Our Story

While working at Palantir, I spent years building product alongside teams that were deeply embedded with customers. The work was meaningful, but it exposed a persistent frustration: the information that mattered most for the product team to find direction was spread across many of these embedded teams and their conversations with customers.

Everyone had pieces of the truth, but no one had the full picture.

Finding the right direction for the product often felt semi-random. If I happened to have the right conversation with the right people — and if those people were willing and able to connect me with the customers they worked closely with — I might uncover the insight I needed. More often, product decisions were shaped by whichever signals happened to surface, rather than by a comprehensive view of what customers were actually experiencing.

As a builder, I found it difficult to move with confidence. I had strong instincts about where the product should go next, but validating them meant navigating a maze of conversations, anecdotes, and secondhand context. The process was slow, manual, and dependent on access — not on the availability of data itself.

That experience stayed with me.

Over time, I realized this wasn't a Palantir-specific problem. Derrick saw the same thing at Meta — the difficulty of building consensus and alignment when different teams had seen different slices of customer reality. As organizations grow, customer insight becomes increasingly fragmented across people, tools, and workflows. Critical signals end up buried in emails, Slack threads, call transcripts, and internal systems — accessible in theory, but hard to assemble in practice.

Overstand is the data team we wished we had.

We built it to help leadership teams pressure-test their ideas against all of their company's data, no matter where it lives, and surface the specific evidence needed to align teams and act with conviction.