Palantir Technologies

Earned a B.A. from Haverford College, a J.D. from Stanford Law School (1992), and a Ph.D. in Social Theory from Goethe University Frankfurt (2002), studying under philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Before Palantir he founded Caedmon Group, an investment firm managing money for European private clients. He met Peter Thiel at Stanford and co-founded Palantir in 2003, serving as CEO continuously since. Under his leadership Palantir went public via direct listing in 2020 and reached a market capitalization exceeding $200 billion by 2025.

Studied philosophy at Stanford (B.A. 1989) and earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School (1992). He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin in 1998 and served as CEO until its $1.5 billion sale to eBay in 2002. He used PayPal's fraud-detection insight — pattern-matching on large datasets — as the conceptual seed for Palantir, which he co-founded in 2003. He also made the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004 and co-founded Founders Fund in 2005, becoming one of Silicon Valley's most influential technology investors.

Earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. While still an undergraduate he began working at Peter Thiel's hedge fund and co-founded Palantir in 2003 alongside Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings. As President and Secretary he has helped grow Palantir from a government intelligence software startup into a platform deployed across defense, law enforcement, healthcare, and manufacturing. He is among the company's longest-tenured executives and holds a substantial ownership stake.

Interned at PayPal before working as an early executive at Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital hedge fund. He co-founded Palantir in 2004 and departed in 2009 while retaining an advisory role. He subsequently co-founded Addepar (wealth management analytics), Formation 8, and 8VC, an early-stage venture firm managing over $6 billion focused on defense and government technology. He also co-founded Epirus, the directed-energy counter-drone startup, reinforcing his pattern of building dual-use defense technology companies.

Was an early engineer at PayPal, contributing expertise in cryptography and secure systems before co-founding Palantir in 2003. He contributed to the early technical architecture enabling Palantir to manage sensitive government and defense intelligence data securely. After departing from Palantir he co-founded Affirm in 2012 with Max Levchin and others, applying fintech to consumer lending, and also founded RoboteX, a company developing robotic platforms. He is the least publicly visible of Palantir's five founders.