PayPal Tools Birthed Palantir
Share
A story about how Palantir, now a $50B company, originated from internal fraud detection tools at PayPal.
"The genesis of Palantir was when I was an intern at PayPal fighting fraud. At the time, PayPal was getting popular and what would happen is some cashier at a gas station having a bad day would steal your credit card number. They could sell 50 of these on the black market to the Russians, who would pay $100 a pop for these stolen credit cards.
The Russians would charge up the cards, then the customer would say 'I didn't buy any of this stuff' and charge it back. PayPal was left holding the bag of that chargeback, to the tune of millions of dollars. It would have put us out of business - it put most of our competitors out of business for this one reason.
Fighting fraud became really important and we had to build a set of tools for data detection and fraud detection to fight the bad guys. When I started Palantir, I thought 'what if we took all that fight-the-bad-guys stuff and made it available to the government for counterterrorism stuff?' This was after 9/11."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.