Nabeel Qureshi

Nabeel Qureshi is a former VP of Business Development at Palantir (8 years), where he worked as a forward deployed engineer on public health projects, COVID-19 response, and AI drug discovery at the NIH. Previously founding member of GoCardless; visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center researching AI policy alongside Tyler Cowen. Based in London.

Key ideas

• Forward deployed engineering. Engineers working at client sites 4 days a week, with 4–5 iteration cycles per week against real users — the fastest founder-training loop in tech. 30% of PMs who leave Palantir start a company.
• Services-to-platform. Be your own first customer; force customers to use internal tools early (even when painful); generalisable learnings become product differentiators (e.g. Foundry Ontology from Airbus engagement).
• Murder boards. Standard project review: three to four people who know nothing about the project tear apart a two-page plan. Principles must be genuinely contestable to be real principles.
• Distinctive bad signal. Intentional culture filtering: attract the people who resonate with your hardest mission by being willing to turn off everyone else. Palantir’s defence/intelligence focus was a deliberate bad signal.
• No titles. Goodhart’s Law: titles become the metric people game. Without titles, contribution must be demonstrated continuously.

Appearances

See also

• Agentic Engineering
• Product Taste
• Evals