Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp is famously unorthodox—and that applies to everything from his fitness regime to his hiring strategy.
Karp, estimated by Forbes to be worth $3.4 billion, built his fortune in the mysterious world of big data analytics, supplying services to defense and intelligence agencies.
In addition to shaping the shadowy world of intelligence, the founder-CEO keeps himself incredibly busy during his spare time.
Last year Karp revealed he skis five hours a day, runs “like a deer” and also practices tai chi. Yet these pressures haven’t stopped him personally intervening in the hiring process for his $72 billion organization.
The CEO enjoys meeting prospective employees himself and reportedly prides himself on hiring or discarding a candidate within two minutes of meeting them.
“A lot of my populist-left politics actually bleed into my hiring stuff,” Karp told The New York Times.
“If you ask the question that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has answered a thousand times, all you’re learning is that the Stanford, Harvard, Yale person has learned to play the game,” he added.
Instead, Karp looks for something less obvious. Even if he gets a theoretically ‘good’ response from a privileged candidate and a ‘bad’ answer from “the child of a mechanic,” he will sometimes choose the latter.
The 56-year-old entrepreneur says he instead searches for the “feeling like I’m in the presence of talent.”
Working at Palantir
Karp, who founded the company with investment titan Peter Thiel in 2003 and has around 4,000 employees, also takes an unorthodox approach to company culture.
While other Big Tech giants have struggled to navigate a corporate approach to social and political issues, Karp has unapologetically shared his views and faced the impact.
Karp, a Jewish entrepreneur, has supported Israel during the nation’s conflict with Gaza. In March, he told CNBC that his position as CEO would be worthless if he didn’t stand by his morals.
That being said, he knew there would be consequences to his stand.
“We’ve lost employees, I’m sure we’ll lose employees,” Karp maintained. “If you have a position that does not cost you to ever lose an employee, it’s not a position. It’s some kind of self-pleasuring where the joke is on the other person or the joke is on you.”
He added: “When you join Palantir and you dedicate your life to Palantir, I am standing in front of the company, the people that run Palantir are standing in front of the company, not promising you to tell you something you want to hear.
“We’re going to get as close to telling you how we see the world as we’re legally and ethically allowed to.”
However, as well as losing staff, Karp said his pro-Israel stance has also won him talent.
Palantir has offered 180 jobs to students who didn’t want to stay on university campuses because of a rise in anti-semitism, which Karp believes will ultimately prove a better career choice anyway.
“Palantir is a much better diploma,” Karp told the Times. “Honestly, it’s helping us, because there are very talented people at the Ivy League, and they’re like, ‘Get me out of here!’”
Karp adds he is a “progressive”—a sentiment at odds with some left-wing politicians who would argue Palantir is involved in the business of conflict.
But, like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Karp argues democracy requires economic foundations.
“I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries,” Karp said. “If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
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