Palantir Technologies Inc.'s (NASDAQ:PLTR) record 63% revenue growth came with a side of swagger — and a warning shot to the rest of Silicon Valley. On the company's third-quarter earnings call, Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar took direct aim at the new wave of companies imitating Palantir's success without understanding its substance.
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Copying The Job Title, Missing The Point
"It's become fashionable, actually, for lots of companies to start hiring FDEs," Sankar said, referring to Palantir's elite Forward Deployed Engineers — the technical problem-solvers embedded directly with clients. "The Financial Times had an article about how it’s the most popular new job title. But what you see is that they don’t really understand it. It’s just mimetic everything."
In other words, while rivals are chasing buzzwords and replicating job titles, Palantir is building what Sankar described as software "that works, not software that ought to work." The distinction, he suggested, is that most AI hopefuls are optimizing for appearances — not results.
"Our measure of success is not did we sell the software? It’s did we solve the problem?" he said. That clarity of mission, Sankar argued, is what has allowed Palantir to scale its AI stack faster and more effectively than peers.
A Culture Built Around Truth, Not Hype
Palantir's two-decade journey, he noted, was "downstream of creating value for our customers." The company's foundational ontology — its deep data integration layer — and its recent "AI hive mind" architecture are, in his words, the products of taking on "the most painful, most integral, most valuable parts of the stack in every enterprise."
That frontline immersion, he added, is exactly what separates Palantir from the imitators now flooding the AI space.
"We will always believe that we are outsiders," Sankar said. "We need to be in the place where the most valuable problem is being solved because that’s the way we end up staying, solving the problem tomorrow and the way we get paid."
Sankar's message was blunt but timely. In a year when every tech firm wants to be seen as an AI leader, Palantir's growth shows what happens when you build for reality — not fashion.
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Photo: Mamun Sheikh via Shutterstock
