From Mumbai to a White House lunch: how Palantir's 13th employee became CTO
BrettKrieger12 · x · 2026-09-30
A thread traces Shyam Sankar's career: born in Mumbai, family robbed of life savings in Nigeria, restart in Orlando, self-taught Linux/Perl, Cornell while working as a software dev, joining Palantir as its 13th employee, pioneering the FDE model, rising to CTO, and pushing a renaissance in US defense innovation — now invited to lunch with the POTUS. The quoted post confirms Karp and Sankar are directly within the President's sight.
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