Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. In this episode, Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Palantir CEOs George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss.
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Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6.
This is a special edition really, since this year marks the 20th anniversary of Palantir. It’s hard to fathom considering the internet was still very new in 1996, so there are very few web shops that have been around this long. Palantir started as a development agency, then over time added services such as design and strategy, to become the full, well-rounded, end to end company that it is today.
So we are celebrating our 20th anniversary later this month. I sat down with owners George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss to talk about how Palantir started, how it developed into the company it is today, and where we’re headed.
AM: Hello, Tiffany and George! How are you doing today?
George DeMet [GD]: We’re doing well.
Tiffany Farriss [TF]: Hi, Allison!
AM: Thanks for talking with me, I appreciate it. So we’re going to talk about the 20 years of Palantir. It’s hard to believe, right?
GD: It’s…yeah [laughs]. I’ve never really known anything else, it’s kind of funny.
AM: You’ve never had another job?
GD: That’s not true. I worked for my parents when I was in high school. They ran a disposal and recycling company. So I did have experience growing up driving a garbage truck and managing a recycling center.
TF: This wasn’t what I was going to do, but it is pretty much the only thing I’ve done. Other than having a NASA research grant as an undergrad, this is it.
AM: What were you going to do? I’m curious.
TF: I was going to go to grad school in astrophysics. That was my thing. I really wanted to do astrophysics, and I really liked cosmology in particular. I wanted to study the origins of the universe.
AM: Which we’re kind of doing [laughs]. So let’s have a quick overview of Palantir’s history. How did Palantir begin?
GD:So I actually started Palantir back in the summer of ’96, which was between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had discovered the Web back in the fall of ’94 when I was a freshman, and had really been kind of fascinated by it. It was very new – Netscape was still in beta at that point, and I was just really captivated by this idea of having pretty much anyone in the world being able to publish content that pretty much anyone else anywhere in the world would be able to read and access and view. I thought that was kind of revolutionary and I could see that this was the start of something kind of interesting, and I wanted to be a part of it. And so I started making some web pages, just sort of as a hobby. I made a fan page for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ that is still around today, after 22 years. And then I discovered that folks would pay me money to build websites and web pages. So after doing this freelance for a while, I decided it was a good idea to start a company around it.
TF: Because that’s what your family does [laughs].
GD: So that’s probably a little bit of helpful background. Both sides of my family are a couple of generations of people who started and ran family businesses. I mentioned that my parents have a disposal company. My mom’s father had a couple of grocery stores in Leavenworth, Kansas. My dad’s family ran the DeMet candy company, the folks that brought you the chocolate Turtle. So that was really kind of all I knew, right? Working for someone else was really not part of my DNA. So I knew I was going to do something, and when the web came along, it seemed like this was definitely something I wanted to do.
TF: For me, I started on the web around the same time, in 1994. It was kind of an outgrowth of my love of Latin [laughs]. That’s the other thing about me is my love of the classics, particularly Latin, and I was involved in the Junior Classical League in Ohio. I first became the membership director and then the president of the Ohio chapter, and for them I learned how to do HTML. And the web was so new and so exciting, and I had a friend who was at MIT who could give me server space. And this was just so cool that we could be out there and be doing that. So when I met George, when I started at Northwestern, I joined up with him when we were creating a website for our dorm, for Willard Residential College. And we really wanted – our residential college was eclectic, which is probably the best way to talk about it [laughs].
GD: I think the proper way to talk about it was pan-thematic. Most of the other residential colleges had a theme, like arts or sciences or engineering. We were all the things.
TF: We were all the things, we were all the interesting people interested in lots of things. And so we really wanted to do an amazing job creating that website, and that’s really how George and I started working together, in that capacity, and ultimately that’s how Palantir got its second client, or first paying client, depending on how you looked at it [laughs].
GD: That’s right. So one of the things I didn’t know how to do but Tiffany did quite well at the time was to actually go out and find clients. And that’s the skill that Tiffany brought to the table, in addition to her technical skills and managerial skills – really bringing some kind of structure to the enterprise, as it were.
TF: And it all happened in the way we still sell today, in that we’re looking for that good fit. You say, OK, this is what we can do and these are our ideas and this is what we bring to the table. And that’s essentially how we got – when I was a freshman and George was a junior – how two students got the job to do Northwestern’s main university site. It was also the 90s which was a bit of a Wild West [laughs]. But that’s how it happened.
We were at the awards ceremony for the residential college competition, which we won, of course [laughs], and I was talking to one of the judges who happened to be responsible for the web at Northwestern at the time. And she was talking to me about our thought process, and how we approached it, and I was talking about things that are so obvious to everyone now. The three-click rule. Thinking about how users would journey through the path and how you would organize information. And how you apply human-computer interaction theory to the web. But this being early ’97, you know, she said to me, I’m taking classes to learn what you guys already know, can I hire you for $2 an hour as a work-study? And I said, well, I already have a NASA research grant, so, no, but you can contract Palantir. My partner will be in Wisconsin but I can come in for meetings with you. And that’s how we got that contract, so that’s how it all worked out. And that first project was to redo the information technology site, and then in ’97 through ’98 we ended up doing the main Northwestern site.
GD: For the folks at Northwestern, I’ve heard people complain since about the fact that it’s northwestern.edu. We share a little bit of the blame for that [laughs]. But seriously, nobody calls it NWU. It’s Northwestern. Or maybe NU, but I think that might have been taken.
AM: Well, a pretty auspicious beginning, I would say. Now that you live in Evanston and the office is in Evanston.
GD: Yeah. We never moved [laughs].
TF: Well, this is the thing. I met George my third day at Northwestern, and we’ve been a couple ever since, but we’ve lived within a six-block radius since 1998 [laughs]. Our first off-campus apartment was literally a block over, two blocks away. This has just been where we’ve found a home. Neither of us is from here. I’m from Akron, Ohio, and George is from Wisconsin. We met in the middle and literally stayed.
GD: To be fair, I have some family connections to Chicago. My dad and his family are from Chicago, and so it’s always felt like a second home to me even though I grew up in northern Wisconsin. There’s also a lot more to do here, and it’s a place where even though we are a distributed company and have customers all over the world, it’s a really great place to be.
TF: What I like about it is that irrespective of a physical office, I do consider us to be a firm that’s rooted in Midwest values. And I love that Chicago means business, but it’s business with this ethic. You work hard and you play hard, and you treat people fairly, right? That’s the way that we do things here, and it’s really important to me. And even once we don’t have a physical office or we don’t have headquarters or whatever it is, it’s about the sense of philosophy of place, of being Midwestern. Of being very authentic, being very genuine, and bringing our best selves to what we do.
AM: What would you say, if you can project back 20 years, or 19 or 18 years, the focus was for Palantir the first couple of years? Was the focus just trying to stay afloat, was there a specific direction you were trying to take at the time?
GD: So if you go back in time to the mid-90s and remember what the Web looked like at that point, it was the era of Geocities websites, and everyone was into, like, banners that scrolled across your pages and little animated GIF clip art and animated background patterns, and just really horribly ugly garish sites that people were creating because they could. And one of the things that I really wanted to do at Palantir was to bring more of a design aesthetic to the Web. I really felt that it shouldn’t be too difficult to create websites that were not just functional but were actually easy to use, and didn’t make you want to claw your eyes out when you looked at them. So I thought there was a real opportunity there. Not just to be able to do business, but also to help make the Web a better place. And that was very much what we wanted to do, certainly for the first couple of years, and even beyond as we started partnering with other folks. I think making the Web look better and work better for people was really key in those first couple of years.
