Ex-Palantir Vet: Your AI Problem Is Really a Data Problem

My guest today is Ben Amor, co-founder and CTO of DealSage, a startup focused on making enterprise companies AI-native. At DealSage, Ben’s already used hundreds of billions of tokens across OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. And he’s bringing to his new company lessons from nearly ten years at Palantir, the AI and data company serving governments and large enterprises that’s now worth about $460 billion. Ben worked there as a forward deployed engineer years before that role became commonplace across AI. And he’s generous in sharing what he learned We get into: • the ideas that shaped Palantir under CEO Alex Karp and Chairman Peter Thiel, including Thiel’s famous line that “competition is for losers”; • the six books Palantir handed all employees (including Zero to One); • why they might hold 10-plus meetings before a pilot — and walk away if there’s no clear business outcome; • Ben’s work with Ferrari’s Formula One team; • why Silicon Valley dismissed Palantir’s mix of software and consulting for years; • and how, amazingly, Palantir went public with only about 100 clients. We also get into lessons Ben is applying now: where the real AI advantage lives, how companies can accidentally give private data to LLMs -- and how he’s thinking about AI in schools as a father of young kids. Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Amor. Thx! Rob