Why Palantir's CEO Never Mentions Palantir

So Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, I don't know if you noticed this, but whenever he talks on CNBC or whenever he does these interviews, he never really talks about Palantir that much. He talks about, he might talk about politics a little. In this case, now he's talking about AI sovereignty 'cause it's the hottest topic.

No, it depends what interview you catch of his 'cause I watch CNBC a lot and he'll tell you sometimes he'll be crazy and he usually is crazy and he talks about a lot of random stuff. But a decent chunk of the time, not majority, but a decent chunk of the time, or let me rephrase, majority of the time he talks about Palantir almost on every single appearance. It's just not the majority of the talk track. And I think that's what you probably mean.

This is what I'm saying. So because he used the way he was like, he was doing media before was he talked about Palantir, he talked about the product and the service or whatever. That bores people, right? But when you start to talk about the latest topic, like right now it's AI sovereignty, or like another case, it might be talking about, oh, you know, securing our defenses or whatever it is, right? So Marc Andreessen said this, my friend Marc Andreessen from Twitter. So he says Alex Karp almost never talks about Palantir in interviews. He might talk about it a little bit, right? But he calls it the single best marketing strategy he has ever seen and then revealed a number that proves it works better than anything else in the history of investor communications. Right. So what he does is he talks about the future of the US military, which is what I just said. He talks about superintelligence. He talks about whatever is genuinely interesting to him about the world right now. And because he is CEO of Palantir, the company just sits there attached to all of it. Right.

Yes.

And so it's like the Seinfeld way. You talk about something that's interesting that happened to you and just you put your offer at the end.

Right. But it's also related. What he talks about is related to what Palantir does, even though he doesn't talk about it.

So Marc Andreessen drops this number. So what percentage of Palantir investors have actually read the S-1? Practically zero. What percentage have seen Karp on YouTube or CNBC or whatever? Close to 100, right? So an Edelman B2B, I don't know how much you can give credit to this, but no shade on Edelman, but Edelman B2B study found that thought leadership content drives purchasing consideration more than product marketing does by a factor of nearly 3 to 1 among enterprise buyers. Karp did not read that report. He just built the playbook it describes. So here's the thing. So sure, even though the lawyer spent thousands of hours on the S-1, he is able to kind of just be out there all the time and he occupies a little bit of mindshare. 'Cause when I think about him, I think about his crazy hair. I think about how quick he talks. I think he talks faster than me. So he talks really fast. He's like this and then he's very expressive as well. And so I'm like, oh, Pound here. He's like kind of the crazy guy that's on CNBC.

And super fit.

Yeah, he is super fit. I was thinking about that yesterday too.

Dude, the amount of skiing he does, outdoor stuff. I think someone ended up releasing, it went viral on X.

He's like, body scan.

It's like 8% body fat.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. He, he, he, he's, he gets a lot of clips for the things that he said. That's why he had that clip that went viral. Right. And then this reminds me, I look at my YouTube, it's like, you know, sure. Yeah. I can talk to finance people or dating people or whatever and get all the views in the world. But at least what he talks about is directly related to his business.

Yes. Totally agree with that. And if you look at what you and I do, most of the time we talk about marketing stuff. We talk about what's happening industry or strategy. We don't talk about specific tactics, but I've also seen it backfire. And a prime example of this is Snap. They lost $1 billion in market cap from the launch of their Spectacles, which I believe is $2,400.

Yeah, tell me what happened.

So Evan Spiegel, right? I believe that's his name, Evan Spiegel. Showcased the Snap Spectacles and talked about the future of Spectacles and where the industry is heading. Instead of breaking down why this product costs more than Meta Ray-Bans by a lot, by magnitudes or multiples, and he didn't really break down what it does. So people are like, so you're not going to even really break down what your product does and you're just going to talk about the future and you want $2,000-something stock tanked.

Oh, it's $2,000?

$2,000-plus stock tanked.

Dude, at least, see, that's where he should copy Apple. Apple does a good job of explaining.

Yes. And I think what he should have done is broke down what it does and then, or he could have started off actually breaking down why Snap is making this investment and why this is going to be remarkable. He can then break down what it's doing right now and what it's going to do in the future iterations and where they're going with the product. He could have covered all 3.

Yep. Yeah.

So doesn't mean the stock wouldn't tank. I think it was a bad job of marketing. And I also—

What's their market cap now?

It's gone down a lot.

Let's look at this.

It's not that big. It's single-digit billions.

So Neil forgot to bring his iPad, guys. So let me do this for Neil. Neil, it's $8 billion.

Yeah.

$8 billion market cap.

What's the stock price at?

Stock price is at $4.84. So year to date, it's down 40%. And then if you look at max, it's down 82% all time. So it shot up to like like $75 during 2021 when everything was hot. So Neil, there's some shocking sales quota data I have for you here. So I'm curious to see what you're seeing, but—

Okay.

Jason Lemkin tweets this, sales exec quotas are up in 2026. They sort of have to be since comp OTE is up too. So per Iconiq Capital, their latest GTM survey, quotas at top quartile startups, enterprise is $2.25 million. Okay, that's and then mid-market 1.35 million, and then SMB 750k. So again, these are the quotas. These are the targets they're aiming for. Three years ago, enterprise was 1.8 million. That was considered aggressive. Now it's considered medium. So what he's saying here, and we can we can react to this: one deal economics have shifted. So logos that were mid-market three years ago are now enterprise. So the GTM bar has moved up. Quotas follow. Number two. AI pipeline generation actually works. I think we should talk a little bit about this too. So companies embedding AI in marketing and SDRs are seeing 10+ point conversion lifts at the top, more pipeline equals higher quota. I think we should talk about loops as well. Number 3, hunter-farmer model came back. In 2026, 65% of high performers have AEs owning cross-sell versus 49% of others. And then number 4, attainment at leaders is 85 to 90%. That's not tight quotas, that's a different operating model. So Basically, I think he's saying a lot of AI enablement is happening and he's like, if you're planning enterprise AE comp for 2026, 2.25 million quota is the new baseline, but you need to 3 to 4x the pipeline behind it. You need to have territory modeling, you need to have rep quality bar high enough to sustain 85% plus attainment and then comp that ties to expansion. So 33% NRR or 23% net dollar retention.

So love to say a few things about this. First is one, Jason Lemkin mainly deals with B2B and software as a service. Software as a service over time has moved more into all-in-one where it does more things for you than just a feature or a specific solution. That's caused these companies to be willing to charge more. The next thing is, is if you look at over time, we've seen, if you look at just the stock market and the value of companies and how much more money is being printed by a lot of these companies, it has continually gone up. And he did point that out. A lot of those mid-market companies are now enterprise companies, which means they have bigger budgets and We're also seeing in this new world where it is actually more competitive than ever because of AI. So companies have to do more, they're willing to spend more, and because of that, companies are also generating more income and they're being sold more things to help them do more. But I do believe a lot of it is not just because of efficiencies, it's due to efficiencies, companies growing, and then them having to spend more to compete as well in today's world.

Yeah. And so, you know, the interesting thing is he shared a lot of stuff around their AI SDRs and how they help qualify and they help, you know, there's a lot of things you can build now, like trigger-based agents, right? Where he's like, oh, you know, they raised funding, they're looking to hire like that, that those things are kind of becoming more stale table stakes. I also think that we've talked about having a deal reviver, a stalled deal reviver that can look through your pipeline and also look at lookalikes as well. Like these things are all very doable and should help with your pipeline piece, but you need to kind of have that piece. He, I mean, he, I think he said what, 3, you need to have 3 to 4 more pipeline behind it. So you need to have these things to support the pipeline generation if you want to hit this 85%, 90% attainment. And yeah, Neil is right, there's more all-in-one happening. I mean, you look at, let's use HubSpot as an example for fun. They have an AEO tool, they have all these other tools that I never use. Like I just use it for my system of record. I don't know how you use it, probably same thing, right? For your HubSpot and Salesforce, you pay for both, right?

We pay for so many different solutions. I don't know how we specifically use our CRMs because I haven't logged into our CRMs in a long time.

Nor should you be logging in. You should be headless and asking your Slack all the time, what's happening? What's happening? What's happening?

I don't even have to do that. I get a report every single day.

From human beings.

Yes, but they're using technology. It just gets forwarded to me because I don't want to pay per seat.

But you're in a chat, right?

No.

When they send you that, you're in a chat?

No, I'm not in my corporate chat.

No, no, no, no, your text message. They text you in a group chat, right?

My team? Yeah.

The reports.

It depends what division, not sales. We don't have a group chat for sales.

How do you get the sales reports?

Email.

Email, okay, got it. Yeah, the reason why I'm asking Neil this right now is like if he's getting these reports, I'm just imagining if it's like in a Slack channel or even an iMessage channel, then you have an ambient bot sitting in there and then Neil can ask follow-up questions because Neil always has follow-up questions, right? And Neil's going to needle you.

It's usually email or text. We have Slack and we have Teams. I don't use either really, unless I had to put a refund request into Slack.

See, Neil's a boomer already.

Yeah. Bank balance, financial updates, I get Monday through Friday. I don't get Saturday and Sunday. Banks are also closed Saturday or Sunday. I get Monday through Friday. Every Thursday I get global balances, but Monday through Friday I get US ones. Thursday I get US combined with every single country and it's done currency basis and I get comparisons of week over week and day over day so I can see what changed and has notes on why everything's changed because they know I'm going to ask questions.

Yeah. So should you— okay, why don't you tell everyone which reports you find to be the most helpful? Because you get a lot of reports, right?

So no, no, no, I don't get too many reports.

Okay. So which reports do you find the most helpful and Tailor this towards maybe someone that is starting their business or earlier in their business career so more people can get value from it.

The bank balance one is very important, especially if you're starting off. You have to live and die by your cash and you need to understand why things are going up and down and where there's wastage. And when you see things on a daily basis and you really look at the numbers, and I get a— I don't just get a number on a daily basis of the bank balance, It's by division and I can see which one's going up or down and it has notes on why it fluctuated up a lot or down a lot. If it's just a little bit here or there, there's no notes and I don't expect the notes for that. But this is important because it also helps you find if there's something that went wrong and you can avoid making that again. The other number that I tend to end up getting is RFP counts. So that is more of a spreadsheet.

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Of how many RFPs we're getting per region and all the countries keep track of it. It then gets aggregated. They put it in a spreadsheet for me because I just like looking at it and then charts are automatically created from it. And the reason we have to end up doing that is a lot of people speak different languages, different CRM solutions based, you know, they may not be compatible with language or they may not be cost prohibited for certain countries, right? Depending on their currency exchange. And with the RFP count, I like seeing patterns over all the years, what's going up, what's going down, and I get notified when new ones have come in. And when we've lost them or when we've won them or when they go silent or when they've been sitting there too long, because I know that, hey, I should be bugging some of these people. Hey dude, this deal's dead, or why is it not moved or whatnot? So I know who to push, especially for the big logos, and they have pricing in there on what they think it's going to roughly be. So that way I know who to really spend my time with to push them to try to win the bigger accounts. Another report that I get is, what is it called? Any big potential customer that we're talking to and where they're actually based. So I just get notified of that through email. So that way I know because I travel a lot or I could be willing to travel a lot.

To meet them.

To meet them, to try to build a deeper relationship and try to close them or to try to see if I should go to that city and meet up with multiple tighter people and cultivate that relationship. The other report that I get, and this one's over WhatsApp, I get notifications anytime a new product is launched and what did it do and a summary of that feature and how to test it out so that way I can just go and check it out. I also get a weekly report of, and this actual individual sends this to me, his name is Colin. He sends me the stats of the emails, how many leads are generated, how many emails did we send, open rates, click rates, and then he also sends me the next week's emails before they're scheduled so I can review every single email, at least the English ones, and then I can modify what I want modified in all of the emails. I still go through my emails every single week ahead of time.

I think the point to call out for everyone, the reason I asked Neil this question is so You all can see that it's not just reports, it's very specific things that he can take action on.

Yes.

It's to move the ball forward every day. It's not just to have this like dashboarditis where it's like you have all this stuff that you're looking at that make you feel like you're doing something. People have a problem with dashboarditis.

Yeah, and I don't like dashboards. I really don't. I want really specific things that can help me improve the business. So dude, I was Talking to my team and some of them were complaining how leads are down. And I was like, okay, leads are down. So then a few of them were just like, I'm like, what are we going to do about it? Exactly. Right.

That sucks. What are you going to do about it?

Yeah. So then someone was like, well, it's not in our budget. And I'm like, who comes up with the budget? And they were telling me, you know, how they create the budgets because I'm not in any budget meetings. Like genuinely my teams meet up multiple times a year in person by divisions to go over future budgets. I don't go to any of those meetings.

Yep.

So then they tell me what they want to end up doing and I'm like, so it's not in budget. You're losing leads from, let's say, top of funnel from informational queries because that's happening to a lot of businesses because we had really aggressive capture intents to generate revenue from our informational queries with like exit pop-ups and quizzes and stuff like that, which worked really well. But those aren't as effective because AI answers a lot of the questions for people. So I was like, all right. I'm like, for your country, how much have you optimized for LLMs and actually turned rank? I'm like, are you getting good leads from them? They're like, yeah, the leads are amazing. I'm like, of course they are. Have you done more in-person events? No, it's not in budget. That costs travel and costs all this kind of stuff. I was like, all right. I'm like, so I'll go to the regions that'll complain. I'm like, I'm going to make a deal with you. They're like, what? I'm like, we don't have a money problem. You have a budget problem. Those are 2 very different things. If we have money in an account and you're not spending it, and I did the same exact framework with Brazil when I was in Brazil for Web Summit, Rio. You're telling me it's harder. We're going more upstream. You want more of them, but conferences are more expensive. Brazil, you get taxed on revenue. If I bring the money to US, I face another tax, right? Because they don't have a tax treaty and it just sucks. I was like, all right, why don't you do a few more events? It's not in my budget. Approved. If you generate revenue for it, I'm going to count the expense against your budget. So you better pick the right ones. And even though I don't count it against your budget in future years, I'm going to slowly expense this to your future years revenue, not from accounting perspective, but it has to make them responsible based on bonuses and things like that.

And they're incentivized on this.

Yes. And they're incentivized on this. And then I'm like, cool, you want to do more press to help with GEO, hire a PR company, do way more digital PR? They're like, yes, but again, it's not our budget. I'm like, cool, I'll give you a lump sum budget. What do you want? $50 grand, $100 grand? And they're like, whoa. They were like, you have to keep in mind currency exchange. I was like, whatever, in your currency because everything is cheaper.

Yeah.

I was like, figure out what you want to spend, go hard. Over time, you're going to have to pay for that expense. You don't have to pay for any of it this year, so you better make wise decisions. But a lot of these problems are solvable. And the key is you want data to figure out where there's blockage or where there's political issues. I'm not talking about political issues like Trump or Biden or any of that. I'm talking about internally as an organization grows, there's always excuses. And the reason I started asking for some of these reports is I listened to an interview. I think it was a DealBook interview with Jamie Dimon.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know what their profit is. You can look up JP Morgan's annual profit. It's large. And he was just like, one of the worst things that he hates hearing is, oh, we can't do this. We don't have the money or the budget. And when you look at JP Morgan, I think it's a $600-ish billion company from a market cap perspective.

$16.5 billion for the first quarter in profit.

So $16 billion a quarter in profit.

Right?

That's roughly $64 billion a year. So I'm just aggregating—

$896 billion company.

$896 billion company. Look at that. That's large. And he was just like, we don't have a money problem. So when someone says there's a budget issue or we can't do this in marketing, if things can produce an ROI and you know it, you have to just make a case for it. And the problem that I see in companies, and I see this in marketing all the time, People just go by a budget or by a number and they don't make a case on why they need more money, especially when companies are profitable. Like if I look at my organization, even your organization, you're looking at bootstrap companies. That means we're operating based on cash in our bank account. That means we have money to some extent. We don't have JP Morgan money, but we have money and we can make investments for our level and where we're at. So when people say they can't do stuff, to make us grow faster because of these random excuses. It's the way they're thinking and it's just a bunch of BS.

So related to this, we have this thing now, I think I've explained it before, command through negation. So we have a mutual friend, ex-military, okay? And so in the military, if you have commanders that basically they say they can't get anything done or like they don't have the approval to get something done, it's basically, no, I will do X because of Y by Z date. unless otherwise instructed. And so this guy, my friend who runs a company, he told the entire company, he's like, if you block yourself on something and then you don't use this command through negation directive, I will fire you. Like it was in front of everyone, right? And after that everyone's like, it's like you can't just say, oh, I'm waiting on someone, I'm waiting on the client, I'm waiting on this.

Yes.

It's like, I will do this stuff by this time unless otherwise directed, right? And you need to repeat it over and over. I found that one day, a couple weeks ago, I did it 4 times, but it felt so relieving every time I just kept sending them the HTML file, command through negation. But what you're doing too is like, I think if you stick this in front of them next time, it's like, they'll know, right? But I think the lesson's already pretty clear with this one. But I've just found that having that directive and I just keep sliding in front of them each time, it moves things along and I don't have to re-explain myself on how to think about it because they're, they're not as incentivized as you are to think about it that way.

Totally agree with what you're saying. But there's one issue that I found no matter who you end up dealing with and no matter what position they're in a company, You and I are entrepreneurs. Would you agree we have more aggressive personalities?

Of course. Yeah.

Hired employees tend to never— hired guns tend to never have, maybe never, almost never have as much aggressive, go-getting, risk-taking appetite as let's say the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are much higher risk-takers. Hence, we're entrepreneurs and we're not employees. So, those types of people balance you and I out.

They do.

But it's giving them a little bit more of our risk-taking and enabling them and just making sure that they understand if they believe it's the right decision. And what I've always found is the key to getting them to do this is, especially if it costs money, you don't have to deal with the expense in the short run. We'll deal with it later on. Yes, it'll affect you and your future budgets, but if you're so confident that it'll work, I will give you the money right now to go and spend for this.

And I feel like this just needs to become like a skill or a doctrine where everyone, all of your divisions can just look at it whenever they run into this problem, which leads me to my last point. And then we can, we can end here and then I really got to go pee. But we ended up making a Skills Dojo. Okay. So we're making it public for free. In fact, if you go to skillsdojo.com by the time of this recording, you can access it. So we're going to put all our skills out there. Neil can share all his skills out there as well. Noah can share all his skills and everyone's going to have like a little profile as well where you can see how many skills he has.

Noah can share all his skills?

Yeah, no, you can share all your skills. Everybody can share all your skills. Skills that you— yes, Noah can share all his skills. So, so—

You got the joke.

I got the joke. So everyone can share their skills. So, so anyway, sorry, inside joke, guys. But the cool thing is you can now see who's the most engaged in there. You can see who's good to maybe hire. We can also see, hey, who maybe needs more help? Who do we need to help, right? But I think it's really cool to have something like a GitHub and then just give it away for But I even look at, I look at Ubersuggest, I look at AnswerThePublic, I look at ClickFlow. A lot of this stuff is kind of going to zero and it's just like, how do you build distribution? And I think this is one of those ways. So you can check out skillsdojo.com and you can implement your skills there and you'll see how many downloads, how many forks are there and just pick them off. It's almost like a skills marketplace. That's what it is.

It's like a version of GitHub but for marketers.

But for skills. Yeah, for any skills, business skills, whatever it is exactly, because we find ourselves copying each other's skills, forking off each other. And my, my team, when I send them something, it's usually 70, 80% built. But oftentimes, like, they make the skill 10 times better. And so you, someone like you and me, we can make these skills all day, just pop them out and then they know what you're thinking too. So anyway, that's it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.