Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why your product can be better and still lose, because perception is more real than reality: Most founders assume the best product wins. Build something that works, prove it with data, and customers will see it. Wang says that assumption breaks down when you sell to large organisations. "Probably a lot of the companies that you all have worked with, they're very data-driven companies. It feels like the truth makes its way... everybody serves a shared sense of reality and whatnot. That's not true at most large companies and also not true within the government, unfortunately." So what do they run on instead? Perception. "At a lot of large customers, perception is more real than reality. The reality is just so ugly most of the time that very rarely do people actually confront reality, and most of the time they just sort of choose to believe the perceptions that they live in." That is how a better product loses. If buyers aren't judging reality, being better in reality isn't enough. The deal goes to whoever owns the perception. Wang spells out what this means for anyone building or selling to enterprises: "If you end up doing enterprise sales or you end up building enterprise products... just as much as your job is to improve the reality, it is to shape the perception." The product still matters, but by his reckoning, it's only half the job. One company he singles out for mastering the other half is Palantir: "One of Palantir's superpowers is that they shape the perception better than most other technology companies do, because I think they view themselves... it's like a combination of a sort of acting troupe combined with a software company." And @alexandr_wang means it literally: "They literally give an acting book to all of the new hires, or they did for a very long time." A software company that trained its people in performance. That tells you how seriously Palantir took the perception half of the job.