Palantir CEO Alex Karp said one of the company’s top executives once told him to stop talking so much about how large its Foundry platform would become.

“Please stop talking to Palantirians about how big Foundry is going to be,” Karp recalled Ted Mabrey telling him. “It’s depressing, and everybody knows you’re out of touch.”

Karp made the remarks Thursday during a conversation with Zeta Global CEO David Steinberg at Zeta Live ’26, Zeta’s annual AI marketing conference. Mabrey, who now leads Palantir’s commercial business, told Karp that the repeated promotion of Foundry was becoming somewhat aggressive for employees who had to hear the CEO boast about the platform constantly.

The warning had an effect, at least temporarily. “I had stopped talking to people for, like, six months,” Karp said.

He added, however, that his approach to decision-making often conflicts with what others believe is possible.

“I have an aesthetic idea of what could work and what won’t work,” Karp said. “About once a month, I have some idea that I think is important, and then I know it’s important. Everyone tells me, ‘We can never do that.’”

‘Tell me something I want to hear’

Karp said he depends on colleagues he has worked with for years to tell him the truth, describing those relationships as “very harsh.”

“In fact, I often tell them, ‘Can you tell me something I want to hear, please?’” he said.

Foundry is Palantir’s platform for bringing a company’s data together and controlling who can access it. The platform is now at the center of the company’s fastest-growing business.

During the second quarter, Palantir’s U.S. commercial revenue increased 149% from a year earlier to $764 million, according to the company’s earnings release. Palantir raised its full-year U.S. commercial revenue guidance to more than $3.4 billion, representing a growth rate of at least 134%.

The figures underline the anecdote’s stakes: Foundry, the platform Mabrey once urged Karp to stop touting, now anchors the commercial business Mabrey himself leads, and the raised full-year guidance sets a concrete bar for the quarters ahead.

After the results, Karp told investors that “for the first time people believe us,” according to Fortune.

Zeta is among the companies building on Foundry. In June, the two companies announced an agreement under which Zeta’s Data Cloud would be rebuilt on Palantir’s platform. Steinberg told Adweek that the seven-year partnership would generate “over $100 million a year in sales” within “the next year or so.” The arrangement made the venue part of the story: Karp was speaking at the conference of a company whose Data Cloud was being rebuilt on Foundry.

‘Where’s the parasite?’

Karp also discussed the difficulty Palantir faced in reaching its current position, saying investors initially struggled to understand the business. He said the company had difficulty raising money during its early years because it refused to develop software in the way investors wanted.

“Normal software is built to force you to adopt something that’s parasitic,” Karp said. “They take every one of those things, turn it into a commodity, and sell it to everyone else.”

According to Karp, venture capitalists wanted to hear that customers would be unhappy with a product but unable to leave it.

“‘Sticky’ is a metaphor for parasitic,” he said. “I get your data. I get it into something you can’t get rid of. The thing turns into something I can sell to everybody else.”

Karp said investors asked, “Where’s the parasite?”

Palantir was also mocked for sending engineers to work inside customer companies, a model the company calls forward-deployed engineering. The role since become one of the fastest-growing jobs in Silicon Valley, according to Fortune. Steinberg said Zeta adopted a similar approach.

“We pivoted a huge part of our business to follow you guys on this because it’s so freaking efficient,” Steinberg said.

Karp said Palantir has about 4,500 employees and is “not everyone’s cup of tea.” He said some of the company’s strongest references come from former employees who left after “another crazy lecture from Karp” and later wanted to return.

In March, Mabrey publicly called on “former hobbits” to return to “the Shire,” a reference to The Lord of the Rings, which also inspired Palantir’s name. AOL reported on the appeal.

Second-rate AI is costing businesses

During the AI-focused discussion, Karp argued that the technology has changed the cost of poor execution for businesses. In the past, he said, a second-rate software rollout might cost a company time and money but would rarely destroy it, because a business with a strong competitive moat could survive.

He used the defense industry as an example. A German government will buy a German company’s missile “even if it’s B minus because it flies and it’s German,” Karp said. But a missile that cannot hit targets against Russian weapons is no longer sufficient, and achieving that performance now depends on an AI application layer.

“Your B-minus missile is a triple-plus with this, and your A-plus missile is useless,” he said. “So that’s just binary.”

Karp said the same principle applies to every company. Asked what single decision the CEOs attending the conference should make, he advised them to identify what makes their business distinctive, obtain complete visibility from the factory floor through the cost of goods, and use AI to strengthen that advantage without allowing a model company or competitor to learn how the business operates. The advice tracked with Foundry’s own design, which is built to bring a company’s data together and control who can access it.

“If your person down the street gets it right, even if they’re inferior to you, just like the missile, they will outperform you,” Karp said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.