The Philosopher in the Valley

Palantir is one of those companies everyone has heard of but nobody really understands. It builds data software for governments, intelligence agencies, and militaries. The CIA was an early backer. The US Army uses it. It was unprofitable for almost twenty years and is now worth $400 billion.

Alex Karp runs it. He has a philosophy PhD from Germany, has never worked in tech, meditates for hours a day, and co-founded the company with Peter Thiel. I genuinely do not know how any of that adds up to what Palantir became, but it did.

I read this book on a flight and enjoyed it. The parts about Karp are interesting he is a strange and compelling person and Steinberger got good access. The parts where Steinberger starts editorializing about surveillance and democracy are less interesting and you can feel free to skim those.

If you are curious about Palantir, or just want to read about someone who built something completely outside the normal playbook, it is worth picking up.

The thing that stuck with me is that Karp spent nearly two decades doing something most people thought was either wrong or irrelevant, without much external validation, and turned out to be right. That is not a formula anyone teaches. But it is one I think about a lot in the context of building STQ. Most of what we do is not new. It is institutional-grade thinking applied to people who were never supposed to have access to it. Karp spent twenty years proving that simple ideas, executed with conviction, tend to work out. I am counting on it.

The Philosopher in the Valley, Michael Steinberger. Published November 2025.