Nabeel S. Qureshi
I’m an entrepreneur, writer, and researcher. I’m currently working on a startup in stealth. Previously, I worked at Palantir with a focus on health and biology related projects. I was also a Visiting Scholar in AI at the Mercatus Center, as well as an Emergent Ventures awardee.
I studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Oxford, and am currently based in New York City. Here are my favorite movies, books, and some reading lists. Here are some principles I try to keep in mind.
Essays
- On Reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time · Dec 2025
Why In Search of Lost Time is the greatest novel ever written, and what it's actually about.
- Reflections on Palantir · Oct 2024
What it was like working at Palantir, from the early days through joining the S&P 500.
- The Serendipity Machine (Notes on Using Twitter) · Jan 2024
Twitter is one of my favorite software tools in the world. Here's how to use it well.
- Notes on Puzzles · Jul 2023
What chess puzzles, mathematical problem-solving, and startup founding have in common.
- Advice That Actually Worked For Me · Jul 2022
A big fan of advice posts and productivity guides, here's my contribution to the genre.
- How To Understand Things · Jul 2020
What we call intelligence is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about raw intellect.
- Video Games are the Future of Education · Jun 2020
The best educational experiences I had as a teenager were all video games.
- Notes On Karl Popper · Jan 2020
Popper is one of the most underrated philosophers, because he was right about several important things.
- How To Sell · Jan 2020
Everything I wish I'd known, before I started, about doing sales at a startup.
Other Writing
- Rented Virtue, with Will Manidis · Feb 2026
Why secular institutions can’t sustain genuine moral behavior without transcendent foundations. Quaker merchants, SBF, and the limits of utilitarian ethics.
- Moral AI (for WIRED) · May 2023
The Waluigi Effect, why rule-based AI safety will fail, and the case for training AI to genuinely internalize values instead.
- Newsletter, usually every month or two.
Selected Projects
- Compounding Intelligence: Adapting to the AI Revolution, written as a Visiting Fellow at Mercatus.
- I worked with NIH, academia & clinical centers to create the largest medical dataset in the world for researchers. (Link)
- I built Emergent Ventures Winners: Semantic search over every Emergent Ventures grantee. (Github has the data + code).
- A fun iPython adventure into computational genomics: Analyzing the SARS-CoV-2 Genome
Interviews
| Title | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Lenny’s Podcast | May 2025 | Palantir, forward-deployed engineers, enterprise data, hiring for independent thinkers, AI strategy |
| Dialectic | Mar 2025 | Care vs. slop, original seeing, how to understand things, spaced repetition, defamiliarization in art |
| The Ruffian | Mar 2025 | Principles for living, speed, risk-aversion, luck as surface area, “aim for Chartres” |
| Better Known | Oct 2024 | Weerasethakul, Empson’s ambiguity, Wittgenstein’s notebooks, Sokolov’s Goldberg Variations, Shklovsky, Vikram Seth |
| The Common Reader | Sep 2024 | Proust, defamiliarization, deep reading vs. skimming, what literature demands of you |
| Dan Schulz | Mar 2024 | Bergman and slow cinema, close-reading Shakespeare, LLMs vs. real meaning, Beethoven’s late quartets, NYC vs. SF |
More about me
- I grew up in England, and I’ve previously lived in SF and DC, as well as a one-year stint in France, and most recently spent a year fully nomadic.
- At Oxford I specialized in Development Economics, Derek Parfit’s philosophy, and the later philosophy of Wittgenstein.
- I interned at the Bank of England in the summer of ‘08 (!) which was a dramatic introduction to central banking, quantitative easing, and financial crises.
- I led various public health projects with US federal agencies as an Enterprise Lead at Palantir Technologies, with experience in machine learning in the biosciences, public health during the COVID-19 response, and applied AI in drug discovery.
- I was also a founding employee and Vice President of Business Development at GoCardless, a Y Combinator (S11) funded company headquartered in London, now one of Europe’s biggest financial technology unicorns.