Everything awesome in life is kind of a cult—it starts with a truth or belief that flies in the face of orthodoxy
Garry distills his lesson from Palantir: the most successful ventures begin as contrarian beliefs held by a small group, which is actually very punk and aligns with embracing truth over conventional wisdom. ✦ AI generated
Garry Tan · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 10:20
From Palantir I definitely learned that everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. That starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy, which is very punk actually.
verbatim transcript · starts at 10:20
10:20and talk to the first party people who are experiencing a thing experiencing a thing. >> Yes. >> Um then you learn secret knowledge. Then you have gnosis. And so, uh you know, from Palantir I definitely learned that everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. >> Yeah. >> That starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy, which is very punk actually.
10:44>> Yes. Yes. Totally dude, that's very Rick Rubin would approve. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah, well, actually what I love about you're saying is that there's a beautiful truth in the fact that you've talked through some of these maybe tragic misses, but you know, the lessons are courage, the lessons are earnestness, right? The lessons are when your instincts are pulling you to work with a set of people. So so maybe talk a
11:04little bit about, you know, we talk a lot about how Silicon Valley and the magic is it takes outsiders and turns them into insiders. And I feel like YC is the ultimate distillation of that. You know, you go from being two founders perhaps from a foreign country to two people with YC on their LinkedIn and everybody now knows what that means. >> Totally. >> So talk about how that happens. Is it a