Why build next Palantir? | Captain Jack Sparow
←<br>Why build next Palantir?
Jul 16, 2026
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--><br>Story of a 23 year old founder knocking on doors of intelligence agencies and police departments - selling AI native platform to solve national security problems.
Sounds insane right? Why sell to the government? Why create a surveillance system like Minority Report? Why solve the hardest problem for intelligence agencies?
Just one reason, as JFK said…
… because we need to make the world a better and safer place in this decade. We need to do it now, while protecting our liberties and freedom of speech.
One Attack, Too Much Data
I once asked an FBI’s cyber division analyst during my intel class, ‘what happens when a major incident takes place? How do you analyze large quantity of data and convert it into meaningful intelligence?’.
They told me about their experience after Boston Marathon Bombing, “analysts across FBI offices and police departments manually reviewing 33 TBs of digital information, stations flooded with video footage and Boston shut down while the attack vectors and attackers remained unknown.” Hours of content being analyzed manually frame by frame while manhunt continued for 102 hours.
It was one attack and the bottleneck was already visible despite deep pockets of the intel community. But again, they are known by their failures and not successes.
I searched for more problems that can be overwhelming and could create similar situations in future, not only in US but around the world, if under attack. I asked many questions and found some major problems -
Could our law enforcement and intelligence agencies hit bottleneck?
What if there are multiple coordinated attacks by non-state actors or homegrown terrorists?
What if something like Boston Marathon could be scaled up at multiple places?
What if we miss another attack or coordinated attacks?
What if….?
These questions don’t go easy if you read history of intelligence failures and how modern threats are evolving and becomes more sophisticated every single day.
Problems<br>As reported by Office of the Director of National Intelligence & FBI along with global intelligence agencies
Homegrown terrorists, extremists and online radicalization
Non-state actors influencing vulnerable people through social media
Now the question comes - So what??
What can I do to make the world a safer place and save lives?
Now that I found some problems in intelligence and law enforcement - then what? Just publish it and wait for someone to solve it?
So I selected my thesis subject for intelligence community and law enforcement’s work to counter radicaliziation and extremism by analyzing warrant return data from social media companies, starting with Instagram.
The concept is - if Instagram’s algorithm understands us so deeply and our psychology to recommend us next best reel/post, based on our data. Why can’t law enforcement find homegrown terrorists influenced by online radicalization faster?
My thesis subject became - “Automating Law Enforcement Investigations for warrant return Instagram data.”
Surprisingly there was not much research conducted on this topic and I verified the need by interviewing a digital forensics officer in local police department.
Thesis is complete - problem is real and solutions are hitting the bottleneck already - and data analysis and forensics is slow for police departments - can’t answer about Intel agencies, it’s a unknown known.
Is the job done by publishing thesis that remains in a corner that only a few will read and will be utilized in references in research papers or LLMs training? Would this make the world a better place?
Should I go ahead and solve this problem myself? Or should I get a safe job that gives easy paycheck and good weekend vibes with netflix?
If not me, then who will solve it?
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”
— Steve Jobs
I went an extra mile and decided to solve the problem myself based on my then expertise of cyber, intelligence and machine learning instead of living the easy life.
warrant returns while preserving chain of custody. I was also studying GNNs, models that learn from relationships inside complex networks.
The idea felt obvious: organize large, authorized datasets; map relationships, locations, activity, and metadata; then help analysts surface what deserved review first. The system would not scrape everyone or predict who might become a criminal. It would help investigators navigate data they already had legal authority to examine.<br>*/ -->
Funding
I graduated while requesting my advisors to keep the thesis unpublished for confidentiality and IP related purposes and pitched my idea to get initial funding.
I got Google’s Rural Entrepreneurship Award through Center for Entrepreneurship at UNG. Instantly, everything aligned: a painful problem, large datasets, AI,...