RARE Alex Karp Interview: Palantir Philosophy Explained! (2009)

Alex karp is here he is the co-founder and CEO of paler Technologies the company's data mining software is used by various government agencies in the United States including the CIA FBI and NYPD is also used by hedge funds and other Financial firms carpa is a Stanford Graduate and co-founder the company with ex PayPal Engineers I am pleased to have him here at this table for the first time he does not do many television interviews and for that I'm also pleased to have him here welcome thank you for having me let me tell a bit about

the background which is interesting Stanford law wasn't it it was Stanford law uh and then and then you went to Frankfurt then I went to Frankfurt and got PhD neoc classical uh social philosophy which is a fancy way of saying a quick path to being unemployed certainly to be the highest educated least earning person on the planet and why did you do that um well the same reason I I got involved in founding P here I I was really passionate about the issues I largely wasn't putting money ahead of what I thought was important um

some of the ideas I dealt with were actually quite important how what does it mean to know something how does it what does it mean to communicate it um what is the F Foundation of Western Society uh can we participate as Citizens and how I was very passionate about those ideas just like I'm passionate about uh my business paler and and also about anti-Semitism and other issues that you thought needed to be written about and discussed I published widely on both technical issues uh kind of issues involving the convergence of neocon philosophy and Freud and

on discrimination and on civil liberties and on anything that anyone would read uh which is what you do when you're an aspiring academic with uh essentially an interest in writing um and uh and then I migrated into a business context U and what caused you to do that well you know the interesting thing about um Academia is that it's more interesting to the people in it than it is to anyone else uh you know and uh the impact yes you end up fighting about small things that may be fairly unimportant to other people and I

I thought that while the ideas were important that the actual impact they were going to have was was going to be very small I mean the kind of work I I I did was intelligible to probably 30 40 people in the world so um it it it seemed more interesting and compelling to do something else uh get involved in business and see how that worked out and some of the issues in business are actually from an academic perspective also quite compelling so where did you my great too well it turned out I had a a

facility for I was pretty good at making money and um I was very bad at getting paid so I basically turned the ability to make money and get paid into a business where I look for other people who are good at making money and bad at getting paid and I taught them how to make money quicker and to get paid fairly now this was kind a venture capital kind of operation or um basically my own uh business which I built and uh we went I went around looking for mly people who who had academic proclivities

and were interested in business and I would approach them and say why don't you build a business I'll help you and uh and I did that for a couple years and uh and then I reconnected with Peter uh Peter te Peter teal um and uh we began along with a couple other guys to build this company and while there you had the idea for paler yeah well I you know post 911 I think the idea again it was Silicon Valley ought to be involved in in in fighting terrorism protecting our civil liberties um and uh

and you know terrorism is asymmetric asymmetry presupposed software because you're finding needles and hay stacks actually using an approach that's not exactly like data mining was a critique on some of the data mining approaches uh that had been used at PayPal and we thought that that approach would be very effective in this context and it would do two things it would allow humans to find needles and hay stacks so make the data intelligible to you and me which it's not and by doing that it would allow them to find bad people trying to destroy our

society and could be used also to protect civil liberties by making the data sets transparent so that you could it was very clear what the government is doing and how they're doing it which is a particular passion of our company this may be obvious but why did you name it paner after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings yes the the for those of you who had a social life in in in high school you may not realize what this what Cal here is for those of us who didn't have a social life

you immediately jumps out at you as the seeing St in in Lord of the Rings um and uh they allowed the the West to communicate or the forces of good to communicate and see into vast distances and we thought uh it was a fitting name for a product that allows you to see into large databases but doesn't allow you to see things you're not allowed to see which is basically what the seeing ston which is one of the problems because of civil liberties and everything else or yes so the the basic idea is that the

west or Western values will win if we in the west believe what we're doing there's no point in having a war on terrorism if civil liberties are being undermined to the extent that we aren't willing to fight that war and this is particularly true in the Cyber context it turned out that the approach that was used at PayPal was essentially an anti- datam mining approach it was anti-am mining in the sense that data mining uses algorithms across large data sets and what we do is we use what legal Scholars call a predicate based to search

so we would look at you and then we would go out and say oh there's lots of different things in your life that may be indicative of someone being someone involved in bad behavior but it would also be very clear how the government looked at you it wouldn't be a wide net cast into a SE of data that brings back all of our all the innocent citizens that that are touched by that net it would be it's a very precise very precise operation and each step in that operation is documented how much of your business

is finding terrorists for the US government or whoever wants to hire you most of our businesses in government and it all involves both sides of of this equation uh finding uh people who are up to essentially bad things both in the anti-terror area in cyber in financial Mal feasance mortgage fraud but also making sure the data is tagged in a way that allows agencies to collaborate with one another which is one of the big findings in 911 Commission why weren't people able to collaborate people tend to focus on the policy issues but there are also

massive technical issues that had to be solved and solved in a way where you can just install it we do that and the second piece is how do you do it so that when the government is looking at you or me it's clear that they're looking at you and me for a reason if they bring a case against us what is the case where did the evidence come from did it come from sources they were allowed to see did they migrate from the the source of one evid of a piece of evidence into another source

these are the kind of questions that that Americans care a lot about why can't the government do this themselves we first of all the go we are a piece of this the the hardworking and tremendously impressive people that you meet when you're in this business are the most important part our part is to Pride worldclass software this is something America by the way is very good at Silicon Valley is especially good at and that will continue in your judgment and America's leadership in creating software I I think software is probably an area where America will

continue to lead I think sou silon Valley will be at the tip of that of that movement uh it's it's it's the place we've Excel that think of the software products you like to use your audience likes to use it they're mostly American and they don't use it because it's built in America they use it because it's the best and why is that well you know the thing is we it's of course we have enormously talented people but what makes a software product work is an ability to build a business around a compelling idea and

that's that while this seems obvious in America and especially in silon Valley in almost every other place if you want to build a business people will say well how are you going to make money tomorrow in silon Valley we build businesses around an idea and then we figure out how we're going to make money and this is incredibly important because if you want something to really work something really complicated you cannot hire people who are motivated by a paycheck they have to live and breathe it they have to do it over a long period of

time you have to be willing to our company took three years to build before we even went to Market three years no Revenue in any other part of the world people would laugh you out of the room you go but not in the Venture Capital world but not not in Silicon Valley it's a rare place where somewhere else it doesn't have to be Silicon Valley for Venture Capital to say you're not going to make revenue for 3 years and but then we believe that you have the seed to grow into something big Venture Capital exists

everywhere but the companies that have been best at using that Capital exist in America by and large and particularly in silen Valley and it's it's I believe it's it's it's not because we're smarter it's because we work better together because we're more likely to be compelled by a big idea and put monetization second and this is this is the secret to our company and you know even when we went to Market we didn't hire sales we still don't have salespeople we have no salespeople working for us at paler we sell the product by exposing clients

to it and saying compare us to what you have so what's the compelling business idea here the compelling business idea is uh if you want to make data if you want to interact with data in a way that's intelligible to you so the data that's around you and you're the government it's a very hard thing to do it scale so let's just say you go to the market and you buy something you talk on your cell phone you send an SMS you send it every little kind of you write a report all those are data

at massive scale it's very hard for you to see that as a pattern so what is the pattern of Charlie Rose is Charlie Rose interacting with people that are up to no good uh and then it's very hard for me the citizen of America to look at the government and say did they look at Charlie Rose because he was up to no good or did they look at Charlie Rose because they didn't like his hair color oh by the way did they use Charlie Rose as a way to look at Charlie Rose's audience and find

out who's in the audience well if I'm looking at the government trying to figure that out it's very hard to do what's done currently is they hire a team of computer scientists who write algorithms that none of us understand right and then they come back and say oh well maybe do you believe the computer scientists they hire or would you rather see it yourself self and that's what we offer we offer a way to just plug on our platform and you can be a leading expert in finding patterns and large data set whether those patterns

are terrorists they're cyber attackers they're people again in financial malfeasance or we the people who want to look at what the government is doing in one form or another either through Congress or through our attorneys we can then see what the government is doing this is very important we also allow people to collaborate which is an enormously important problem when when people look at what happened on 9/11 the conclusion was has it happen because people weren't collaborating and they focus on kind of especially the CIA and FBI agencies did not effectively collaborate and people focus

on the policy and inability to work together but there's also a massive technical issue how do you work in a massive data set and take out the two pieces of data that the FBI is allowed to see it's very tough and that's something we we turn we have a turnkey approach to that you can put our product on top of your servers and you can collaborate tomorrow what patterns have you discovered about terrorists well you know obviously you know we don't discuss exactly what we've done in in a classified context nor am I allowed to

but but for example in the sjar case which is a case that was discussed in the public uh we took a data set that lots of people looked at some of the world's experts and we found that there was a group of people that lived in a village that was responsible for most of the attacks in Iraq and we found out they were responsible for most of the money and most of the attacks now that's very valuable and highly actionable information if you know if you know all the real attacks are coming from One Source

there's a lot you can do about that and this is typical for the kind of things or when we looked at the Dal Lama um a case which got a lot of public attention we partnered with citizen lab in Canada and um we discovered that the Dal llama had been infiltrated by one of the world's most sophisticated and uh uh uh largest uh cyber networks and we discovered that working at the service of someone else working at the service of somebody else a government that part we we're not clear about but we're are clear one

of the very interesting things about cyber is this whole issue of attribution right um I think the metaphor that one could use in talking about cyber is maybe less cyber War but the democratization of spy techniques so in this 80s and the 70s only large governments could pull off spy operations now teenagers in the basement with a computer can pull off a spy operation and it's very unclear if it's them or someone else and the diagnostic you use is very very complicated it's not like someone breaks into your home they leave a footprint or a

handprint or they leave a hair behind or you take a picture of them it's very very tough to find out who they are but what we can allow people to do is get a much better sense of what the evidence is where it points to the reason the simple reason why simple data mining doesn't work even leaving aside the moral issues it raises is it uses a static algorithm against a non-static and highly entrepreneurial uh adversary that would be the terrorist that's the terrorist and and so what you need to do is have a platform

that allows you to interact with the data and see the patterns before they realize they're giving off the patterns so it's non- algorithma it's not static and what we allow people to do is we allow the the actual person doing the work the analyst the targeteer to get ahead of the terrorist to see patterns a terrorist doesn't realize they giving off and this is this is what now how good is the terrorist to in there you have to think of terrorists as entrepreneurs and they tend to be I think very good at what they do

and my view is we need to put our best entrepreneurs against against their best entrepreneurs that's how we win because they all stopped using cell phones the way they used to and all those kinds of things you can think you can think of any approach you use as a static approach they will figure that out they this person gets taken away they do a diagnostic how did that person get caught and they change their patterns immediately what we need to do is is game them is be ahead of whatever their technique is and that requires

people are very flexible agile the kind of people that build weird companies in the valley you put put them against these people and that's by the way in these pockets in government that's what you find entrepreneurial people going after their entrepreneur and where did they develop their entrepreneurship and where do they develop their own computer savvy they believe in things that we don't believe in and I think are highly destructive but they're nevertheless maybe the most interesting talented people of their society it's the same place we get our entrepreneurs the best schools the best minds

or people are just good at something that's very valuable moving to cyber warfare what do you fear the most if we as a country understand what the danger is and we as a country understand the kind of uh that it's possible to fight this without giving up our civil liberties we'll win if we underestimate the danger or we perceive this as a war that will be costly to who we are we'll lose democracies tend to win when the country Gets behind it we are kind of the greatest democracy in the world and we tend to

win Wars where the people believe in what they're doing where the people think that there's a trade-off between civil liberties and fighting cyber terrorists it's going to be very hard to win as long as we have computers that are turned on there will be people that penetrate them every time we find a way to block them they'll find a way in the danger is is real and it's going to be with us the rest of our life now the question is if the danger is real and it's with us for the rest of our life

what can we as Citizens do we as Americans do that allows us to experience the Liberty we want and stop them and I think unless that educational piece is really addressed directly uh we will have a problem America educating the public about the threat both the threat and the way the necessity of taking certain approaches obviously I'm biased and I think you know paler ability to tag data and show what the government has done is enormously important but you have to explain if it's if this is explained where there's a contradiction between our Liberty and

protecting oursel we're going to have a real problem it's just the same way in any other War where if it's we don't believe in what we're doing we can't win where Americans believe in what we're doing we tend to do very well but then are you arguing if they believe in what you're doing they're willing to give up civil liberties is that part of the argument you're making no my my well I believe one of the re why I actually talk in public um is there are approaches like ours which allow the people to make

sure the government is actually doing what it claims to do so if you understand what the government is doing to protect and you understand what the limits are and you know those limits and they can be enforced that's one thing if it's data mining where they're casting a massive net under the ages of protecting us well that's not fine so let me give you a concrete example Data Destruction something that is not talked about enough so you're running a large multinational company and the government knocks on your door and says your data is about to

be destroyed we know it because we're down the stairs we have also classified files we understand what's going on we want to make a we need to make a copy now of your data to prevent it from being destroyed because we we know how to secure that data well you might be in favor of that except for you want to make sure they're not going to use that data against you like what are the what's the guarantee that they use that that that data doesn't get migrated into a case that the government brings against you

what if the government already has a case against you answer your own questions well the the the the our approach is when the when the DAT when the government takes the data it's tagged in a way that shows the source so it can't be migrated from the data they've they've taken from you to a case they have pending and this is enormous so they take the data you make sure they tag it they they if you use our platform we can we can take that data and justest it it's tagged if it's migrated into a

case that they may have running against you you your defense attorneys will see that and you'll say okay well this data came from data I gave you this is enormously important you're not going to have buyin to help the government protect you unless you know that your Liberty is going to be protected and this is this is something we do kind of TurnKey or as we say in the valley out of the box whether you use us or whether you build a system that's not my point these kind of things have to be built in

and baked in they have to be discussed with the American people I'm always perplexed by this question uh if the CIA can hire people like you like palente Technologies uh why can't bad guys hire people not you but people like you well I I think actually because they don't exist is that no no no no I I I think the bad guys do get people of equal talent to what we can get I think that we in America are very good at organizing oursel so that we outperform the bad guys they get but I think

they get very talented people and the Cyber context is a great example you have what are probably bands of teenagers taking down major organizations these are highly talented highly motivated that's happening today or that the potential to do that is there if what we found with the dalama and our other kind of Open Source operations uh is indicative of what's out there it's out there it exists today there are many cases where we don't know it's happening and we are all capable of being targeted and taken down software and technology has democratized Espionage so what

would have taken a large governmental organization now a now can be done with two or three teenagers in a in a c in a coffee shop the biggest question this is really scary the biggest question that you as a president would have to if you were a president yeah you would have to decide an organization in America is being taken down okay we know it's being taken down what is the response that person has got gotten inside an organization with significant security and been able to obfuscate who they are doesn't that sound like the J

lare novels you read yeah so but but now you don't need to be a governmental organization you can be a single teenager now you as the president to go back to the example how do you respond well if it's a government organization you you call up and say look you either stop or we're going to come after you but what if it's a teenager and before you've solved that issue you cannot respond and this is a major issue that okay but it's part of your ability to see to see around the corner then in terms

of before something before they take it down you can see patterns of people and our actions and or behavior well what we do is we help people like we did with the Dal Lama figure out if you actually have been infiltrated so what kind of data is leaving and they had been they had been and in a massive way but then two we say these people are likely to actually be this they appear to be teenagers but they are teenagers that are likely being handled by this organization or they actually are teenagers or more likely

when you're done with our diagnostic we say we are not sure where who they are but we are sure they are in this building why don't you send someone to go find out who they are why isn't this going to collide head on into uh privacy and civil liberties well it would if there was a contradiction between finding terrorists and protecting civil liberties but the exact same transparency you can use to find terrorists you can use to see what the government's using the central question in my view of civil liberties is how it's not if

the government has data because let's assume the government has as much data as a health insurance company it's how is that data being used is it being used in a way that's lawful meaning do they have the right to use it and is it being migrated into places it's not allowed to be used we allow the we allow the enforcement of rules that government ought to enforce and by the way my experience is they want to enforce or at very least know they need to enforce and if it's framed in that way then you can

have you can have what is the ultimate Silicon Valley solution you remove the contradiction and we all March forward it's extraordinary stuff thank you for coming