OMR Podcast · Philipp Westermeyer - OMR

Erst baute er Palantir mit auf, jetzt Helsing: Robert Fink (#892)

·1 hr 19 min·6 clips

Robert Fink helped build Palantir from scratch and now leads Helsing, a German defense tech company valued over $10 billion.

1. OMR Podcast host Philippe Westerbarkey interviews Robert Fink, CTO of Helsing, a Munich-based defense tech company with a valuation above 10 billion euros. 2. Robert Fink grew up in Neumünster, describes himself as a 'classic 90s nerd' who programmed on a C64, studied physics, and defaulted to computer science because it was easier — earning a PhD at Oxford in database theory. 3. The episode covers Fink's eight years at Palantir (joining as a forward-deployed engineer, building the Foundry data platform from scratch), his post-IPO wealth, and his transition to Helsing as its fourth employee. 4. Fink describes Palantir's talent culture as a deliberate experiment in hiring top graduates directly from the best universities and having them discover everything from first principles — contrasting it with Google, where textbook authors were literally sitting next to interns. 5. He explains that Palantir's core business is integrating complex data from siloed sources, homogenizing it, and making it available for analysis — starting with counterterrorism (government intelligence silos) and later expanding to commercial clients like Airbus. 6. Fink built Foundry — Palantir's flagship data platform, now paired with AIP for AI models — starting in September 2015 with a team of four to five people, a complete rewrite from scratch with no dependencies. 7. He left Palantir not from dissatisfaction but because COVID altered the social culture of a very social company, and the IPO introduced minor cultural shifts toward profitability over exploration. 8. The IPO made Palantir employees who joined before 2018-2020 'probably all' multimillionaires; Fink has since sold all his shares and describes the post-IPO salary market for comparable talent as starting at 600,000 USD in total compensation, primarily from London fintech firms. 9. Helsing co-founder Niklas recruited Fink through a chain of LinkedIn messages, a reference call, COVID-era parking-lot beers, and a third meeting Fink describes as 'an asymmetric date' where he thought it was social but was offered the CTO role. 10. Fink accepted because he wanted to build something from scratch again and felt European defense tech aligned with a conviction about European strategic independence — though he consciously avoids the word 'patriot.' 11. At the time of Fink's joining, Helsing had 12 to 15 people; Daniel Ek (Spotify founder) invested shortly after in September 2021, with Fink participating in the technical due diligence. 12. Helsing was founded before the Ukraine invasion with the thesis that geopolitical shifts — Russia's Crimea annexation, US pivot toward Asia, China's ambitions — made European sovereign defense tech inevitable; the Ukraine war in 2022 validated this early. 13. Helsing's first major product was not a drone but an electronic warfare system for the German Eurofighter fleet developed jointly with Saab, providing AI-driven radar warning systems that classify incoming radar pulses as threatening or benign. 14. Winning the Eurofighter program established Helsing as a 'defense prime' — a serious player in major European armament programs — rather than just a drone startup, which was a deliberate strategic prerequisite before entering the drone market. 15. The HX-2 drone's core differentiator is AI-enabled GPS-denied navigation, a capability that previously required cruise-missile-class hardware costing millions but now runs on systems in the five-figure price range. 16. The HX-2 just received a 200 to 270 million EUR initial contract through the German parliament, with an additional framework contract still to come; Fink describes production scalability as the key hardware challenge — making drones like ammunition, not precision devices requiring expert assembly. 17. Fink describes the Ukraine war as a 'cat and mouse' dynamic where two sides use drone swarms in trench warfare 50 kilometers apart; Russia and Ukraine are each producing millions of drone systems per year, a production-capacity scale that Western Europe currently cannot match. 18. On autonomous weapons ethics, Helsing's current position is 'operator in the loop' — human operators must understand and approve what AI systems do — though Fink acknowledges this may be a transitional position as software capabilities advance. 19. Fink is notably candid about the moral weight of his work: 'It would be better if this company didn't exist,' and deliberately avoids saying Helsing is 'fun,' positioning his choice as a conviction rather than enthusiasm. 20. The episode is best suited to listeners interested in defense technology, AI applications in physical systems, European strategic autonomy, or entrepreneurship in high-stakes regulated industries; it is not entertainment-oriented.

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