My Most Difficult Interview

I interviewed with Palantir - $20 billion valuation as of this writing. It is a company that produces software and largely works with governments and institutions in areas ranging from cybersecurity to financial fraud detection. It was co-founded by Peter Thiel and in his book Zero to One, coauthored by Blake Masters, Peter reveals his favorite question.

What is something you believe in that the majority of the world does not?

Had I read the book prior to this final round I would have been much more prepared. The exact same question was asked to me – a wondrous example of when reading books about the industry in general can help tremendously. In an interview, you want to begin answering a question before the “awkward time zone”, defined loosely as the time it takes before responding becomes late and creating an impression of not knowing what you’re talking about. I believe 10 seconds of silent thinking is the limit before one enters the zone. 10 seconds is usually sufficient to begin dissecting most problems such as case questions, analytical hypotheticals, and brain teasers. After the 10 seconds are up I express how I will plan to solve the question and ask clarification questions along the way. However, if you were to dissect and walk through your thought process for Peter’s question, it would likely look a bit different from a traditional one. By this I mean given that we are in an interview where you don’t personally know the interviewer, it would be in your best interest to stay away from certain subjects such as religion, social stereotypes, etc. But those are simply internal filters you would apply to your thinking, and is not something that would be verbally explain to the interviewer. This is the first reason why this question is uniquely difficult.

The second reason, which is related to the first, is that the question almost prompts you to take a position prior to providing the proof or justifications. This prevents normal case dissection strategies where you list off things to consider and along the way realize which ones should be further explicated. These strategies are useful for all sorts of questions like how would you maximize movie ticket sales in NYC to how many basketballs fit in a plane. Peter’s question is difficult because you have 10 seconds to fluidly make a claim, defend it, and persuade the interviewer why you have a justifiable contrarian view on that subject.

The answer I provided within the awkward time zone was the claim: Love is quantifiable.

Just these 3 words. I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of what just come out of my mouth. This claim was never something I had ever thought about before. It was not something I had filtered down to in my mind in the 10 seconds before entering the zone– it simply popped into my head and now I have to defend it. Once I verbally made the claim, I had to stick with it for the sake of fluidity, and let my impromptu skills carry the rest of the conversation. My argument began as such: Feelings of like, love, and desire (LLD), are at its rudimentary level, a combination of chemical reactions in the mind that involve a release of dopamine and endorphins. Acknowledging that these feelings are of course subjective for each individual, it is also true that people are able to assign preferences among competing activities, objects, and beings. For example, if I said to you “Would you rather eat a cheeseburger vs. pepperoni pizza?”, you can provide me a comparison as to what you would prefer to eat at this moment. It doesn’t matter if that changes over time, all that matters is that you can make a comparison when asked. Now if we simulated this across all activities, objects, and beings, you can then create a rank order for all of these things, at any given time. At the point where you can simulate this across all things, the feeling of love (and like, desire, etc) can be quantified on whatever scale you want to transpose this rank order to. Even though there are differing notions of love when comparing things like hobbies to food, love is still comparable on their own scales within hobbies, within foods, and that means quantification can exist since you can rank order those preferences. Everyone can create their own unit of measurement and decide where love for anything resides – and have multiple classifications to be able to more aptly compare hobbies to hobbies, people to people, etc).

Now I wouldn’t say this is the greatest answer in the world, and probably to the average interviewer, this would be quite a strange response. But in retrospect I was quite proud of this answer as it truly pushed the bounds of my impromptu skills while still operating within my framework of 1) answering within the awkward time zone 2) don’t hit sensitive subjects since you don’t know the interviewer 3) fluidity (minimize retracting statements, prevent completely if possible). Either way, it was a great learning experience.