Executive Vice President Leaves NetApp to Join Palantir

Former Executive Vice President and General Manager for public cloud services, Anthony Lye, has recently decided to leave NetApp and join Palantir.

From Cloud News,

‘The people [at NetApp], the applications and my role were a once in a lifetime opportunity. I loved and love NetApp. I am very proud of what I accomplished. I leave the company better, the business, the product and the people I brought to the company are things I will forever be proud of,’

Lye joined NetApp 5 years ago and since then has helped the company grow at astronomical scales. Before his leadership, the company was doing simple data storage and averaging 1M in annual recurring revenue. During his time, the company changed to offer more data management services and compute while also scaling to 500M ARR.

Lye's role in Palantir will be an exciting one. He will now become the Global Lead for Palantir's Apollo product, one of three major products in addition to Gotham and Foundry that Palantir offers for businesses and governments.

Lye is "now focused on looking at how to deliver things like the Apollo continuous delivery system as a service for clients and partners, and build new consumption models for Palantir Foundry, an open architecture connecting data, analytics, and business teams to a common foundation."

What This Means for Palantir

First, Anthony seems pretty legit. Looking back on his track record with NetApp would give anyone zero concern in terms of his ability to execute and actually get things done.

As an executive within the cloud space, Anthony specially helped NetApp transition into cloud applications and not just storage - as a result, the company not only was able to grow, but Anthony was likely able to see how data management is the future and where the true exponential growth opportunities lied for companies that honed in on effective data management.

Second, it's great to see someone leave another company for Palantir. A few months back, I wrote on a former Salesforce Exec leaving to lead sales at Palantir, giving more credence to Palantir being a company that various people around the world were looking to in terms of their next major leadership opportunity for a company that could be transformational and at the beginning of it's growth story.

With high level executives choosing to leave for Palantir, it reinforces the culture and opportunity at hand for a company that may truly be the most important software company in the world. As stock based compensation is reducing and Palantir's missions is becoming more clear around the the world, I'd expect to see more executives wanting to join Palantir while also not joining because of generous SBC but rather to be early on a game-changing company.

I'll keep the website updated on more key leaders that depart for Palantir.

You can watch a video of me covering this here:

Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com. You can join our Palantir Facebook group here to participate in community discussions, polls, and more.