“Innovation doesn’t always begin in a boardroom. Sometimes, it starts in someone’s resignation email.” In April 2025, Palantir dropped a lawsuit-shaped bombshell on the tech world. It accused Guardian AI—a Y-Combinator-backed startup founded by two former Palantir employees—of stealing trade secrets. Within weeks of leaving, the founders had already launched a new platform and claimed … Read more
Inside the Palantir Mafia: Recent Moves, New Players, and Unwritten Rules (Part 2: 2023–2025 Update) I. Introduction: The Palantir Mafia Evolves The “Palantir Mafia” has quietly become one of the most influential networks in the tech world, rivalling even the legendary PayPal Mafia. Since our last deep dive, this group of alumni from the data … Read more
Picture this: your SaaS startup is on the verge of launching a game-changing feature. The demo with a major enterprise client is tomorrow. The team is working late, pushing final commits. Then it happens—a build breaks due to legacy code dependencies, and a critical security vulnerability is flagged. If that weren’t enough, the client just … Read more
Compliance as a Growth Engine: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities As we step into 2025, the compliance landscape is witnessing a dramatic shift. Once viewed as a burdensome obligation, compliance is now being redefined as a powerful enabler of growth and innovation, particularly for startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Non-compliance penalties have skyrocketed in … Read more
I recently read an interesting report by CyCognito on the top 3 vulnerabilities on third-party products and it sparked my interest to reexamine the supply chain risks in software engineering. This article is an attempt at that. The Vulnerability Trifecta in Third-Party Products The CyCognito report identifies three critical areas where third-party products introduce significant … Read more
Top Universities Driving Global Startups Through Venture Capital: A Data-Backed Overview Universities play a pivotal role in nurturing talent and fostering innovation, and the success of alumni-founded startups is a testament to the entrepreneurial culture present in these institutions. A recent analysis of venture capital funding across top universities reveals the strong influence of academic … Read more
In the world of technology, engineers are not just cogs in a machine; they are the builders, the dreamers, and the ones who solve the problems they see in the world. And sometimes, those solutions turn into billion-dollar businesses. This is the story of the “Palantir Mafia,” a group of former Palantir employees who have … Read more
Note: I started this article last weekend to try and explain the attack path “Midnight Blizzard” used and what Azure admins should do to protect themselves from a similar attack. Unfortunately, I couldn’t complete/publish it in time and now there is another breach at Microsoft. (🤦🏿) Now, I had to completely redraft it and change … Read more
In this article, I will summarise effective strategies and best practices to tackle tech debt head-on. Technical debt is an inevitable reality in software development. But, it can be leveraged just like a financial loan/debt can help you achieve your goals, if managed properly.It can be used to drive competitive advantage by allowing companies to … Read more
Background: I work with multiple CTOs and Heads of Engineering of early-stage startups to help them set up their engineering orgs, review their product architecture, help them prioritise their hiring etc. I also help multiple engineering leaders via Plato. Recently, there have been too many questions on whether can I use ChatGPT for this or … Read more