‘Everybody knows you’re out of touch’: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says his own exec told him to stop hyping Foundry
Fortune Joshua Hong
Palantir’s CEO says one exec told him to quit hyping Foundry because employees knew he was out of touch. Foundry is now driving Palantir’s fastest growth.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Joshua Hong — read the original for the full story.
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Alex Karp says one of his top lieutenants once told him to stop telling staff how huge Foundry would become. Ted Mabrey’s message, as Karp recalled it, was blunt: the boasting was depressing, and everyone could see he was out of touch. Karp said that after hearing it, he kept quiet about Foundry for about six months.
The Palantir chief was speaking Thursday with Zeta Global CEO David Steinberg at Zeta Live ’26, Zeta’s annual AI marketing conference. And the irony is obvious: the product Karp once felt he had to defend is now at the center of Palantir’s fastest-growing business. In the second quarter, U.S. commercial revenue rose 149% from a year earlier to $764 million, and Palantir lifted its full-year U.S. commercial revenue outlook to more than $3.4 billion, implying growth of at least 134%.
Karp said that part of the battle was simply getting people to believe the company’s pitch. He described himself as someone who makes calls based on an aesthetic sense of what can work, even when others think the idea sounds impossible. He also said he depends on long-running relationships with colleagues who are willing to be harsh, and sometimes asks them for the opposite of flattery.
Foundry, which helps companies pull data into one place and control access to it, has become a live business for Zeta as well. In June, the companies said Zeta’s Data Cloud would be rebuilt on Foundry, and Steinberg told Adweek that the seven-year partnership could bring in more than $100 million a year in sales within the next year or so.
Karp used the talk to make a broader argument about software and AI: bad execution used to be survivable, but not anymore. He said Palantir was mocked early on for sending engineers inside client companies, a practice it calls forward-deployed engineering, yet that model has since become one of the fastest-growing jobs in Silicon Valley. Palantir, he said, has about 4,500 employees and is not everyone’s cup of tea.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Palantir’s real talent is not subtlety; it is turning things other firms would call awkward into a sales pitch. That works until the room is full of people who can smell the sermon, which is probably why “please stop talking” sounds like one of the healthier things anyone has ever said inside a software company. Plenty of AI vendors could use a little less mythology and a lot more embarrassment.
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