Strongly recommend tiger21 - which is an amazing community of people dealing with the positives and negatives of wealth. I have found it immensely helpful.
We are building a new kind of venture capital investment firm - Empros Capital.
We are hiring for two roles:
1. People that have a technical background and want to become investors.
2. People that have an extraordinary background outside of technology (especially in writing or other liberal arts) and a deep interest in technology and want to become investors.
Please get in touch if interested! My email is alex at …
Interesting to think about why this reality didn’t come to pass. Ben was clearly right about the opportunity market being huge and i think it’s timing. Without having thought too much about I think he underestimated or couldn’t compete with Microsoft. Having cheap wintel PCs everywhere made next irrelevant.
I agree completely. I went all in and I have 7x UniFi ap AC in my house (2 per floor over 3 floors and one in the guest house). They are all powered by the switch (power over Ethernet) making it super clean.
The software is fine by the big advantage is that it has meraki reliability without the licensing.
I think the spirit of this is misguided and goes against the spirit of the compensation. The stock based compensation is designed to align everyone's incentives as well as filter for individuals who believe in the prospects of the company.
Hedging out your stock based compensation goes directly against this, and misaligns you with the rest of your company. I think if you don't believe in the companies prospects it is best to take another job or ask for more cash and less equity.
- Selling enterprise software (you can make 10%-20% of an 8 or 9 figure deal)
- Selling securities in some form or another (you make ~5% of deals worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars)
- high leverage consulting (solving very hard tech problems for lots of people. for example: I have a friend who helps a whole bunch of computer vision companies and makes a ton. Another friend is an SEO expert.)
- Patenting core technologies and selling those patents (A buddy of mine sold his patent for $10M)
- "platform based land grabs". Think of the people who bought tons of domains early in the Web's history. Or the first guy to make an emoji app on iOS. These are different than "starting a company" as you really only need a product and can pull it all off on your own. I suspect there will be more of these in the future.
All of these require creatively navigating business as well as being an awesome dev.
That is simply FUD – Palantir guarantees to customers that their software is working within 90 days AND has generated results. They offer a refund if not. Their homepage said this for a while!
The alternative to Palantir - an alternative enterprise bespoke system or one built by the companies' or Gov's IT department - costs a whole lot more (25x) and often doesn't work! Palantir is a great value.
Any SaaS B2B company with network effects does this easily because the revenue from each customer is a function of the value they derive from the software, which increases with the square of the number of customers.
Think Excel (network effects derived from its communication properties), CoreLogic (derived from having all the data), Addepar, etc.
These companies also typically have high fixed costs across all of their customers once they are at scale.
Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.
These features are a deep part of the platform (i.e. they can't be turned off) that powers a lot of the other features (entity resolution / de-resolution, for example). Say what you want about the people collecting the data and the data they are collecting, but civil Liberties and privacy protections are an inseparable part of Palantir.
Message me if you are interested.
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