20VC: Palantir CTO on The Broken Incentive Structure of How Governments Buy Defence, The Danger of Defence Spending at Historic Lows, How Elections and Wars Change Government Defence Buying & Why Budgets are Anti-Creative with Shyam Sankar

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The Twenty Minute VC

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shyam Sankar is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Palantir Technologies in addition to the Chairman of Ginkgo Bioworks. Shyam holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

In Today's Episode with Shyam Sankar:

1. Journey to the Top of Defence:

How did Shyam make his way into the world of startups and get a role with Kevin Hartz at Xoom?
How did seeing Shyam's parents lose everything impact his mindset and drive?
What does Shyam know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career?

2. How the World's Governments Buy Defence:

What is the playbook for selling defence to different governments?
Why is the way that governments purchase and procure so broken?
If Shyam were head of the DOD, what would he change?
Why does the DOD "need to pick winners"?
Which governments are the best to work with? Which are the worst?

3. A World In Conflict: What Changes:

How does conflict change the buying process and urgency for governments?
How do elections change the buying cadence and process for different governments?
Looking forward to 2024, how does Shyam predict the state of different global conflicts?

4. Hiring 101: You Have To Hire Artists:

What have been Shyam's single biggest lessons on what it takes to hire the best of the best?
Why does Shyam believe that hiring great people is like talent management in Hollywood?
Why does Shyam believe talent should be "shielded from budgets"?
What have been some of Shyam's biggest hiring mistakes? How did he learn from them?

Transcript

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0:00.0	The greatest travesty of all this is in order to constrain the variance in outcomes,
0:04.9	we have constrained ourselves to mediocrity.
0:06.8	We don't want projects to fail catastrophically.
0:09.5	But that also means you can't have projects succeed catastrophically.
0:12.5	The amount of process we've put in place just ensures mediocrity.
0:16.1	This is 20VC with me, Harry Stubbings, and I'm so excited for the episode today.
0:19.8	It's a different one.
0:21.8	Over the last 18 months, we've seen investment in defence tech skyrocket, Palantir, and Jarrell, Helsing in Europe,
0:27.7	being the leaders. And so I wanted to sit down with one of the leaders today and really understand
0:32.0	how governments buy, which governments are best at it, what that looks like moving forwards,
0:37.4	what the DOD can do to improve.
0:39.6	And I'm thrilled today to be joined by Palantir's CTO and the man who built much of the modern playbook for selling to governments,
0:46.0	Sham Sankar. Also, I want to say a huge thank you to Trey at Founders Fund and Joe Lonsdale at 8BC.
0:51.5	Some amazing questions suggestions today.
0:53.9	But before we dive into the show today, there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there.
0:58.0	But using them means switching back and forth between yet another digital tool.
1:02.0	What was supposed to simplify your workflow just made it way more complicated.
1:07.0	Unless, of course, you're in Notion.
1:09.0	In Notion, you can automate the tedious tasks, like summarising meeting notes or finding next steps, really freeing you up to do the deep work that we all want to do.
1:18.4	And that's why Notion is used by over 50%, 50% of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion, send less emails, cancel more meetings and reduce spending
1:29.7	on tools. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com slash 20VC. And speaking of amazing products
1:37.1	like Notion there, I'd like to talk to you about a company called Digis. They're a full-service
	...

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