Harshith Sadhu: Google to Palantir at 22

"I nearly lost three thousand dollars this summer... because no one wanted to take over my lease." That's a LinkedIn post from August fourth, twenty twenty-five, written by a computer science student at UT Austin named Harshith Sadhu.

Three grand. For a student that's not a rounding error, that's a semester.

Right. And here's the loop I want you to hold onto: that one bad sublease is, I'd argue, the most useful thing on his resume. More useful than Google. And I'll show you why at the end.

Okay, bold. Because Google's on there?

Google's on there. So is Apple. Southwest Airlines, Texas Instruments, Fidelity Investments. And as of August twenty twenty-six, he's a Forward Deployed Software Engineer Intern at Palantir, in New York City, working on Foundry.

Hang on. That's five or six major companies and he's still an undergrad?

His own profile says total experience: two years and eleven months. He also plays violin, composes music, plays tennis, and — his words — conducts fashion shows.

The fashion shows are doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Let me walk the timeline, because the shape of it matters. January twenty twenty-six, Apple, Cupertino, Safari Internet Technologies — a one-month stint. May to August twenty twenty-six, Google, Mountain View, on Google Home. Then August twenty twenty-six, straight into Palantir.

A one-month Apple internship? That's barely an onboarding.

That's what the record says. And then he leaves the Google Home app team — the consumer-tech dream job, free lunch, Mountain View — and goes to a defense and AI company whose own careers page says Palantirians deliver mission-critical outcomes for "the West's most important institutions."

So why? Is it money, or is it the mission thing?

I can't tell you what's in his head — nobody interviewed him about it. But I can tell you what Palantir sells to people like him, and they've been remarkably consistent about it for over a decade.

Go on.

Twenty fifteen, UT Austin computer science department calendar. Palantir info session, GDC four-three-oh-four, five thirty to seven thirty. The pitch line is: "If you want to work on the global problems you read about on the front page of the newspaper, we want you to come work for us." Dinner provided. Raffle prize.

Pizza and world-historical significance.

And the scale is deliberately tiny. Palantir's own blog says you're one of only a hundred to a hundred and twenty interns globally. Usually the ONLY intern on a team of full-time engineers.

Versus Google, where you're one of thousands.

Exactly the contrast they're selling. And the role he picked is the sharp end. Forward Deployed Software Engineer — Palantir describes those as engineers who generally work on-site at customer locations, solving problems hand-in-hand with customer personnel. You travel. You sit with the user.

So not "write code, push to repo, go home."

No. And the recruiting machine around it is aggressive in a way people underestimate. March second, twenty twenty-six, the University of Austin emailed admitted students: Palantir's coming to campus April twenty-fifth. A seminar on how the American Founders thought about ambition, a debate on whether AI should make us optimistic or terrified, then a hands-on Palantir session called "The Art of Decomposition."

Wait — admitted students. They hadn't even started college yet.

Admitted and deposited only. Free. Travel reimbursed up to five hundred dollars. Closing reception open to families.

They're recruiting the PARENTS.

That's talent flow into defense tech, in one email.

Okay, so bring me back. The three thousand dollars.

So he and three co-founders — Sankarsh Narayanan, Shreyan Katta, Avanish Shilpi — built InternNest. Housing, roommate matching, sublets for interns. By April twenty twenty-five it was backed by Capital Factory and the Forty Acres Founders Program at UT Austin, they'd presented at South by Southwest, and they said they placed in the top three percent of Y Combinator applicants.

They're pitching that as traction while also being, what, twenty?

Over a hundred interns pre-registered, five companies onboarded, raising a fifty thousand dollar target. And December twenty-third, twenty twenty-five, he posts that they're hiring a founding Campus and Growth team — UT Austin, UT Dallas, Texas A and M, Bay Area, East Coast. March sixteenth, twenty twenty-six: "InternNest is officially live for this cycle."

While interning at Google.

While interning at Google. And that's the payoff. A forward deployed engineer's actual job is: notice a messy real-world problem, sit with the people drowning in it, ship something that works. He did that with Reddit threads and chaotic group chats before anyone paid him to.

So the lease disaster was the interview.

The best ones usually are. Somewhere a twenty-two-year-old loses three thousand dollars, builds a fix, and the most controversial software company in the world is waiting at the other end with dinner and a raffle ticket.