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This web of relationships could shape the direction of Silicon Valley over the next decade.

　　In Silicon Valley, almost everyone knows the famous PayPal "gang." Those who left PayPal created the tech companies that Silicon Valley is now familiar with — YouTube, Tesla, Yelp, SpaceX, Palantir, Matterport, LinkedIn, and more. 

　　In addition, their pace is also in the investment field - Uber, Facebook, Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Stripe and other companies behind the investment are inseparable from the support of PayPal veterans. 

　　Some of them - Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman are also billionaires. It can be said that no one can deny that this group of veterans who have left PayPal has been the main force in subverting Silicon Valley and changing the technology circle in the past ten years.

　　But now, a new mysterious organization is on the rise, and it is likely or has reappeared the scenery of the PayPal "gang". That is Palantir, a big data company founded by one of PayPal's "gangsters", Peter Thiel, which has spawned an entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this ecosystem, there are more than 170 companies founded by former Palantir employees. Most of these companies have grown into Silicon Valley star companies and have even gone public. In addition, the ecosystem also gathers a large number of partners and investors from the top VCs in Silicon Valley.

　　In this rather mysterious relationship network from the outside world, the elites have their own wonderful businesses, and at the same time help each other at critical moments.

　　The Network Behind 170 Startups 

　　Palantir is relatively low-key compared to the PayPal mafia of yesteryear. Because most of them have engineer backgrounds and work in relatively low-key technology startups.

　　Currently, there are 170 companies founded by former Palantir employees. There is often an additional layer of partnership and investment between these companies.

　　For example, Palantir co-founder Joe Londale founded Addepar, a wealth management software company, with a Palantir engineer. The company's valuation has exceeded $2.1 billion, and its current CEO Eric Poirier was once Palatir's technical director.

　　Another Palantir co-founder, Nathan Gettings, co-founded Affirm with PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. The company currently has a market capitalization of more than $8.6 billion.

　　Analytics firm Amplitude also has Palantir's blood in its blood. Former Palantir engineer Jeffrey Wang co-founded Amplitute. After the company went public, it had a market value of $5 billion. However, its current market value is about $1.8 billion.

　　In addition, defense technology company Anduril was also founded by three former Palantir employees, Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens and Matt Grimm. CLOBabak Siavoshy and CRO Matthew Stechman also previously worked at Palantir on the company's executive team. The company is currently valued at $4.6 billion.

　　Banking infrastructure company Blend, also previously founded by former Palantir employees, is valued at more than $4 billion in 2021.

　　The NFT trading platform OpenSea also has the genes of Palantir. One of its founders, Alex Atallah, is also a former Palantir employee. The company currently has a market capitalization of more than $13 billion.

　　In addition to full-time employees, Palantir has successfully started businesses, and even its interns are quite good. Handshake, founded by Palantir intern Garret Lord, has a valuation of more than $3.5 billion and has become a strong competitor to job-related companies such as LinkedIn. It is worth noting that before founding the company, Garret had no full-time work experience and only two Palantir internships.

　　There are countless such examples. In the statistical list alone, there are already more than 170 companies. If you look at the experiences of these Palantir-founded companies, they have a lot in common: having the best engineers, a courageous pursuit of bold ideas, and an investor list often supported by employees who have left Palantir.

　　Endless financing support 

　　When creating PalantirAlumni (Palantir Alumni Association) on Angelist, LubaLesiva thought it was a side project. The purpose is also very simple, which is to help her former colleagues at Palantir get more investor resources when they start their businesses. 

　　"I was so wrong," she said in an interview with Protocol. Now this organization has grown into PalumniVC. Up to now, more than 700 LPs have participated in the investment.

　　In her view, the number of investments is also directly proportional to the soaring number of Palantir "alumni" leaving to start companies.

　　A big factor in the success of these "alumni" entrepreneurs is that they are not bad at starting a business. Those ex-employees who left Palantir to start VCs or join VCs became their strong financial backing. 

　　For example, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale co-founded 8VC. 8VC's investor team also includes former Palantir employees like Alex Moore. Currently, Alex remains a member of Palantir's board of directors. He was also Palantir's first employee.

　　Trae Stephens, an early Palantir employee, is currently a partner at FoundersFund. Another partner of FoundersFund is Peter Thiel.

　　The tenth Palantir employee, Garry Tan, left Palantir and founded Initialized Capital. In addition, Accel's Steve Loughlin and XYZ's Ross Fubini are also consultants to Palantir.

　　It can be said that Palantir's "graduates" are all over the major VCs in Silicon Valley. They have natural trust in the "graduates" from Palantir, and are willing to support these former colleagues to start their own businesses and realize their ideas.

　　For example, when Pratap Ranade founded Arena many years after leaving Palantir, he was supported by investment banks such as FoundersFund and Initialized mentioned above.

　　In this "gang" network, there is no need to worry about elites who want to start a business, and investors who hold a lot of money.

　　It is worth noting that, until now, there are still "alumni" who "graduate" from Palantir and choose to start their own businesses.

　　At this summer's YCDemo Day event, four companies, including Ilumadata, Moonshot, Windmill, and Medplum, were founded by former Palantir employees.

　　Alex Moore compared Palantir to a school in an interview with Protocol. "A lot of young people didn't go to graduate school, they chose to go to Palantir." In his view, Palantir not only gave them a strong alumni network, but also taught them how to make a company stronger and learn hard work.

　　"Just as pressure can turn carbon into diamonds, Palantir can forge engineers into the next generation of Silicon Valley's best entrepreneurs," he said.

　　The best place for young people

　　Of course, the success of entrepreneurs also depends to a large extent on personal ability. The reason why Palantir's former employees can be brilliant after leaving Palantir is also because they themselves are the best technical elites in Silicon Valley.

　　When people in Silicon Valley talk about Palantir, they can't avoid its high standards of recruiting. This company can be said to have been gathering top technical talents since its inception.

　　Many Palantir employees have graduated from prestigious schools such as Stanford University, MIT, and Harvard University. Its co-founders will go to Stanford to study advanced natural language processing courses after graduation, in order to be one step ahead of other companies and tap the talents in the top of the pyramid in the classroom. As Palantir's first employee, Alex Moore once said that Palantir not only recruits talents, but also uses its powerful data analysis products to combine Facebook friend relationship lists to discover potential elites that may be attracted.

　　One of the things Palantir has taught these young founders is to do whatever it takes to poach top talent—who is your smartest friend, and who is the smartest friend of your smart friend, is the potential wealth of an entrepreneur.

　　In addition to the fact that these young people who join Palantir have very strong technical abilities, the experience of Palantir has also given them the ability to solve problems beyond the scope of technology.

　　In Palantir's corporate culture, engineers are not just engineers. Palantir sometimes has engineers working with customers in the field to solve problems in place of the sales team. This approach gives young engineers a big-picture view, an invaluable ability for entrepreneurs. Lonsdale said the more direct contact an engineer has with customer issues, the more likely he is to take responsibility for his work and have the ability to coordinate resources to solve the problem.

　　Like a school, Palantir trains its employees with real cases. The 80-20 work model they implement internally—that is, use Palantir software to solve 80% of customer needs, and then let engineers adjust the other 20% of needs on site, so that employees have a lot of autonomy over the product.

　　Pratap saw the power of this model and started practicing it at Arena, a new company he founded, giving tech employees more time with customers.

　　Matt Grimm, a former Palantir employee and co-founder of Auduril, said an employee only gets this ability to connect things when he experiences it himself. This ability to solve problems and work together in the long run is what drives the expansion of the Palantir alumni network.

　　At the same time, he also said that Palantir gave him the tenacity that an entrepreneur should have. "All four of Auduril's C-level management team have worked at Palantir. All of our struggles on the road to starting a business have all been at Palantir. We have all had one experience of overcoming difficulties."

　　Auduril's Stephens said: "There have been many twists and turns in the development of Palantir as a company. It is worth noting that, as a well-regarded data analysis company, Palantir was founded 17 years ago before it finally successfully went public. Previously, the company had faced many external doubts. This also gives these young people enough tenacity to move forward in adversity. "That's something that a big company like Google can't teach its employees. Because working conditions at Google are so good," he said.

　　There is no doubt that these Palantir "graduated" veterans are gradually becoming a force that Silicon Valley can't ignore, and the network between departing employees also allows these people to move forward together, without worrying about not having enough talent or money. support. Some of them will probably be Peter Thiel in a few years, start the next Palantir, and weave another bigger web.