Palantir is worth $265B today but had one customer for the first years of its existence.

That customer was the CIA.

The things they got right here?

1. Positioning themselves like a direct extension of the CIA’s team: any data or analytics requests were coming to the Palantir team, which
2. Allowed Palantir to fully understand the CIA’s workflows and day-to-day operations, and
3. Build core primitives into the product that could scale to other customers.

And if they could sell to the CIA, they could sell to anyone.

This resonates with me. The approach we take at Markprompt bears some resemblance:

1. Embed closely with customers, handling the engineering lift to build tailored support experiences, which allows us to
2. Understand the nuances and exact use-cases of their support operation, and
3. Model core structures to be adapted and reused across the customer base.

The challenge (and the thrill) is in defining the right “primitives”: modeling the core structures so they can be adapted and reused across a broad customer base. That’s how each partnership doesn’t just solve a single problem, but inspires a solution that can scale for everyone. As new customers are brought on board, this process accelerates in a compounding way.

For example, we’re currently partnering with a customer to streamline complex account and transaction data into their support system. It’s amazing how much detail hides in the team’s day-to-day operations - and how satisfying it is to reveal and simplify it with the right foundational building blocks. Once this goes live, we’re confident many other companies will benefit from this immediately.