Palantir’s tech head explains how he manages stars — and how he owned a big screwup to the CEO

• Palantir's tech chief uses a "Superman" analogy to help employees identify their strengths and weaknesses.
• Shyam Sankar said Palantir's culture values honesty and learning from mistakes.
• The CTO shared a time when he made a major mistake and came clean to Palantir's CEO.

Palantir's chief technology officer uses a "Superman" analogy to help manage the company's brightest talent.

On an episode of the "Invest Like The Best" podcast released on Tuesday, Shyam Sankar shared how he helps employees identify which skills to embrace and which to avoid.

"Superpowers are effortless," he said. "My analogy for this is it Superman could fly. He could see through walls. But that wasn't some sort of arduous thing for him to do. It's just something he could do."

The Palantir CTO, who has been with the defense tech giant for 20 years, added that the other side of this is identifying your "kryptonite" — in the series, a mineral fatal to Superman.

"It's not like something you can work on. The only strategy for Superman around kryptonite was to avoid it," Sankar said.

He added that the company supports employees in uncovering these weaknesses.

"The discovery of kryptonite usually involves you being exposed to it," he said. "You don't want to create a culture which is like, you fuck this up, I gotta fire you."

Palantir culture

On the podcast, Sankar shared that he once made a big mistake, which he took to the company's CEO, Alex Karp.

"I sheepishly went into Alex and was just completely honest," he said. "He was also in pain as he internalized what this was going to mean. But he valued the fact that I wouldn't try to hide it."

Sankar added that the episode taught him that it was important to have an environment that allows mistakes.

Palantir is known across tech for its anti-hierarchical, untraditional company culture.

According to staffers on the company's YouTube videos, Palantir is split into micro-teams, and employees report to their teammates. One hiring manager said that, for a project to which a Big Tech company would assign 30 engineers, Palantir only assigns three to four.

The company's leadership has also embraced ditching diplomas in favor of real-world learning.

On an August earnings call, Karp, who holds a law degree from Stanford and a doctorate from Germany's Goethe University, said "no one cares" about educational backgrounds at the company.