Palantir

There are two big reasons to work at Palantir (in addition to a myriad of smaller ones):

• It's the sharpest group of people you'll ever get to work with.
• You'll be working on some of the most important problems society has regarding technology.

One of the cool features of Palantir that differentiates the company from the walled-garden (and useful, not knocking them) experiences one gets at Google, Dropbox, Facebook, etc., is that Palantir deals with problems in the messy world, in a wide variety of industries—healthcare, law enforcement, disaster relief, energy, fraud, etc.—and puts a lot of responsibility on individual employees to map new problems in the messy world to sets of existing or not existing (and needing to be built) pieces of software, to solve the problem. It's really empowering and an exciting change of pace from what much of Silicon Valley considers important.

The downside of interacting with the messy world is that you can't easily construct a narrative about your business and expect it to remain unchanged (e.g., Dropbox being the place you store your files, or Google categorizing the world's information).

As a rapidly growing company, Palantir has been forced to constantly refine its mission and why it operates the way it operates. This can lead to a lot of ambiguity and anxiety, as the unknown always has a tendency to do.

Give ground grudgingly. Palantir is now over 1600 people, and this creates a push to drift towards the bureaucracy of a bigger company. The empowerment that individual employees get from our decentralization, though, is what allows us to adapt to new problems quickly and effectively.