5 minBusiness
Palantir CEO Alex Karp Says Executive Told Him to Stop Hyping Foundry
Palantir CEO Alex Karp revealed that a top executive once told him to stop promoting Foundry to employees, saying the constant hype made him seem out of touch. The platform now anchors Palantir's fastest-growing business, with U.S. commercial revenue up 149% year over year.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp said one of his top executives once told him to stop talking about how big the company's Foundry platform would become, warning that the constant hype was alienating employees. Karp recounted the exchange during a Thursday appearance at Zeta Live '26, an AI marketing conference hosted by Zeta Global, where he spoke with Zeta CEO David Steinberg.
«Please stop talking to Palantirians about how big Foundry is going to be,» Karp recalled Ted Mabrey, who now runs Palantir's commercial business, telling him. «It's depressing, and everybody knows you're out of touch.» Karp said the message landed, at least temporarily. «I had stopped talking to people for like six months,» he said.
The anecdote underscores how far Foundry has come since those early days. The platform, which consolidates a company's data and controls who can access it, now sits at the center of Palantir's fastest-growing business. In the second quarter, U.S. commercial revenue grew 149% year over year to $764 million, and Palantir raised its full-year U.S. commercial revenue guidance to more than $3.4 billion, a growth rate of at least 134%. After those results, Karp told investors «for the first time people believe us.»
Zeta Global is among the companies building on Foundry. In June, the two firms announced a deal under which Zeta's Data Cloud will be rebuilt on Palantir's platform. Steinberg told Adweek the seven-year partnership would bring in «over $100 million a year in sales» within «the next year or so.»
Karp also described the difficulty Palantir faced in its early years, when investors struggled to understand its business model. He said the company had trouble raising money because it refused to build software the way venture capitalists expected. «Normal software is built to force you to adopt something that's parasitic,» he said. «They take every one of those things, turn it into a commodity, and sell it to everyone else.»
According to Karp, investors wanted to hear that clients would be unhappy but unable to leave. «'Sticky' is a metaphor for parasitic,» he said. «I get your data. I get it into something you can't get rid of. The thing turns into something I can sell to everybody else.» When he pitched making special operators «more lethal» and bringing them home, Karp said, investors asked, «But where's the parasite?»
Palantir was also mocked for sending engineers to work inside client companies, a model it calls forward-deployed engineering. That approach has since become one of the fastest-growing jobs in Silicon Valley. Steinberg said Zeta has copied it. «We pivoted a huge part of our business to follow you guys on this because it's so freaking efficient,» he said.
Karp said Palantir has about 4,500 employees and is «not everyone's cup of tea.» Some of its best references, he said, come from former staff who left after «another crazy lecture from Karp» and later wanted to return. In March, Mabrey publicly called on «former hobbits» to return to «the Shire,» a reference to the Lord of the Rings.
During the AI-focused talk, Karp argued that artificial intelligence has changed what poor execution costs a business. In the past, a second-rate software rollout cost a company time and money but rarely sank it, since a firm with a strong moat could get by. He used defense as an example. A German government will buy a German company's missile «even if it's B minus because it flies and it's German,» he said. But a missile that can't hit targets against Russian weapons is no longer good enough, and getting it there now depends on an AI application layer. «Your B-minus missile is a triple-plus with this, and your A-plus missile is useless,» he said. «So that's just binary.»
He said the same logic applies to every company. Asked what one decision the CEOs in the room should make, Karp told them to identify what makes their business special, get full visibility from the factory floor to the cost of goods, and use AI to strengthen it without letting a model company or a rival learn how it works. «If your person down the street gets it right, even if they're inferior to you, just like the missile, they will outperform you,» Karp said.
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