Architecture and civilization have always been practically synonymous. From one era to the next, the built environment has shaped countless aspects of daily existence, and the architect has become a celebrated figure in the popular imagination. It’s no accident that “architect” can refer to someone responsible for realizing many types of visions, beyond blueprints.
Last month, the first company I co-founded, Palantir, joined the S&P 500. For most of 20 years, the naive mainstream view of Palantir was that it was a “glorified consultancy” – a services firm and not a real tech innovator building SaaS “products” or “platforms”. To dismiss Palantir early on was short-sighted, given they’d hired some of Silicon Valley’s top tech talent, but it was based on a factual observation: unlike most software businesses, many of our engineers spent significant time working alongside our customers. We called this team “Forward Deployed Engineers”, and they obsessed over the intricacies of our customers’ daily work, business models, and pain points.
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