is to prevent data breaches and to make sure that sensitive information Doesn't spread too wide and so what's the easiest way to do that is to lock with data down You know, basically be a gatekeeper for access, right?

57:34I think where I got a little bit more interesting was Where your skills are valuable and depend on you think the gatekeeper so what I mean by that is like let's say I'm the guy who I'm the only guy who understands the The way the sales calculation pipeline works, right? And I write this equal for it all the requests from business SME has come to me I have a big queue of them it takes me weeks to get through this queue. I have a great job. I have great job security Um and people depend on me right and so now along comes this company and they're like hey, actually We want to make sales data available to everyone and we want to make a point and click suddenly you're like hey like hang on Uh, what am I going to do right and so that's where I think there was a lot of Difficulty and and I always say like you know people are like what a pountess competitors I don't think it's the ones you think of necessarily pountess biggest competitor is a company rolling its own solution Right and so the biggest difference would just be a CSE a CIO saying I'm going to build my own data infrastructure.

58:37I'm going to own it It's going to be on top of one of the hyperscalers and we're all just going to do our own analytics ourselves And what we came along with is just quite disruptive to this model was saying no actually All your data is going to get ingested into this one platform and everybody new company is going to use it The tradeoff is it's going to be really really easy for everyone to do things But as you can imagine some people weren't a huge part of that model Feels like Glean is the biggest competitors to balance here after I hear this You know about that company. I think yeah Glean is Glean looks amazing from the outside I mean, you know, so many so many differences there.

59:11I can totally see why you would stay this But clearly a different use case, but uh, it feels like the reason they've been successful is they figured out a lot of this data ingestion permissions Search stuff and it would be better that way Interesting. Okay, I want to talk about hiring you talked a bit about this you're starting a company again What are some of the kind of the key lessons you've learned from your time and balance here when you are hiring people for your company I don't know if you're actually hiring people yet. Maybe when you may start hiring. Yeah, we have We have six people at the moment.

59:45So it's a really recently small team You know, I think With hiring it's funny man like there's so much hiring advice on light and you read it and you're like yeah This is super obvious and then when you live it you're suddenly like This is why people say this right so a few simple examples are I think the thing that is really hard to find is somebody who really really has A lot about doing the thing and Will go that kind of extra 20 % like I think I think when you hire out of especially not to pick on them But I think if you hire out of fan and great. It's like people People want like a 400k a job.

1:00:22They would like to work a certain number of hours They would like to ship some code and they go home like that's basically the bottle that you get accustomed to Even if you don't intend to when you work at a big company And so if you hire out of that for a really small startup it can be really challenging because A lot of your success as a startup depends on each individual person being like no I'm really gonna I'm gonna work this evening if that's what it takes to get this thing working and I'm not just gonna check My boxes. I'm actually gonna look towards what is the real outcome that this business is trying to achieve and Everything I'm saying is feels kind of obvious But when you actually feel that difference between somebody who's just checking the boxes and somebody who's kind of an animal in this way Like they'll actually go and pursue and accomplish the end outcome that that difference is very very big and it matters so much for your first 20 people Right and there's no science to finding these people It's not like you can just put like somebody who cares about outcomes in your JD and then suddenly you'll get all these people applying And so then it's like okay, well How do you screen for that and how do you find these types of people and so That's where it gets really interesting.

1:01:26I think that's where the mission alignment comes in and so you do have to find people to For what you're doing Have this extra Maybe private reason to care about it a little bit more than the average person, right? So I think for Palinso they did hire a lot of Fets for example, or maybe people who were a little bit more patriotic or pro -America than the average employee and that those people had an extra reason to join palinso and an extra reason to try that little bit harder And so you know what I'm doing is a little bit more in the kind of medical and health space and so I think people who Have themselves had experiences with this system Have maybe had relatives, you know go through difficult experiences with things like cancer or whatever it is They're just that extra bit motivated to really care about the thing you're trying to do and then work that little bit harder And so I think aggressively filtering early on to things like mission fit How much are you cared about stuff in the past and what's an example?

1:02:28You know you ask questions like what's the hardest you've ever worked to get something done and why right and that like Does differentiate a lot of people a lot of people don't actually have a great answer to that so I would say that's been A really big learning because it's less about testing for the right skills. Yes, that's important too It's much more about just like who has that extra 20 % That is really interesting as you just said it's what everything you've shared is essentially around motivation and drive and passion and kind of just like commitment to working on this Intently and you almost like let's almost like a second thought of just like also.

1:03:01They're like really smart and skilled at stuff Like it feels like that's just table stakes and this is actually what makes the difference in your experience Yeah, I totally agree and I think it's different for every business right so I think if you're in a space like B2B SaaS where Maybe it's a little harder to tell the story of like oh, this is so mission critical like whatever There are other ways of getting at this thing right so for example I know I know a lot of people again. It's a little played out now, but um I know a lot of people who for sales teams they will express that you go for people who are professional athletes or played sports in college right and it's like okay, what does that test for it's like you are very very disciplined You're very very goals and numbers oriented and you're willing to just work really really hard And so there's all these kind of lateral ways of getting at these Quiles who said I think you just have to be kind of intentional about as As a founder like as a personal example.

1:03:49I'm a runner and so I actually love meeting fellow runners And I always like to I kind of jump like oh maybe I'll go higher from like run clubs or something like that But it's just like same with you know, I play a lot of chess like I love I love meeting chess players I'm not necessarily saying that's the right kind of higher for me But I think having this This thing of here are some traits that seem uncorrelated but which actually give you Good signal to this person's personality. Those are actually really important the last thing I'll say just as a funny illustration of that concept is Uh, I think Max left in tell us the story of somebody interviewing at PayPal early on and he passed all the Interviews and then it just got to the final round and he said something about liking to shoot Like he liked to play basketball and they were like instant reject And it was just like The bite here was just like if you're not like a mega you know Linux Hardcore computer person that we don't want you here You and if you actually passed all the tests just because you like to shoot the hoops now whether that was the right call or the wrong call I don't know but That's an example over when I talking about I think that's like a great echo back like people hearing this Maybe like what the hell how that's like how like how dare they do that But this is exactly what you said at the beginning of our conversation that If you're trying like an approach to building a generational business is to be very Clear about who this is not for and that's okay.

1:05:11It's your company Not everyone needs to work there and it's almost saving them time because they may they might realize this isn't for me This isn't the people I want to be around necessarily So I think it's important to see that side of it is like you it's your business It's important to be clear about who is a good fit for the company and who's not Speaking that I'll let's talk about product management for a bit. I know Palantir PMs are like not very not traditional product managers Uh, what what is like did I imagine people have the title product manager a Palantir? Okay, so if so what As far as you understand how what's the difference between say a PM at Palantir versus a traditional PM say at a thing company Palantir was As far as I remember quite anti -PF for a while and eventually we did need them because we just got more serious about Classic story classic story classic Companies the big difference or one big difference I noticed was that they were extremely Careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward the point engineers You basically could not become a PM any other way so As an example the When I mentioned earlier the the thing that we built for the plain factory The person who was managing that deployment she later became the PM for ontology And it was just because she'd kind of proven her metal in the field and you know the reason for that's pretty simple right It's going to be someone who Understand who how customers work has that customer ability and it's going to be someone who Has this drive to get things done because that's what be decided for I think the failure mode that they were very very Of us to in in traditional pms was this kind of Google docs syndrome of like okay.

1:06:54I'm gonna write my Product requirement documents and I'm gonna kind of manage it in this like very sort of sane rational way I think So the company was really rigorous about that and so basically pms were almost always Internal promotions and they always came from From BD it was not like I'm not aware of a single case where we took somebody who was a PM at a place like Google Which produces many excellent pms and hide them successfully into balance. They're just a very different vibe So I think that was one thing, you know This is this is maybe more of a classic PM trait right, but you just had to be either an engineer yourself or extremely good at working with engineers And the ones I saw who succeeded the most were just best friends with their engineering team right and the team would always just be like one You know it was called a group of PM and then it would be a lot of very very good engineers and basically the success Ophelia mode was just like do the engineers like and thrust you and I mentioned before like pounds It has very kind of almost disagreeable personalities and so If you didn't gain the trust of engineering team pretty fast you didn't last very long I think we've cracked the problem the the question of why are pounds your PM so successful First of all the hiring bar is just like basically hiring for leaders in a lot of different ways to This like at an afforge for founders where they're working with a company solving a real problem building a real product that makes money And then those are the people that become the pms that balance here and then they go on to leave and that's why 30 % of them end up starting companies I'm surprised it's not higher Or become first PMs that other companies are heads of product Yeah, absolutely.

1:08:29I mean, it's it's crazy. I was part of a pretty small team within pounder I think it was 20 to 25 people and I joined and I think at least six of them now all Either in unicorn or just pre -unicorn founders from from that like group of 25 people Which is actually a crazy ratio and then a bunch more of become founders recently at an earlier stage So yeah, there's all these little pockets of excellence and It's been really interesting to see I think the other thing that's driving that a little bit is you know when you leave It's just such an interesting company to work at that You know, I think the retention numbers are actually very high for that company like people would often stay A lot longer than maybe the average average valley tenure and um, so when you left it was really this decision of just like Something very specific is pulling you and you want to kind of play the next level of the game And so it was very unusual for someone to leave and then join maybe a more traditional tech company It's sort of like you're either gonna go become a founder or Why would you leave when there's so many interesting different things to work on here?

1:09:31And I know that sounds a little culty, but that's just that's what everyone thinks And you could totally see that a lot of people that left there being beef never found something more Yeah, it's just hard especially if you're early There's a stat that I didn't share that I think is really interesting And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from I think you may be shared in this in your post that There's more YC X -palentiary founders than there are X -Google founders In spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size Yeah, yeah Let's talk about the the moral question of Palantir a lot of people Probably seeing the title of this episode hearing this or will not be excited about Palantir being Highlighted and promoted a lot of people kind of disagree with what Palantir's doing You know builds products that kill people in some ways they work with governments.

1:10:20They don't agree with I know you wrote a really insightful Way of of how you approach this question when you decided to work at Palantir and how you see people tackle with this You just talk about the kind of the framework that you landed on how you thought about this yourself Yeah, it's a really interesting topic. It's definitely very nuanced I think what I was trying to say in that post was a couple of things one was that there was a lot of upside that right? So you know, I worked on the US Co -Peterspans I've friends who You know worked on Operation Warp Speed and you know These are all things that I think saved a lot of lives and I was pretty focused while I was working at an age Cancer research and so to me these were just obviously good things and you couldn't do them anywhere else and so that was a load reasons to say The the question I had in that post was well, okay There are definitely going to be other pieces of this that people object to right so during the kind of 2016 to 2020 era It became a pretty common thing to go into work in New York and you'd have people protesting outside your office or you know Doing all kinds of things and so There was this question of well is this okay And I think the point I was trying to make was I don't think that it's rather disengagement is the correct answer And I think it's more recognized now, but especially then it went a bit too far right so The famous example here is Google kind of disengaging with a Pentagon AI project just because some people felt that working with a Pentagon was itself morally bad I think that's way to sort of the left of what the median American would say I think the median Americans say it's fine to work on defense stuff You know within within reason and assuming you're doing largely good things And so There was just this kind of almost arbitrage there at some point of just like hang on like it's not like working on defenses inherently evil It's actually a pretty interesting thing and then there's this question of well Would you rather be in the room and making this that sort of not right?

1:12:22And so And struggling with how much I can share him but like as a simple example If you're doing even a workflow, which I think many people would not be super comfortable with like let's say you're targeting somebody for some kind of strike If you compare what the way it's done now to maybe the way it was done in 2010 It's good to be a lot more targeted. It's gonna be a lot more accurate And so you've actually improved that process and reduced the chance of error Maybe you should feel good about that right now that is a bullet many people are not willing to buy I didn't work on the defense side of the company myself, but I think I think you have to be okay with These kinds of great zones and and actually actively thinking about what you are doing and That doesn't mean that it's always the right thing to do to work on a defense company, right?

1:13:09Maybe we go into a very dark future We start being the bad guys in some ways and then it's probably not a great idea to work on a defense company, right? So it's a shifting landscape But I think I kind of felt pretty strongly that a lot of people in tech Just didn't want to think about this at all right, so like you have engineers now who are working on optimizing short form videos for higher engagement and You sort of want to say to them like hey are you thinking about what this is doing to the brains of young children or Have you seen you know and eleven year old kind of scrolling something for five hours?

1:13:46And do you think this is a good thing? I think people don't want to think about this stuff too much I'm not saying I know the answer, but there was almost this refusal to look at what Tech was doing From a political lens for a very long time. It was just like hey Let us play with our toys. Let us sit in Manlo Park and like don't bother us and we're just gonna build cool stuff and watch it and 2025 we're in a very very different state of the world, right? You know tech is involved in politics now and Politics basically came to tech right there's this famous image of Mark Zuckerberg sitting in Congress and you kind of looks very pale and He's like why why if they dragged me in here again, right?

1:14:25But I think I think tech went through this journey of Oh, we're suddenly becoming important now. Oh, we're really really important now Oh, we better stop playing this game of politics and so I think what I'm saying now is a lot more consensus that it was 10 years ago, but at the time the feeling was just like look what we are doing is political So you better engage with that I think when this became really real for a lot of people is with the crane war Like the government's running out of certain vehicles and ammunition We're just like not able to produce it and then we're like oh thank god for company like androel and all these other Tech companies that are actually ahead and keeping us ahead like I think the only reason the US is ahead of the Of China and the space race is because space x just was one company that just was been doing this for a long time So I think a lot of people have kind of realized okay.

1:15:11Maybe maybe we need these things Right yeah, and I would make this argument as well as like people are like well, you know How can you feel good about working in defense? And it's like well you're not gonna feel great if China debates I won't actually you're not gonna I think you're probably also not gonna like that outcome so We do just live in this world where you do need to build up deterrence to these things and they better be good So to me it didn't feel That difficult of a question. I think when you zoom into particular things They can be very difficult questions and there have been a bunch of those in the last book is but yeah, again disengagement isn't the answer Yeah, and again, it's not for everyone.

1:15:48I think that's an important kind of theme through this conversation is some companies like to build sometimes to build a generational really successful companies to you need to turn some people off because That's what brings in the best talent oftentimes Okay, just a few more questions Kind of like stepping back a little bit You're building a company again. What are what are kind of like a few core pieces of advice that you're bringing to your new startup that will inform how you build this company from your experience of balance here We talked about a lot of stuff Is there anything? I don't know if there are like three things that you think are like I'm definitely gonna do these things this way because it worked really well a balance here One thing is probably just really fast iteration cycles so placing a lot of bets and then Being really rigorous about just going through that cycle very soon I have this I just thought of principles of one of the things on there is basically saying like your peace successes Goes up the wall bets you make and it's sort of a function of how many bets you make the probability of success Those in the job that's right and so one easy way to almost guarantee that you'll hit something is just to make a lot of bets And then just kind of like cycle through them very quickly now obviously this is Difficult this often this question of well.

1:17:04It's just bet actually failing or like are we quitting too soon kind of thing But it's that's kind of one principle I take is just Test this thing very early, you know like the classic white feed white thing is just When you take something to a customer ask them to pay you a lot of money if they know then Find a new problem like don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does because you don't have that kind of time I do think the importance of just like having a really tight distinctive internal culture and Building a strong feeling of trust within a team is really important and and kind of like you mentioned with Airbnb And you know people people definitely felt there's a pound there.

1:17:48There was this Feeling of like while you work there you must be good. I trust you and all of that and I think it's so important to Create that and you kind of know that feeling. That's what like people ask me, you know Should I go work at place? I asked or should I just go be a founder straight away? I don't know the answer for everyone But I will say one of the benefits of working at a place like that is you just have all these Internal benchmarks now for okay. This is what this should feel like and if it doesn't feel like that We're off and I can't imagine not having those benchmarks and just kind of having to Figure it out.

1:18:21See, I think that think too is just like distinctive internal strong Team culture Um, and then I think I think for me think three is just like working with a really messy Um part of the real world So you know, I kind of joke when I left like uh I'm excited to just do pure software. I'm excited to I don't know. I want to build an IDE or something and just like Not have a support email you and all of that but It turned out like my look my comparative advantage in a lot of ways was You know the networks I built and the experience I'd had and engaging with the messy parts of the world and They do need technology a lot right like there is this There's this horrifying thought I have sometimes of just like maybe we'll get a ti in the next two years And you know the health care sector will still be broken and it will still be impossible to afford rent in New York City and build houses and all these things Uh, and that may well become true And so I think it's important to engage with those parts of the world too even though they're really really Challenging and I think the really nice thing about LLM says that actually Uh, there's so many work for us now that are accessible to you as a tech founder and people are somehow more Open to working with tech companies and they ever were before like selling into this sectors of the economy in 2015 Incredibly hard.

1:19:38I think now post the chat gpt moment I mean People are willing to give cancers to small startups that they weren't willing to do previously As you mentioned earlier the cost of doing things like forward deployed engineering is fallen by maybe five to tenx now at least Um, and so there's a lot of new possibilities and I'm excited to engage with the best Wow, that is some alpha right there that you're finding that some of these very large organizations are more open to working with startups because you know Classically investors don't invest in companies that are going after Healthcare companies and governments and things like that.

1:20:14So it is really interesting actually to hear Uh, I'm gonna You're back the tips you just shared and there's actually like a secondary tip that I think is the more interesting piece So the first thing you're taking away is iterate quickly But I love your tip of ask for lots of money quickly early to see if it's an actual idea that people will pay lots of money for and if not move on I'd love that The other is uh build a very distinct culture But the piece you share there that I love even more is this idea of knowing what a high bar looks like Knowing what awesome a plus people look like And you need to work at a company like Palantir to actually see that So they'd vice there.

1:20:52I feel as they're just like work at a company that is amazing first with the best talent To understand what that should look like plus you build a network of those folks So I think that's really interesting and then the other pieces Uh, I've advised you're pulling away. It's worked out like really hard messy problems because that's where the biggest opportunities are and it's sounding like this is the easiest time to actually do that Amazing. Okay, I'm gonna take us to a recurring theme on this podcast called AI corner And what we do in AI corners uh is we share some way that you and this is you sharing some way that you've found AI to be useful in your day Did did did a day either in life or in work Is there any way you found some tool in a some AI tool useful that uh you can share Oh my gosh there are so many um I'll give you a few examples So I use whisper flow quite a bit so this is the um talk to your Keyboard and it will transcribe for you app very good It's just great when you're iterating very quickly with an alarm and you sometimes you have to do these paragraph long prompt It's just easier to speak into the right so whisper flow I like just if the double done in that there's like is like you press a button and you start talking and it's writing out what you're saying I cool and like there have been these products for a long time dragon dictate on all these guys Is the difference now these are just like very very good now at actually transcribing what you're saying I think that's right.

1:22:18Yeah, the you know, these these are really good model and certainly rarely makes mistakes even when I think it's quite challenging And then yeah, they you accidentally just nailed so that's a really good one I love Claude code for developing even though I have my complaints about it There's something just very addictive about just telling it what to do and it can up It's basically something that you run within the terminal of your computer And so you just type Claude it over the Claude interface. It's very cute. It's very beautifully designed and You just tell it what to do and actually operate some of the file system directly So if you're like hey create a bunch of these files that will just do it and you don't need to go and mock around Inside finding yourself and then it'll do these really complicated pull requests and it'll basically execute them quite well So to me, this is like a very exciting kind of previewed AI agents That's what I was gonna ask.

1:23:04So this is essentially like a AI agent engineer I didn't know that's what Claude did very cool It's sort of a guided agent, but yeah, it is really sweet And then yeah, I'm just enjoying You know every week there's like a new wonderful. Do you think to play with last seven days? I've been testing Gemini Pro 2 .5 excellent model I don't love Google's UX sometimes, but I was playing with that and I use LLNs every day for all kinds of things The other day I was doing taxes that I needed to classify a bunch of Transactions based on some metadata and so I just wrote a script. I'll really quickly edit that so I love just like the smile on your faces you're describing all these AI tools I think a lot of people are just like I'll always shit.

1:23:50I'm just overwhelmed with all the things I need to be paying attention to all these things in mirror. All these tools I gotta try And I love just this vibe of just like this is incredible and so fun We need more of that Okay, I'm gonna take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. You're gonna get a double whammy contrarian corner So here's the question what's something that you believe that most other people don't? I think going to college is great I think this is a somewhat contrarian view within tag. Maybe not in the broader economy But you know, I often see people saying just like oh if you can just drop out when you're 18 And just start working why would you get a college?

1:24:25And I think this is completely wrong But maybe it's good advice for 5 % of the population who probably would have been teal fellows anyway, but college is one of the few times when you can Just make really really deep friendships you are in You know typically a nice campus If you're in North America you you get to spend all of your time just thinking and writing papers and reading books and hanging out with your friends And it's actually very precious and it's very hard to find that kind of time after you turn 21 Because you know, you got to carry your own work I'm gonna do all this stuff even you know, let's say you make a bunch of money.

1:25:00You take a career break It's still like all your friends are working and There's you always feel like there's a there's a ticking time or a top of your head or something Just taking those three or four years at the very beginning and Going really deep on lots of different Intellectual topics and being able to try different things and discover more like yourself I'm a big college fan. I can't comment on the ROI or whatever I personally think the ROI is great because the fees are kind of high in the US But that's probably my kind of contrarian within tech views don't drop out of college unless you have a really good reason It's so funny that that is contrarian and it does sound contrarian I had a great time in college here here Okay, is there anything else in the bill that you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round No, I think it's just it's it's a really exciting time in the world, right?

1:25:51You know, I think I can be exhausting, but it does really just open up the possibility of building about a world in all these ways and so I think just Reassess what you're doing Every couple of months and make sure that it's Aligned with Where I think a is Going and make sure that you are Working on something that you feel has very high potential if it succeeds I think that's more of all in than ever now just because the amount of leverage we have for technology is at the highest point in history Let me double click on that real quick So four people that want to do what you're describing What helps you understand where a is heading and just kind of like a lying with it?

1:26:31Is there like places of information and news you find useful? Is it just play with it kind of thing? What what would you recommend? This is the big question I use X a lot to keep on top of AI So I just recommend finding a good Twitter list and maybe following people off of that. There's some good use that as I really like late in space I know whose X handle it's swix SWX. I can't remember his actual name, but that one is very good and it's it's pretty technical I would recommend trying to stick to the more technical news that is possible Like I think there's a lot of kind of Philosophy about AI or like AI policy type stuff and I think that's good if that's your area, but You know, it's it's an area where it's very easy to have a lot of takes on it It's not you're not necessarily learning a lot by reading those But I think it's just important to know what's going on and make sure you are Revisiting your own workflows as often as possible and just making sure that like the people who went here Are going to be the kind of hybrid cyborg to fuse with the AI's right This actually played out in chess if I can take a slight detours The chess players who succeeded the most in the mid -20 tans especially were the ones who were really early adopters of neural network based chess engines So when you know deep mind did that thing There was very quickly an open -source version of it called lila and you find basically like The very top players like Magnus Carlson Fabiano they they were the ones who Kind of mind -melted the most with lila and learned how it played and then kind of started copying its moves And so I think there's like becoming a cyborg to the extent that you can and then I think there's this barbell thing of like it's also important to just leave everything at go touch grass just for your own mental Mental sanity Excellent advice and with that nabiel we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

1:28:22Are you ready? Here we go What are two or three books the find yourself recommending most to other people the first one that comes to mind is Impro by Keith Johnston This is actually a riddle about it in that essay. It's one of the books that pouties to send to people I just think it's a really interesting book so normally speaking. It's about improvisational theater Which I believe this guy was a pioneer of he was a British guy Keith Johnstone Active between the 60s and the 80s I think and improv is just this really interesting book about creativity and How social behavior works and basically just what he taught this in probably prof students It's a very weird book.

1:29:02It's full of these unbelievably strange ideas like there's a lot of very tactical Things he tells you to do in the first chapter for example just to break out of your mental frameworks um like really just wild stuff like he'll tell you to Walk backwards while counting down from 100 and like think about some problem that you're struggling with and there's all these kind of odd things But the the number of ideas per page I've found on that book is extremely high the Concepts about how social interaction works and how things like status and so on play into your social behavior are Super important and they made every kind of forward to point engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you kind of read people better and interact with them better and Become more conscience of how you are coming across and just modulate that What is the title again?

1:29:52Impro Impro okay cool. Yeah, we'll get to it in show notes. Yeah, so Impro is number one. I think just to go the double high -brow. Maybe Shakespeare's History plays There's a there's a set of them called the Henry ad so like Henry the four with Henry the fifth Henry the six I find most people don't read these so you know they'll read Hamlet or Macbeth or whatever The Henry ad is absolutely incredible. You don't have to be interested in British monarchy or British history in order to enjoy them They're actually some of the most interesting and insightful books. I've read about power and how power works and Politics and kind of what the sacrifices that you might have to make if you want to be you know a successful king in that case But it transfers over I think it just it it's worth thinking really hard about I think especially in a world where Everything is kind of organized around these prominent figures and personalities now, right?

1:30:46Like when you think about the current administration you think Trump Elon Like when you think about AI you think of Sam Dario, right? And so I think it's important to Understand like how do you think about these personalities and Yeah, the kind of game that they're playing at Henry is actually the Henry ad is an incredible kind of set of books around that They're also like easy to read which sounds hilarious when I say it But you can read a Shakespeare play in a day that they're sort of I don't know they're like 50 pages all because not that bad You have to get used to the language. Yes, but I would recommend that so sure Uh, I guess you asked for two to three.

1:31:22I love High output management by Andy Grove. I just think that's a great business book and People sort of tend to read summaries of it on the internet more than they actually read the book But the actual book has a lot of really interesting stories and explanations about Like I think the most powerful thing about that book is actually how Andy Grove thinks and less any of the specific tactics that I think you don't get that unless you read like how he came up with all these things Your first two books were extremely out there versus what other people have recommended and the third book was the most recommended book on this podcast So I love that spectrum that we just went on perfect Okay, next question.

1:32:00Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've just really enjoyed? The last movie I really loved was Decision to leave it's a Korean movie. It's by the director of all the boy, which maybe some people have heard of It's a great movie. I think I think it was released a couple years ago And the basic premise is there's an detective who is investigating a woman who's accused of killing a husband and he Gradually starts falling for her would starts to Effort his judgment pull these ways just like a really fascinating Kind of psychological thriller with a sort of romantic element to it visually very beautiful Yeah, I think a lot of the most interesting movies nowadays come from abroad actually so East Asia TV I Don't watch so much yet.

1:32:46It's in a while totally understandable for a founder Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you just Really love it could be an app could be some physical could be a water bottle. I don't have a good answer to that one I guess it'd buy enough stuff. Yeah, it's acceptable. There's no wrong answers in the lightning round Moving on do you have a favorite life motto that you often find useful and work here in life that you share with your You come back to they share with friends or family So there's this obstacle crystal fronts on who are these beautiful books that are about you know beauty and kind of more than architecture right and he He was a teacher at UC Berkeley and he got really frustrated with the students because he just felt like they were always turning in kind of like average work And so he would always tell them every week like Imagine the there's a graphic cathedral in fronts called sharch and um, and he would say you have to aim for sharch Like you have to make something that is better than that.

1:33:45That should be your goal not just to like turn in something that That's sort of you know what you feel is good enough You actually I have to try and be better than the very very best that ever did it and I find myself just like repeating this a lot to myself It's just like aim for aim for that like really trying to do that Otherwise, it's very easy to anger on something right in the middle and you just you do this unconsciously all the time So is that the is that the motto just aim for sharch? Yeah I love that most people have no idea without the and but with the context. It's quite powerful Final question What's a classic novel that would you think would be most valuable for product builders?

1:34:26I just my favorite novel is an a Karen and I I heard about that everyone read Erica. I'm reading that right now. I've never read it before. No way Yeah, so it's by Leo Tolstoy is you know It's this epic like 19th century Russian novel that follows a set of characters across society and I think it's just extraordinary because What's what's amazing about him is he's just able to imagine himself into the brain of anybody and so even like He will briefly just go into the consciousness of I don't know the the servant who's bringing the meal to the table or something like that And he'll just tell you a page of what they were thinking and then he'll just flip back into his main characters head I think that is the most impressive demonstration of this kind of skill I've ever seen and I think Like to connect it to your question.

1:35:15This is what you have to do if you're gonna be really good at product is you have to Really think yourself into the other persons had then you have to be Really seeing it the way that they do and it's so hard especially as a founder or product person Not to just get stuck on your own way of seeing the problem, right? It's like you wrote up this dog you made these marks You're like this is gonna be great and then you take it somebody they don't care that much you really have to like Exercise your empathy understand why they see it that way what That's what a beautiful way to bring it all together Let me also add a while I'm reading the book something a tip here is people talk about I have a chat GPT voicemail just kind of sitting there next to you I found that extremely helpful with this book where I just ask like what the hell does this thing mean like there's all these Russian Dances and balls in etiquette.

1:35:59I just ask and you're like I'm reading Anna Krenna what does this mean and it just tells you Yeah, there's another cool tip for AI. Okay with that and feel this was incredible Two final questions case people want to look you up where can they find you online and how can listeners be useful to you Find me online my website is nabioqiu .co and my ex handle is nabioqiu. I'm probably most active on that But yeah, my website has all the links You know a bunch of essays and interesting stuff How can you help me I would say send me an email my emails on my website introduce yourself say hi I love meeting people um, I don't always have time for coffees nowadays or things like that But I genuinely do get a lot of energy from just receiving emails from interesting people so please do reach out Awesome definitely check out an abuels principles.

1:36:51Is that the turt is that the name of that post? Yeah great Okay, that's one to start with and then also there's the palancy or post that we just talked through Okay, Nabiil. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Appreciate it Lenny. Hi everyone Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on ample podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com See you in the next episode