Build Your Own Lore

Eight Lessons from Palantir

Recently fellow Palantir alums have taken to the airwaves (newsletters) to share their reflections on the company. A couple good examples are Reflections on Palantir by Nabeel S. Qureshi and Lessons from Palantir Alums About Building a Tech Company by Sanjay Saraf.

The sum total of musings like these create what we might call Palantir lore. Lore refers to a kind of folk knowledge typically passed down by word of mouth, though our Gen Z friends have made the word a catchall for generally interesting information.

Lore is worth infinitely more to your business than an Inc Best Workplace Award or whatever. Rankings are generic; lore is sticky and specific. Lore is also the only way to build a generational business. Without it, you can’t attract the kind of talent and money needed for your own hero’s journey.

Below are eight ingredients needed to craft your own company’s lore:

1. GOOD QUESTS

The number one way to build lore is to choose a good quest (I borrowed the phrase “choose good quests” from Palantir alum and Anduril cofounder Trae Stephens). Harry Potter had to save wizardkind. Frodo had to save hobbitkind. Your company should be working on something big and meaty, too. The stakes don’t have to be life or death, though it helps—when recruiting at Palantir, we would tell candidates they could help preserve Western democracy…or build advertising infrastructure at Google or Facebook.

2. A COMMON ENEMY

All great quests also have roadblocks, often in the form of opposing forces. These enemies can be great mobilizers of your people, the same way you run faster when someone starts catching up to you.

There are a few forms of enemies to be aware of:

• Business competition: These are your enemies as a business—the Pepsi to your Coke, the Uber to your Lyft. They’re operating in the same space and can take your market share. Often business competitors function more as frenemies than as true enemies—you don’t want to totally kill them because they can help grow the market and because contrast can help underscore the areas where you’re differentiated. Use business competitors to help set the pace of your business.

• Talent competition: These are your enemies as a recruiter. Palantir wasn’t competing as a business with Google and Facebook, but we were certainly competing with them for talent. Use talent competitors to highlight why your quest matters most and where your culture is differentiated. On the culture piece, early stage startups will often want to emphasize agility and insurgency, while later-stage companies might emphasize the scale of their impact.

• Nonbelievers: This is a catchall category for anyone who thinks you’re destined to fail. Nonbelievers can take any form, from your new recruit’s dad to The New York Times. Don’t ignore these people; they metastasize when left untreated. Instead, tell everyone why they’re wrong.

3. FOUNDATIONAL STORY

Every religion has its (lowercase b) bible, and every startup has its foundational story. This might take the form of an oral creation myth—Apple started in a garage, Facebook in a Harvard dorm, Palantir after 9/11, and so on. It can also take the form of a textual manifesto, like Anduril’s Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy or Palantir’s Defense Reformation. Even if not written down, these stories provide a shared sense of purpose and direction, offering a just so explanation for why the company exists.

4. SHARED LANGUAGE

At Palantir, we adopted military terminology like NACK, BLUF, and CO. If you don’t know what these mean, that’s exactly the point (though I’ll define them in a footnote to be nice).¹ In the early days, that language established a respect for the customer while also reinforcing that Palantir was an outsider among tech companies.

If you don’t create your own language, you risk defaulting to generic corpo-speak. Circling back, pinging, EOD are all a shared language, too, so you might as well pick one that serves a cultural purpose.

5. LARGER-THAN-LIFE LEADERS

Bezos, Zuck, Dr. Karp, Palmer, SBF. They’re all specific enough characters that you could easily imagine them as cartoon characters, wearing the same outfit day over day. That’s because lore does not create itself; it’s created by larger-than-life leaders. Individuals are more memorable than corporations.

I tend to believe that such leaders are born, not bred, but you’ll notice they share a few things in common:

• Founder-market fit: Founders should be deeply invested in their company’s quest, whether through their personal history or a deep moral conviction. There needs to be a reason they’re doing this work. Often this will be related to the company’s creation myth.

• Physical appearance: It’s hard to image Karp without his froth of hair and athletic gear or Zuck, these days, without a white tee and chain. One of my earliest bosses was famous for wearing glasses and a fedora, Anna Wintour for her violently cropped bob, sunglasses, and florals. You get the idea: Appearance plays a role in how we perceive people, by either playing into type or against it.

• Odd hobby: I will caveat by saying that this can feel very forced when put on, but you’ll notice a lot of leaders have highly specific hobbies, whether that’s German philosophy or e-foiling. My best theory for why hobbies like these work (as opposed to, say, an investment banking manager director playing squash or a tech founder interested in life hacking) is that they “snag”—that is, they don’t fit neatly into your idea of what a leader “should” be interested in.

6. RELIABLE GUIDES

It’s not enough to have a good story—you need good storytellers.

This is a corollary to (5). Larger-than-life leaders need translators: people who can communicate leaders’ ideas to the masses. These guides serve as reliable narrators who can help newcomers acclimate to their surroundings. To be clear, though, the point of a guide is not to water down spiky leaders; it’s to bring people along on the journey, to get them bought into those spiky leaders. Guides can also provide helpful context and a longer-horizon view to newbies, who haven’t been around long enough to see that, say, Leader X’s ideas always seem batshit but always get proven right.

Companies also need external-facing guides: people who can communicate the company’s story to customers, candidates, and investors. These people might take the forms of “communicators,” but they might also be salespeople or engineers who are gifted at the art of communication.

7. GATEKEEP

Every magical realm has a way of distinguishing those who belong from those who do not. In Harry Potter, there are muggles and wizards, and once at Hogwarts, students must prove to the Sorting Hat which house they belong in. Recruiting should operate the same way: as a sorting mechanism to separate the true believers from the posers.

This means good recruiting should turn off the wrong people. You want to reject those who are impressive on paper but won’t thrive at your company; otherwise they wind up, say, joining a defense tech company and then being upset their company is working in defense.²

There are a few ways to make sure you hire well:

• Comms and marketing: Don’t hide your core mission on your website or in interviews. Your quest should be front and center in all of your materials so candidates can opt out before they ever apply. This is, frankly, table stakes for comms beyond recruiting too, but it especially matters in this context. Hint: If your tagline is something like “Making an Impact,” you’re doing it wrong. One of my favorite examples of getting this right actually isn’t a company at all—it’s the University of Chicago, whose unofficial motto was “Where fun goes to die.” What kind of person applies to a school like that? Big ole’ nerds! Aka exactly the kind of people who will thrive there.

• Job descriptions: It’s just as important to indicate what kind of person won’t succeed at your company as who will. Consider adding a “This job isn’t for you if” section to your JDs.

• Interviews: In the recruiting process itself, you need to be brutally clear about how your company operates, almost to the point of negging candidates. When I recruited for the comms team as we grew from four to 20, I emphasized the chaos and lack of org legibility to weed out those who expected to come in with pre-built credibility on the basis of title or seniority.

8. HAPPILY EVER AFTERS

Few employees, if any, will stay at your company forever. Own the story about what they can do next. A company like McKinsey, for example, tells employees they can use their cred to transition into high prestige, low volatility corporations like McDonalds or GM. Palantir has established itself as the next Silicon Valley “mafia,” a place where future entrepreneurs go to cut their teeth in a chaotic, high autonomy environment. The story you tell about your happily ever afters will directly speak to the story you tell about your culture—that is, to your lore.

1. NACK: Negative acknowledgement, used to indicate you were going to do something unless someone told you not to (as in: "NACK by EOD [Thing I’m going to do]”)
BLUF: Bottom line up front, used at the top of emails to summarize key details
CO: Commanding officer, used to delineate team leads for customer engagements

2. This isn’t to say you should avoid any ideological diversity. There was lots of healthy debate about just war and the limits of military power at Palantir! But if you fundamentally don’t believe any war is just, you shouldn’t work there.