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Once upon a time, computer scientists broke the Enigma code and helped win World War II. Now, they are building photo-sharing apps and AI girlfriends.
Last month, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his colleague Nicholas Zamiska published his book The Technological Republic. I began reading this book believing it would simply be a memoir of Palantir and a call for more people to work on defense startups. But instead, Karp told a story of progress and decline, of conformity and boldness, through the lens of history, philosophy, psychology, and much more.
The book’s main premise is that Silicon Valley lost its way. In the 1950s and 60s, Pentagon funding sowed the seeds that nurtured Silicon Valley’s early growth. And the Valley’s early projects were devoted to serving national interests – from intercontinental rockets to microwave tubes for military applications. But things have changed. According to Karp, the peace and comfort that these inventions created turned Silicon Valley into a consumerist hotbed, where founders enjoy the Pax Americana, pursue their dreams of revolutionizing social media, and neglect their duty to help protect the American national project.
But a new technological revolution is afoot: we already have a taste of what large language models are capable of, and have barely scratched the surface of agentic AI and robotics. Karp argues that as this revolution could (and most likely will) threaten the current world order, one of the West’s greatest challenges is redirecting Silicon Valley engineering talent back to working on meaningful problems in science and defense.
The Technological Republic has a little something for everyone.
For those interested in defense, the book recounts some of the main difficulties the defense industry faced in the past – such as the notorious case where Japan needed to buy radios for the US military in Afghanistan, because pointless regulations made the US unable to buy them itself. It also imparts key lessons Palantir learned when first entering the defense tech sphere, from how to navigate government regulations to get contracts, to how to efficiently deploy their system to vastly different teams in Afghanistan.
On the other hand, the independent thinker may be more interested in how groupthink has infiltrated Silicon Valley, the home of innovation and pragmatism. Karp gives the example of how companies tackling geopolitical problems became a taboo in the Bay Area, and how that turned the engineering elite away from using their skills at said companies. He also shares how Palantir combats groupthink internally. Learning from Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, Palantir’s management is based on a root-cause analysis system that avoids seemingly obvious assumptions, and instead finds the true reasons for failure, which are often interpersonal.
His book also particularly resonates with engineering students at elite institutions, where we are eager to build, but are lost in the search for meaning in our work.
This problem starts the moment we step foot on Stanford’s campus. We hear the legends of Evan Spiegel starting Snapchat in his student dorm. My freshman year, everyone knew of the frosh that founded a startup which sold essays of successful college applicants. And this certainly motivates people. Each year, entrepreneurship clubs receive applications from hundreds of ambitious freshmen, who are eager to dive into the startup world. And sometimes it “works”. BASES has successfully fostered startups that allow influencers to communicate more easily with their fans, or the great innovation that all of us use: Fizz.
This is not surprising–after all, the consumer startup space has low barriers to entry. A freshman is much more likely to understand the challenges of ordering merch online than of manufacturing cheaper biofuels. But an overstated takeaway from consumer startups is that what we build does not matter as much as finding sticky consumers and iterating quickly. The result is disappointingly incremental innovation; ultimately, while Fizz and Snapchat may quickly enrich their founders, the world would get along just fine without them.
In our Stanford applications, we painstakingly wrote about our passions for solving meaningful social problems. But when we come to Stanford, a lot of us forget those aspirations, declare a CS major, and groupthink our career decisions.
We are privileged to be able to access world leaders in engineering and science working on solving meaningful problems, from building underwater robots that recover lost shipwreck artifacts, to teaching AI to write in the language of genes. We should imbue our own work with this degree of ambition.
I hesitate to say that consumer startups are pointless–founding one certainly teaches a great deal about how to make products people love and care about. But as today’s technological revolution risks a growing Thucydides Trap, it may be a good idea to revisit some of the questions we answered in our college essays: to try to answer truthfully to ourselves what we care about, and what our moral and civic responsibilities are.
