Palantir Co-Founder Rejection

A story about how Garry Tan turned down Peter Thiel's offer to become a co-founder at Palantir, which is now worth $95 billion.

"I went to Stanford computer engineering, and my fraternity brothers Joe Lonsdale and Stefan Cohen were a couple years behind me. I was a year out of school in 2004, and I thought 'Look at me, I have health insurance, I have a real job.' Then my old fraternity brothers - I guess they couldn't get a real job so they're going to start a company.

Peter Thiel was running the playbook that worked for him when he sold PayPal. When you start something, you take an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, write down all the smartest people you know, then take them out to dinner and lunch and sit on their doorstep until they quit their jobs to come join you.

Peter wasn't a billionaire yet. He offered me a check for $70,000, matching what I made at Microsoft. I said no before the soup even came out, and we just sat there awkwardly for the rest of dinner.

In retrospect, I didn't understand that the world isn't narrated to you. I thought 'The Wall Street Journal isn't writing about enterprise software, this isn't a hot space.' But that was fundamentally backward thinking. If you're actually a prime mover in the world like Peter Thiel, you go out and discover something about the world by talking to your users and gathering primary information."