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Chances are, you have an opinion about Palantir. With any person, company, or concept, the general public really only has space in their head for one characteristic of it, says Palantir alum Marc Frankel, cofounder, board member, and former CEO of Manifest, which creates software and AI bill of materialsthink ingredient labels for critical software. Biden: old. AI: scary. Palantir: secretive. Frankel worked at Palantir from 2013 to 2018, and whether the one idea in your mind about Palantir is secretive or something else, it likely exists somewhere in this band of public opinion from the past year. Believers: Palantirs a category of one company, according to Everest Group partner Abhishek Singh in a blog post last year, crediting its forward deployed engineering model where it embeds teams with customers to tailor its products to their business.Critics: Conservative comedian Tim Dillon calls it a shadowy military-CIA contractor building a digital prison.Investing bulls: Theyre the best software company, concluded Gil Luria, head of technology research at the financial services company D.A. Davidson, after Palantirs successful Q3 earnings report, where it closed 204 deals worth $1 million or more in those 90 days, 53 of which were worth more than $10 million as companies flock to build on top of Palantir’s Foundry and AI platforms.Investing bears: I just dont know how this company ever grows into its valuation, said Dan Nathan, a former trader turned financial media personality on CNBC and podcasts, referring to Palantirs market cap hovering around $400 billion, or 100 times revenue. As Frankel adds, whatever your one thing may be, it just becomes this trope.Are you thinking about your feelings about Palantir right now? Good.Now its time to add another idea about Palantir, no matter your beliefs. This is a story about what really underpins Palantir’s success. It’s not its products. It’s not CEO Alex Karp or its other high-profile cofounders. The idea is Palantir: unparalleled talent magnet. How has Palantir attracted such an astonishing array of talent? How does the company get so much out of its employees? How have hundreds of Palantir employees gone on to start their own companies? What can any company that wants to build this kind of talent density and financial success do to emulate Palantir? If your company envies Palantirs successfinancial, cultural, or otherwisethe story of its employees turned founders reveals: how to hire the Palantir way; how to build a dynamic workplace culture that delivers measurable results; why traditional corporate structures can be impediments; the ultimate secret behind the company’s success. If you admire Palantir’s mission, this Premium story offers: our exclusive list of 315 former employees turned company builders; how these founders are advancing and adapting what they learned at Palantir for a new generation of businesses. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/fc-feature-palantir-infographic-horiz-v5@2x_970213.jpg","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/fc-feature-palantir-infographic-vert-v5@2x.jpg","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"","paddingTop":0,"paddingBottom":0,"paddingLeft":200,"paddingRight":200,"mediaType":"image"}} If you care about Palantir as an investment, this story will give you: a new way of looking at PLTR and what to look for when considering its future prospects; ideas for both private and public-market investments via the comprehensive list of Palantir alumni-led companies. If youre not a Palantir fan (to understate how many of its critics feel), this story explains: the real sources of the companys strength; exactly how and where the company’s influence is spreading. Signing up for a mission As recently as a decade ago, Palantir was largely unknown. It had offices in Silicon Valley and New York, not unlike Google or the other hot tech companies it competed with for talent, but it wasnt on most peoples radar. So how did it attract people to work for it? In a word, mission. Multiple former Palantirians eagerly volunteer how the companys mission made them want to work there. There were different articulations over time, says Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, who worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2020 and then cofounded Chapter, which uses AI to help American seniors find the optimal Medicare plan at the lowest cost. The one that stuck the longest was Palantir solves the worlds most important problems at the worlds most important institutions which is the most amorphous mission but its great. Its exciting. For any precocious undergrad, that sounds really appealing, says Howard Zuo, cofounder and CEO of Dataland, which builds AI agents for complex operations and customer support. He did summer internships at Palantir in 2015 and 2016 and then worked there full time from 2017 to 2020 before pursuing his first startup. Ty Wang, CEO of the AI-native healthcare benefits platform Angle Health, came to Palantir after working for various U.S. government agencies thanks to his Stokes Scholarship. (Wang received a full college scholarship as a STEM major in exchange for work inside the Department of Defense and other agencies.) The beauty of Palantirs culture is that everyone had probably different reasons to be there and cared about different kinds of missions, he says, but you had the opportunity to work on the things that you really cared about and have tangible impact on real-world outcomes. Perhaps no one articulates the breadth of how one could find meaning in Palantir’s mission better than Frankel, who was 27 when he started at Palantir in 2013, coming from working in consulting. It was absolutely make work, he says of his experience. Dig a hole and fill it in. By contrast, at Palantir, with no background in financial investigations, he could support finding inside trading because of Palantir’s software. With no background in counterintelligence, he could support counterintelligence work. With no background in fraud, he could help teams discovering a quarter-billion dollars worth of mortgage fraud. ÜI worked on an investigation of a homicide that was a wrong in the world that needed to be made right, Frankel says. I cant do push-ups. Im never going to rappel out of a helicopter. This was a chance for me to feel like SEAL Team Six. This was my superhero cape. Like every tech company, Palantir offered both salary and stock (though as others tell me, often below market rates because you were signing up for the cause). It really paid me in mission, and that was what was most appealing to me, Frankel says. {"blockType":"immersive-block-embed","data":{"embedSource":"","embedImageDesktop":"","embedImageDesktopCaption":"","embedImageMobile":"","embedImageMobileCaption":"","backgroundColor":"#EFEFEF","paddingTop":40,"paddingBottom":40,"paddingLeft":30,"paddingRight":30,"mediaType":"ceros"}} Luba Lesivawho worked at Palantir as its head of investor relations from 2014 to 2016 and is now the sole general partner at Palumni VC, a firm thats focused exclusively on backing Palantir-led startupscurrently has a list of 379 companies that are founded or led by a Palantir alum that are still active and private, she says. Some of them are so nascent, Lesivas tracking them as Ben’s startup and Jennys startup. Given that a Palantir spokesperson last year noted that the 22-year-old company had approximately 4,000 former employees, that means roughly 10% of all former Palantirians have gone on to launch a startup. How to hire like Palantir Palantir was not a company I sought out, says Matt Lynch. In 2014, he was a civilian engineer for the Navy, building software, when he decided it might be time for a change. Im just going to work at Google, he thought. Google seems like a great place to come up as a software engineer. Its colorful and friendly and they have free food. During the process, Palantir also reached out, intrigued by his experience building for the government. I was like, I dont know what your company is, but Im going to be in New York, so Ill come by and check it out, he told them. During his Google interview, he says, it was effectively the meat grinder where they make you sweat for hours, youre grinding on the whiteboard without the interviewers really interacting with you at all. The next day, he visited Palantir. I remember those interactions much more distinctly than I do the Google ones, he says, because they were so much more personalized. Lynch didnt get an offer from Google but he did from Palantir, where he stayed until 2021 when he left to cofound Sage, a hardware and software platform to deliver better care in assisted living facilities. Palantir’s hiring process hinges on providing candidates a real sense of the culture. We had to get [recruits] into an office, says Ross Fubini, founder and managing partner of the venture firm XYZ and a Palantir adviser since 2010. Theyd come in and see, Oh, this is a jokey, joyful technology company, not a boring consulting one. Theyd also see the intensity of the people. No matter how long itd been since the Palantir alums I interviewed had gone through their interview process, they recalled key details. There were typically five interviews. Everyone is assessed on their technical acumen, but it wasnt dispositive. I remember basically getting punched in the face for 45 minutes, says Manifests Frankel. I dont think I would be hired by Palantir today or any time in the last 10 years, says Zach Romanow, thinking about how he didn’t have the technical background that has often been required to get hired at Palantir in the last decade. He spent 11 years at the company, from 2012 to 2023, before cofounding Fourth Age, a startup that offers Palantir customers specialized forward-deployed engineering to build complex applications on top of Palantirs platforms. Romanow describes Palantirs hiring ethos at the time as Lets try and hire smart, hardworking people with the right motivations and we will figure out how they can be useful. Multiple alums share their memories of whats known as a decomp interview. Sages Lynch says, Youd spend the hour talking through how you would effectively design an anti-money laundering system or something like that. Others say their challenge was to optimize the operations of an elevator bank in an office building to minimize the wait during peak usage times or to design a subway system where a seat would always be ready for you. The whole idea is can you think abstractly about a problem and can you take something that sounds impossible on its face and start to add structure and rigor to it so that you can turn it into bite-sized chunks that you could actually then go execute or test hypotheses, Lynch says. I had never been put in a position to do an interview like that before. Theres also a behavioral portion of the interview. They asked me pretty intense questions, says August Sun Chen, who applied to work at Palantir in 2021 after graduating from Harvard University and spending a year in consulting. Hes now CEO of Hazel, an AI solution for government procurement. They asked me to tell them the three decisions that made me who I am today. All of it is designed to find people who have the grit to handle the challenges inherent in the way the company works. One of the things we took from Palantir is insisting on a really rigorous intentionality in the interview process, says John Doyle, who spent nine years at Palantir before cofounding Cape, a privacy-first wireless service. Each interviewer knows which facet of the candidate they’re testing, and they use the same questions to test that facet over time so they can develop a little bit of internal data about what good looks like, the range of outcomes, and also how people perform over time based on how they did on various facets. As he notes, its a lot of work up front, but you can have a pretty high success rate. Figure it out: Why Palantir mints entrepreneurial talent You spend the first week just working on a demo project as part of your onboarding, says Alex Shieh, who dropped out of Brown University in 2025; he had applied to spend a semester at Palantir (one of the companys many unconventional programs to bring in and assess talent) but was hired full time. Then you get thrown into a deployment. The idea is that youll get the hang of it. Palantirs forward-deployed model for its implementation teams is the defining element of its corporate culture and also the reason its produced an outsize number of company founders. Within the implementation teams, there are two roles: forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), who are the most technically adept; and deployment strategists, who are more the account lead. Or as theyre known internally, deltas and echos. We liked military technology, says Chapters Blumenfeld-Gantz. Internally we kept inventing [titles], admits XYZs Fubini. Take lawyers. We dont call them lawyers,” he says. Theyre legal ninjs. Your job is not just to do the contract reviewand potentially slow things down. Thats what a lawyer might do. Legal ninjas ask, How can we help you move forward? How can we decode the contract to be successful and win? Whatever the title, they all have the same goal: Figure out the customers problem and do whatever they have to do to solve it. Everyone who worked at Palantir at a certain phase of the company has a story about a customer needing something and it was pretty wacky, but you just did it, says Jason Hoch, a cofounder of Nominal, which helps hardware engineering teams, people who build such things as nuclear fusion reactors and satellites, test and deliver complex systems faster. While at Palantir, Hoch worked as a product developer, forward-deployed engineer, and a product development lead. One of the things I really loved about Palantirs engineering culture, its whole company culture, was its bias toward action, says Pablo Sarmiento, CEO of Avandar Labs, which makes software for social enterprises and nonprofits to manage their data and who worked on Palantirs philanthropy team as an FDE from 2013 to 2017. If something is wrong or missing, just fix it. Employees had been screened, of course, to be mission-driven; be intrinsically motivated, or in current tech argot, have high agency; have what Manifests Frankel calls low ego, high ops tempo, meaning theyre focused on delivering good outcomes for customers; be learning machines; solve those decomp exercises, which are a simulacrum of what you do on deployments into government departments and commercial enterprises. So yes, even new employees, often in their twenties and sometimes in their first real job, are given an insane amount of ownership when they start, as Sages Lynch describes it, and very little problem definition. But when you hire people with these traits, it would be dumb to micromanage them, he adds, though at Sage he does seek to play a role in thinking through a problem before letting employees take ownership. Not that theres no support structure for these deployments. There was a really strong culture of collaboration and sharing via the workplace chat systems, lots of public channels where people can freely share problems and challenges without fear of looking bad, says James Ding, CEO of Draftwise, which makes AI software for law firms and in-house legal teams to automate contract drafting, review, and negotiation. Despite Palantirs secretive image, within the organization people are ccd on hundreds of emails a day to stay in the loop, and Ding says he could email the New York office distro list to ask a question and get help as needed. But on balance, the job is, in sum, to figure it out, even if one worked in product development or a back-office department like finance. They thought that I could come in and help do really unstructured things, says Sage CEO Raj Mehra, who joined the finance team in 2013, after founding a healthcare startup that failed. To be honest with you, that’s all I did at Palantir. I did the most unstructured projects, things that no one thought we needed to do and they just threw me in it. If you found that exciting, then you would do well. If you wanted someone to check your work or give you a requirements document that you just executed, Palantir was going to be a really frustrating experience for you, says Lynch, Mehras cofounder and Sages CTO. Or as Hazels Chen says, You either work three months and quit or youre there for years. Extreme agency and its limits Lets be frank: In too much of corporate America, This. Does. Not. Happen. From Hollywood to consulting to finance, businesses are ever more risk averse to empower early-career professionals to take the reins on a big project. Their structures thwart it. Even in Big Tech, a young employee is going to be told what to build and how to do so. You dont have a ton of context about why, says Andy Chen, who had a number of experiences before working for Palantir from 2015 to 2020. You dont get to exercise your creativity as much. (Hes now CTO of Nira Energy, which helps clean energy developers, data centers, and utilities understand where theres available capacity on the electric grid for new projects.) These kinds of circumscribed career paths can be limiting. When I was in consulting, Manifests Frankel says, somebody who was really trying to be a mentor but who scared the living daylights out of me instead, told me that you start in Excel and you spend the first two years of your career in Excel. If you get good enough at Excel, we move you to PowerPoint. And if you do PowerPoint well enough, you move over to writing proposals in Word. Then if you’re really successful in Word, eventually you move into Outlook. And Outlook is where you manage the client relationships. He was saying this in all sincerity, Frankel continues. You can track your development and maturity as a consultant through the Microsoft Office suite of products. There was nothing more corrosive to me than that idea that I was going to chart my life [that way]. No worry of anything so stultifying at Palantir. Jack Fischer, CTO of the agentic AI startup Credal and who worked at Palantir from 2017 to 2022, recalls one assignment in a skiffin Washington, D.C.and everything is on fire all the time and nothings working, and it is a continuous, multilayered emergency that just needs nonstop creative problem solving. Those kinds of assignments, says Sages Lynch, were addicting, That’s how I ended up with so much [personal] growth, because I got addicted to that dopamine hit every six months of ‘Oh, here’s a new thing.’ For most of Palantirs history, the reason the company looked like technology-powered consulting, as XYZs Fubini describes it, is because the products were not truly ready for customers. That left it to those forward-deployed engineers and deployment strategists to do the requisite duct taping of the product, says Fourth Ages Romanow. That process of taking software thats amorphous clay that needs to be shaped for a customer, as Draftwises Ding describes it, does two things: It creates the opportunity for what Palantir calls repeatability, where one of those custom solutions can be offered to other companies. Ding says that he was the primary developer on a product for a banking client that was resold to seven more banks. These kinds of opportunities are how Palantir has been able to accelerate its growth and profitability in the way it has, increasing revenue 77% year over year and 20% sequentially in Q3 2025. GAAP net income in the quarter hit $476 million, a 40% margin. Its also created a lot of future founders. The lessons they carried In the past year, as Palantir has been on a heater, corporate America has decided it needs to hire its own forward-deployed engineers, with the Financial Times reporting that the FDE role had become the most popular new job title in business. This is, as you may guess, missing the point. The forward-deployed engineers, which people talk about, people still get that wrong, says XYZs Fubini. If the DNA of the company is already set, he notes, then the FDEs become basically technical support people. No, theyre your core engineers and theyre on-site with customers, theyre bringing cupcakes into the break room. Theyre there to get access to the problem and bring that kowledge back. Companies want the cachet (and market cap) they associate with Palantirs FDE model, but almost every fiber of their being fights it. Even in Silicon Valley, says Nominals Hoch, there’s this agency that investors give to founders to build something. But very quickly, companiesits almost the state of natureput up a lot of boundaries and rules and processes. He adds, “Falling into the ruts of corporate organizational norms makes it hard to achieve 10x better outcomes.” What counts are the underlying principles, not titles, and Palantir doesnt have a monopoly on them. One thing Palantir did really well was what we called seeking truth, says Chapters Blumenfeld-Gantz. Are people actually using your product? What do they think? Are you actually talking to customers and embedded with customers? It’s shocking that most companies don’t actually do this well. They don’t get real feedback. Or, he says, they talk only to people who have had good experiences. They don’t ask, What sucks about my product? What can I do better? [Most companies] are more focused on selling their product to customers than using customers experiences to improve their product. Theres a fear that by continually pressing customers for critical feedback you are highlighting negatives and jeopardizing revenue. “What Palantir understood, he adds, is that no product is perfect, sophisticated buyers generally prefer honesty to bullshit, and the best long-term strategy for customer retention and product development is learning the actual truth about your product and continually improving it. The first question we always asked was, What do you hate about this? That is a very valuable lesson, and it goes to having a thick skin. You have to be able to handle that. This probing curiosity to unlock valuable insights also builds confidence, which definitely helps when pursuing a startup. As does cultivating diverse points of view and a willingness to express your opinion. Alex Shieh left Palantir last August after just a few months to cofound the Antifraud Company, which roots out corporations cheating the government using both AI and investigative journalism. Shieh recalls that during his onboarding, [CEO Alex] Karp said he likes to hire conservatives out of the Ivy League [because] they must be independent thinkers [overcoming] strong pressure to conform. It’s also not the case that everybody at Palantir, or even most people at Palantir, are conservative or something. That’s a misconception. Avandar’s Sarmiento says, Whether you agree or disagree with Palantir, the one thing I always respected about them was that, at least during my timeI really don’t know about right nowthey were very adamant and open about if you disagree with anything, you can speak about it. Palantir always encouraged that ‘question what you are doing’ approach. I grew personally and professionally so much thanks to Palantir that, in a sense, Palantir grew me into the kind of person who would no longer want to work at Palantir. What could derail Palantirs founder factory? Ross Fubini founded his venture firm XYZ in 2017 on the thesis that he would invest in Palantir alums who wanted to start companies because of everything hed seen as a Palantir adviser. The whole point was that he anticipated something emerging that no one else had, thanks to his advisory role. You could just see it through these very entrepreneurial, very technical groups, and that was how the whole organization was structured, he says, adding, I was talking about [Palantir] as an authoritarian democracy. There’s no question that Karp, then and now, is in charge of this business.” Karp sets a clear strategic direction for the company. But the democracy is “leaders and teams within the organization self-organizing around problems and opportunities, Fubini says. There’s something here, go find it. If Palantir can maintain the equilibrium of that seeming oxymoron (authoritarian democracy), then its power will only grow, as will the network of employees turned founders. Itd be far too early to suggest that anything threatens this hegemony now, but there are a handful of potential challenges worth watching closely. The Palantir-diaspora relationship Last year, Palantir sued two founding teams of its alumni alleging the theft of trade secrets and poaching employees. One source tells me that the company has sent other cease-and-desist letters to founders and reminded former employees of any non-solicitation agreements they signed. Fubini sees both sides of the issue, given his dual roles. Ive been intimate through multiple of the cease-and-desist events, he says. To every one Ive seen, Palantir believed it was ethically correct. As yet, neither Fubini nor Luba Lesiva, who backs only Palantir-led companies at Palumni VC, say theyve seen any slowdown in startup formation that would signal a chilling effect. We haven’t seen too much of the stepping on toes, Lesiva says, noting that she has not encountered anyone actively looking to compete with Palantir, but we’re also really open with our companies being like, Hey, don’t be a fool when it comes to making sure they’re abiding by their exit documents and seeking legal advice if necessary. The current climate, though, does cast some shade on the sentiment many founders shared, best reflected by Angle Health cofounder Anirban Gangopadhyay: They would always say that the only reason you should leave Palantir was to start your own company. Foundry eats the world Thanks, then, to the product leverage Palantir has with Foundry and its AI platform (AIP), in theory, everything could be a Palantir project, Fubini acknowledges. Lesiva says that of the companies shes invested in and that shes tracking, she sees three opportunities. Pick a niche: Some founders choose to start small, [with] the specific part of a specific problem, she says, citing Tamarack, a company building mill management software for logging companies to generate more revenue. Thats just not going to be a giant focus of Palantir. Do the opposite: Lesiva reminds me that Palantir doesnt collect data; Palantir handles the data that its customers already have. That creates space in data collection or what Lesiva calls the actioning of the data on the other side. Partner: The company has programs for earlier-stage startups, including FedStart, to facilitate meeting government compliance standards, and Foundry for Builders, which forges a technology partnership. Blumenfeld-Gantzs Chapter helped start the latter program and was its first customer. Palantir alum-founded Hence and Adyton (see dataset) were also among the first startups to participate in Foundry for Builders. What now constitutes a startup that wont compete with Palantir yet is something big enough to be worth doing? The answer could affect who leaves Palantir (and why) as well as who stays. Keeping the talent pipeline wide open Fubini ponders exactly what it was he saw in the mid-2010s bubbling up at Palantir and why those teams within the company were so successful. One is just a relentless focus on talent, he says. Back then, it was really just were hiring young people, highly tactical out of universities, and that was the goal: Be a premir place. And a lot of attention went to doing this, building that recruiting group. But, he adds, I have to tell you, we were shit atwe’re still largely shit atbringing in senior people because of this structure. Fubini emphasizes that what’s most needed is Palantir continuing to bring in earlier career and elite technical talent. As Karp has publicly expressed dismay at campus activism in the past few years, Palantir has opened up new vistas, such as the semester at Palantir program; the Meritocracy Fellowship its introduced for high schoolers; the Neurodivergent Fellowship, which it debuted after Karps restless appearance at last Decembers New York Times Dealbook Summit; and, most recently, the American Tech Fellowship for Veterans. Whether these programs can augment, much less replace, its previous campus recruiting efforts remains an open question. I ask Fubini what he believes could slow Palantir down. Fundamentally, he says, people just need to come there for the mission. Still. That they believe in something is a very ego-rich thing. Were better, smarter, were going to solve these problems. And some of thats the Americana and some is Im going to solve a really hard problem in oil and gas or insurance that nobody else is doing. The second part is [Palantirs] got to stay on the technology edge. Its got to be a place working on the hardest, best, most interesting problems, with the platform or otherwise. If youve got one or the other, youre okay, Fubini says. But the perfect intersection is deeply technical and mission driven. Those are the people you want. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});
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It’s Friday afternoon, and a potential client just emailed, asking about your services. You scramble to find your pricing. (Where did you save that document?) You dig through old emails for a proposal you sent six months ago that you could adapt. You piece something together and curse your past self for not being more organized. This scenario plays out constantly for solopreneurs. Most chalk it up to the chaos of running a business alone. But constantly scrambling will start to cost you as your business growsand eventually hold you back. Most solopreneurs think that “operations” is something only real companies need: businesses with employees, office managers, and HR departments. But the absence of basic systems wastes your time, causes unnecessary stress, and makes you look amateurish to potential clients. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-mobile-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Work Better\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn\u0027t suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/www.workbetter.media\/\u0022\u003Eworkbetter.media\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457605,"imageMobileId":91457608,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} 3 systems that make a difference You don’t need the same complex software or complicated workflows that teams rely on. But you do need systems and processes for the core functions of your business. 1. Sales and pipeline management If you dont have a way to track potential clients or deals, youre potentially losing money. You need a system to store contact names and email addresses, along with information about the person/company and why theyre interested in working with you. To avoid feeling frantic when you put together a proposal, make a template (and a few variations, if you have different bundles of services). I have three PDFs stored on my computer to easily retrieve whenever needed. Or if you offer more complex packages, software can make it easy for you to drag-and-drop different options into a proposal. You also need a way to track follow-ups. Potential clients say theyll get back to you within a week, and they dont. You need to know when to email againeven following up on deals that may have gone cold months before. 2. Project templates Theres no reason to reinvent the wheel with every project. Project templates might include Google or Word docs you use repeatedly, an onboarding questionnaire, or a project management tool with a list of specific tasks. Every one of my clients has the exact same set of folders in my Google Drive, and the same setup in my project management tool. Even though each project is slightly different, I know, at a glance, what I need to work on and when its due. 3. Income and expense tracking Lastly, you need a way to keep track of your income and expenses. You dont want to be reconstructing a years worth of finances come tax time in April. You should know how much each client paid you, and how much you spend on different categories of expenses like software, insurance, and marketing. In addition to tracking, your system should include a way to invoice clients and make it easy for them to pay in their preferred method. Payment friction can be a huge headache for solopreneurs (e.g., the client wants to pay via credit card, but you dont have a way of processing credit cards). Payment-processing tools like Stripe or QuickBooks can handle multiple payment methods for you. They can also send automatic payment reminders to help you stay on top of outstanding invoices. Build systems earlybefore you need them When you don’t have basic operational infrastructure, you’re constantly rebuilding the parts of your business. Every proposal, every client interaction, and every project takes more time than it should. In addition to your time, the other cost is mental load. Without established systems, you’re making dozens of mini-decisions throughout the day. Where do I save this file? How do I structure this kickoff call? How can I collect project feedback? Each decision requires some of your energy that could be better spent in your business. When you’re figuring things out as you go, it shows up in delayed responses, inconsistent communication, and forgotten details. Its better to build systems earlybefore you feel like you need them. Its much easier to build when your workload feels manageable than when youre drowning. Operations will multiply your effectiveness. Every template you create will get reused dozens of times. Every workflow you document makes future decisions easier. Well-run solo businesses have invested time in systems that make smooth possible. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-1.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/work-better-mobile-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Work Better\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn\u0027t suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. 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Category:
E-Commerce
In the midst of economic uncertainty, polarizing politics, global conflict and a future that is largely out of focus, many consumers are continuing to fight the good fight when it comes to using their dollars to drive positive change. It’s the 13th year that I have helped run an annual survey on the momentum of socially responsible spending, nonprofit giving, and earth friendly practices, called the Conscious Consumer Spending Index. This year we found that despite a worsening view of the state of the world, consumers are holding firm in their support of conscious brands: A majority of respondents said they were actively supporting purposeful companies, while roughly a third plan to increase the amount they spend on socially responsible products and services in 2026. Digging deeper into the data, we identified several questions that are worth serious consideration. Below are four mission critical issues that purpose-driven individuals and organizations should meditate on as we enter a new year. 1: Is being socially responsible an all or nothing proposition? In our study, one third of consumers reported boycotting specific companies or brands because they were not socially responsible, and 31% said they had encouraged family or friends to avoid a company or product because it was not socially responsible. In spirit, this enthusiasm is a positive. However, it is important to evaluate where we are setting the bar for brands. While there are examples of companies who have clearly crossed lines and are easily categorized as not socially responsible, there are many organizations who are on a journey toward being a good company and experiencing setbacks and growing pains along the way. There is a big difference between a company who has no moral compass and no regard for whats best for its people, the community and the environment, compared with a company who is pure in its intentions to be more purposeful but not yet perfect in its execution. As a result, we must strike a balance: holding companies accountable to a set of meaningful standards without being elitist and too quick to cancel a brand for not yet checking all the boxes when it comes to being socially responsible. Set the bar too low, and the bar means nothing. Set the bar too high, and many organizations might decide being a good brand is out of their reach. 2: Should we separate politics from purchases when it comes to socially responsible brands? Consumers want good brands to take stands. When asked if socially responsible brands should weigh in on cultural and political issues, 36% said yes. Another 34% said it depends on the specific situation. Only 21% percent of respondents said no, while 9% had no opinion on the matter. Those who want brands to choose sides represent the most conscious of consumers. More than half (55%) plan to increase their spending on socially responsible goods and services in 2026. This mindset is potentially polarizing and counterproductive when it comes to advancing the conscious consumerism movement. Showing preference to brands who prioritize their community, their workers, the environment and society at large is different from aligning with these same brands based on their activism on specific issues. We are experiencing an unprecedented divide when it comes to politics in this country. It is worth debating whether it is wise to mix political leanings with mission and purpose when evaluating whether a company is socially responsible. At the end of the day, should socially responsible behaviors be a partisan issue? 3: Are we doing enough to raise awareness and understanding of brands doing good? On the whole, awareness remains a key issue when it comes to socially responsible brands. Collectively, those who are a part of this movement should consider doubling down on efforts to spread the word and educate consumers. As an example, our research shows that 75% of Americans still arent familiar with the concept of a B Corp. While weve made progress on this front in the last decade, we are still falling far short of where we need to be to advance the overall movement and reinforce the right behaviors. In addition to raising general awareness, we also need to help consumers identify specific brands to support. Most consumers can accurately articulate what makes a company socially responsible, but when they find themselves in real world consumption scenarios, the good choice is not obvious enough. When we ask consumers to name a company or organization that is socially responsible, Amazon and Walmart continue to dominate responses. Brands like Patagonia and Ben & Jerrys are also popular answers, but overall this data point reinforces the fact that most consumers do not have a working filter for separating purposeful brands from those who are not actually mission driven. The most frequent way consumers make this decision is by reading packaging labels. We need to equip them with better tools and encourage them to be more proactive if they are serious about being purposeful when shopping. 4: Is increasing interest in conscious consumerism bad news for nonprofits? When comparing nonprofit giving trends with the trajectory of conscious consumerism, the CCSIndex data shows that charitable donations have lagged behind socially responsible spending since 2017. The gap is widening, driven by a youth movement that is more likely to do good by shopping responsibly versus making financial contributions to causes. For Americans ages 18-34, 31% prefer to give back by buying socially responsible products and services instead of donating to charity, compared to 27% of those who are 35-54, and 17% of Americans who are 55 or older. The youngest cohort was the least likely to have contributed financially to a charity in the previous year. While some of this can be chalked up to financial constraints for younger individuals, that likely isnt the entire story. Historically, giving levels have increased as individuals move into older age brackets and are more financially able to give. Evidence suggests a shift is occurring among Millennials and Gen Z toward alternative giving channels, and that this shift might just stick as they age. Specifically, it seems clear that younger Americans favor conscious consumerism over charitable donations. Its less clear what should be done about this trend. Regardless, charities should be paying close attention to where things are headed and how their fundraising strategies can evolve.
Category:
E-Commerce
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