Shyam Sankar - Celebrating Heretics - [Invest Like the Best, EP.462]
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Sham Sankar, the CTO of Palantir Technologies. I think you'll find by listening to Sham that the business itself, their mission and how they built it, and indeed him and his life are completely fascinating. We talk about his entire worldview, which I find personally the most interesting. This need to re industrialize The United States after decades of moving so much of our production, and as he would argue, therefore our learning of how to innovate and make things off of our own shores. We talk about the history of heretics, people who have against the odds design solutions t
Well, I think they're really founders. They're founder figures. They get obsessed with delivering something that it makes no sense because they're fighting particularly in the military context, you're, like, fighting the bureaucracy. You're going to end your career. You pay extreme prices for it. So there's almost like a pathological obsession with winning, which I really relate to both personally, but also that's what I see in great founders. Founders. In the present moment, it's really important to, like, encourage the hidden heretics who are in the military today to recognize your heresy ma
If you could have people study any one heretic story to understand this general idea, is it his story? Is it someone else's? Which one would you pick?
I'd probably pick Rickover's. So, Hyman Rickover, born in a shuttle in Poland, came to The US when he was six, had one of these near miss moments where in those days when you landed at Ellis Island, you had ten days for someone to come pick you up. His mother gave someone money to go send a telegram to the father who'd already been here, and that guy just pocketed the money. On the tenth day, there was another guy who arrived at Ellis Island who bought them one more day, who knew them, and then he, ran out, got the father. So it's like this near miss where this guy almost didn't even end up he
I remember reading the book about John Boyd, who three times, he was the best fighter pilot, then he helped develop the f 16, and then he came up with the military strategy concept that was instrumental in some of the US wars in the nineties. And he was sort of a bastard as well, highly disliked, really bad father, highly disagreeable, but incredibly important in US military history. You don't seem to have that kind of personality. You seem, by all accounts, very likable within Palantir and outside of Palantir. Say a bit about your own disagreeableness. Where does it surface? It seems like thi
It surfaces in certain ways. As Karp w
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