Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a JD from Stanford Law School and a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.
Of his own career, Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking: “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.”
“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to the former police officer who attended a junior college, who now manages the U.S. Army’s Maven system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.
“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said.
Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”
He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.”
“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said.
