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The degree to which society creates wealth, I think, is largely determined by government and financial systems.
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Hours wasted in traffic represent not only lost wages but enormous amounts of economic activity that might have happened. Congestion indirectly increases consumer prices, makes travel times unreliable for commuters and truckers, and precludes many people from accessing jobs in urban hubs.
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Government officials and citizens care about many causes - and they all require resources. For example, I am personally passionate about ending the human trafficking that still occurs within our borders.
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Our family is very, very competitive. But it's a fun and inspiring sort of competitive. It makes you proud of what you do and makes you want to work hard and do all your homework so you can win.
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I was really lucky about two things about my life as a kid: I had awesome parents, and I had awesome peers.
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It always struck me as pretty cool that people who changed the world often knew each other. After reading them separately, hearing that David Hume and Adam Smith were friends made sense.
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As we progress as a species, we will unlock new means for enhancing our lives at every turn - and our conceptions of wealth and poverty will evolve in tandem.
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Success gives you a platform for further success - suddenly everybody wants to work with you, and your opportunities and possibilities open up. But at the same time, success is also immensely challenging - it ultimately often creates pride, stubbornness, and sloppiness that beget failure, taking down people and organizations.
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Palantir owes much of its success to the amazing talent of the first 30-40 technologists who joined the company, as well as to the internal leadership that helped motivate this core group to achieve its ambitious goals and to continue to attract extraordinary people.
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Engineering is the art of managing scarcity - it's easy to design and build a massive bridge that will last forever if cost is not an issue. Similarly, to build a new company, you must manage scarce resources.
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We founded Palantir in 2003-2004 because we perceived a giant gap between how the defense and intelligence community was harnessing technology to achieve its goals and what we had seen was possible in Silicon Valley over the last decade.
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Good government is one of the most important factors in economic growth and social well-being.
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In a well-run tech company, small, elite groups who have ownership in the company are given the freedom to define and achieve their tasks in line with a broader mission that they have internalized as their own.
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Great leaders inspire incredible loyalty in their followers and subordinates.
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Private equity investors are an integral part of the economy and should be celebrated for making our country wealthier.
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A common mistake among new entrepreneurs who have raised large rounds is that they have essentially infinite resources.
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A deep concern of mine is that leaders in the technology sector have not developed a culture that insists upon courage, honor, duty, and humility - what we might call a culture of virtue.
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Fear is the wrong response to technological unemployment. Focusing on economic flexibility and adaptability - with special attention to eliminating the barriers we've accidentally created to the mobility of the working classes - is the right response to technological disruption.
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The Pentagon should use data to guide financial decision-making.
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In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.
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Applying smarter IT to genomic data may offer the potential to cure many types of cancer and other diseases.
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We created Addepar because we saw a place where a multi-billion dollar global platform clearly should exist - but did not yet - to fix many of the challenges that exist in the finance industry.
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One of my biggest intellectual influences in my life was Alex Karp of Palantir.
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There will be trillions of dollars under Addepar. You will have tons of money and information flowing through it.