Why Did Palantir Stay at the Mandarin Oriental?

Garry Tan learned from Alex Karp that the hotel tells a buyer what Palantir is selling. If the team says Motel 6, the buyer thinks they are buying Motel 6 software. Palantir is Mandarin Oriental software.

At 25, he was sent to DC in ripped jeans and a band t-shirt to demo for customers and was booked at the Mandarin Oriental in D.C. He and the other early engineers on the Palantir Finance product wondered why they were staying at the Mandarin Oriental. They were just kids at a startup and asked to be set up at the Motel 6. They were going to talk to a general or a VP of some Fortune 500 company, show the software they had built, then make small talk about how long they were around and where they were staying. Naming Motel 6 would make the buyer think the product was Motel 6 software.

He would go on walks with Karp, a philosopher who was incredibly knowledgeable about the world and, in his own hedge, not a technologist. If he had not rage quit, he would have been a peer to some of the real legends who built Palantir. He got it on the spot and learned a lot from Karp.