you and uh how did how did you meet Joe so I uh I had been working at Zoom for almost three years and one of the colleagues I was working with said you know there's this company that just sounds perfect for you there it's a small group of people at the time it was 12 people and my freshman room dormate at Stanford is one of the co-founders Joe No kidding So he put me in touch with Joe and Joe was how I Joe Joe hired me That's how I got started While Silicon Valley builds chatbots this company is building AI that saves lives Let's dive into the mission and origin of Palunteer and how it's already changing how wars and governments work So what what was Palunteer at the at the start at the beginning it was honestly something much smaller I mean it was still ambitious in the sense that this group of folks wanted to work on problems to help a handful of institutions in the world with counterterrorism And we had this idea that in a you know the discourse if we can remember what it was like immediately post 911 it was really the political discourse was something like what matters more security or privacy and it's like to to us as engineers that sounded stupid like don't those both thing don't both of those things matter uh and so you know politicians they debate where should you be on the efficient frontier should we trade off this to have more of this or whatever but engineers they build things so you can have more of both Uh and so who's going to build the actual technology that allows us to protect the data so that we can maximize what we can share so that there's never going to be dots that we can't connect again and do so in a way that the American people have confidence in and can believe in And recognizing that a solution that was really going to do that would have to span countries You know one of the proudest operations that we were involved with was defeating an ISIS cell in uh in Iraq that had a downed US drone that they were going to load with explosives and bring to a hospital explode it and then blame it on the coalition And to solve that problem it required intel from the Danes the Americans and the Brits you know And how does that work historically uh hopefully you you have friends at each of these services and you're all going to share information and it gets through the foreign disclosure process and you know everything in that methodology is set up so that we lose and you're not going to be able to do it fast enough to intervene But you know our technology enabled that to happen machine to machine in a way that before they could get the drone out of their garage they were gone How many lives are saved when AI systems can talk across borders faster than terrorists can move this isn't science fiction It's the operational edge AI provides today The original vision of Palunteer wasn't just about building software It was about redefining the mission of AI to empower decisions that protect people I mean so what even after interviewing Joe I'm still I'm I'm still trying to figure out what I mean what Palunteer does and and and how it deciphers all that information I mean just a couple You guys are in anti-moneyaundering rail energy defense insurance semiconductors utilities retail I mean there's got to be a list of at least 30 things Yeah Well it Yeah At this point so we do much more than counterterrorism as you're pointing out The business there's two sides of it There's the government side and the commercial side Okay So and it's about 50/50 which is unusual I think for for reasons we'll maybe get into later but the commercial side it's 50 different industries energy and mining insurance pharmaceuticals and and the government side Most of what we're well known for is defense and intelligence Absolutely That's that's twothirds of the business but also health the IRS tax fraud you know justice department you know helping these organizations run themselves better And what the technology really does you can think about it is like an operating system for an organization Uh it it allows you to actually see yourself It's shocking how hard this is How do I have access to all of the data that's in my enterprise in a way that I as a human think about it i as the principal not just the human but I as the principal like what's my model for this what are the questions I want to ask how can a government or Fortune 500 company win if it doesn't even know what it knows it's easy to underestimate how chaotic enterprise data is The fact that Palunteer makes that human understandable from IRS fraud to rail systems shows it's not just about AI analysis but about cognition In an AI era data isn't power Understanding is This is the bridge between raw information and real world action Simple example when rocket man was rattling his saber in 2017 in North Korea the army wanted to answer the question how many tanks are there in the army that is a 3-w week data call Are you serious it takes three weeks to get an inventory Until we got involved it took three weeks to answer that question because there is no canonical representation of a tank And what do you mean by tank do you mean the ones that are ready or not ready so the way you would do it is you would you would send down the data call to all the units They'd go check out the motorpool They'd come back with the answer And so there's no living breathing canonical record that continues to flow through this We've built these systems The army is older than the country right like we've built these systems It's like archaeology when you go back there and try to look at this It's not how you would do it today but that's our extent reality It's we have to deal with this messiness Sometimes uh you know the cynical way to think about Palunteer is it took something as sexy as James Bond to motivate engineers to work on a prom as boring as data integration But that is the starting point If you can't see yourself if you can't integrate all your data like you're just always chasing your tail Then on top of that we make powerful interfaces for decision making One of the contrarian quips I have is that data is not the new oil You know people have been running around saying data is the new oil Data is the new oil I think data is the new snake oil There's nothing inherently valuable about data It's only valuable if you can use it to make a decision So that it's about decision advantage So how do I leverage this data now integrated so that you can make a better decision you can see further in the future that you can out compete your competitor in the commercial world or your adversary in the defense world How do you expect to win a modern war if your systems can't even count your tanks that's not just a military problem That's a data failure at scale Palunteer's core value is cutting through that digital fog and turning bureaucratic noise into real time mission critical clarity Isn't that exactly the kind of AI we need not just smart but operationally decisive This is the part of AI no one glamorizes but it's where the real transformation happens So I mean just just for example the the down drone that ISIS was going to move into a hospital and blow it up and blame it on us I mean what what kind of data are you guys feeding volunteer to to to make those type of decisions and and to speed the process up so the to me like just for example so I'm a former SEAL I hear that and I'm I think okay well let's go raid the compound while they're doing that kill all the bad guys and recover the drone and it so the decision seems fairly I mean obvious the decision is leading up to the point where you realize that's what they're trying to do right so how do I integrate the human reporting that I have that tells me what might be going on now keep in mind that one part of the reporting is in this country one part of the reporting is in that country you So who's willing to share what who even knows that sharing it is going to lead to a mission critical outcome that saves lives So how do you start to automate more of that how do you help them piece those those things together um how do you combine the technical collection you have with this too so maybe you have sigant that helps you understand this helps you understand that this reporting is correlated to other cells that you actually care about where you have intercepts that tell you something How do I use my historic FMV footage observations of that compound that help me piece together more more things that lead to the conclusion we've got a problem here and we've got a tight timeline to act Holy So it's so basic So am I right if I say I mean contractor for the agency operator for the Navy Seals I I saw how inefficient government communication is just within US stuff CIA FBI DA MIL all these all these different organizations all I mean it's a disaster trying to talk to each other and so basically this takes all the information So all these entities are feeding Palunteer the information and then Palunteer basically what what disseminates or not disseminate but processes the information and gives you the probability of what is likely going to happen It's like shining It's like turning on the light on the battle space The things that you couldn't see before you could see now Now some important might seem slightly technocratic but we're providing the software to the government customers So no one's providing us all of this data You know the government has the data Great But it's just sitting there It's it's it's in the dark It's hard to see all of this information It's it's overwhelming Great How do how do we get the spotlight to highlight the things that actually matter how do I get to ask the next question so here's here's something that's risky Okay What are the next 10 questions you're going to want can you even answer those 10 questions in 10 seconds or is that going to take you 10 weeks if it takes you 10 weeks you're not even going to bother answering those questions right so can I make that fast enough that you get to why does this matter and is this a threat or is this irrelevant um that's that's the first part of it The second part of it that's really important is because you know why is this information sharing so hard well there are lots of rules and regulations People have different authorities Different things can be shared The way we enforce that today is with humans which is crazy which is why it's slow and inefficient and you miss things We replace that enforcement with software The software ensures no one can see anything they're not allowed to see The software ensures under the right conditions for information sharing the right pieces of information flow from one agency to the other So by automating that flow it means that you kind of have a hive mind the entire government can operate competently because you're actually able to see everything you're allowed to see as opposed to well we have humans who are gatekeeping us along the way It's just slowing everything down which always when you have humans it always devolves into control You know you it's not it the mission gets obuscated by well we do this job they do that job and the interpersonal factors get in the way How many times has tragedy struck not because we lack data but because we lack the speed to use it When time is the difference between saving lives or headlines of disaster this kind of AI is the edge we need Palunteer isn't just organizing messy government data it's accelerating judgment under pressure What good is intelligence if it's locked behind bureaucracy and bottlenecks this isn't theoretical it's operational Automating information sharing across agencies using software not people removes the single biggest friction point in modern intelligence human gatekeepers The result faster decision cycles clearer priorities and coordinated action that could save lives