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Why I Left Palantir and Faced 50 RejectionsㅣMosaic, Bijan Moallemi

EO10:52Added Aug 31, 2026

Bijan Moallemi is Founder and CEO of Mosaic.tech, a strategic finance software platform that provides advanced analytics and financial planning tools for businesses. As the former SVP of Finance at Palantir, Bijan built the finance team from the ground up, tackling complex challenges that ultimately inspired him to address widespread inefficiencies in financial operations through Mosaic.tech. From his early days as a competitive tennis player to navigatin

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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  1. Intro

  2. 00:00If I'm playing a match and I lose a point,
  3. 00:02I can't worry about the point that I lost.
  4. 00:03Because if I'm still thinking about the point that I lost, I'm gonna
  5. 00:06lose the next point and the next game and I'm gonna lose the match.
  6. 00:09The same is true in a startup. We had like 7 or 8 people in.
  7. 00:12So I'm in my master bedroom closet getting a call from an investor
  8. 00:15hoping for a yes, and we got to no.
  9. 00:17That was super painful.
  10. 00:19We weren't ready for that, but it motivated us to be better
  11. 00:23and move faster and things moved on.
  12. 00:25And so later that year, we were raising a series A and that same
  13. 00:28investor came back around actually saying, hey, I've heard about the progress.
  14. 00:31I'm seeing everything you guys are doing. I'd love to be a part of the round.
  15. 00:34I don't see no as a failure if I'm doing the same thing over and over
  16. 00:38and not learning, that's failure.
  17. 00:40But if there's mistakes along the way and I'm learning from that,
  18. 00:43I actually see that as a positive thing. I don't necessarily see that as a failure.
  19. 00:46Ultimately, that's that's just part of the journey.
  20. 00:50I'm Bijan Moallemi, mosaic tech is a strategic finance platform.
  21. 00:54We hook into data sources across the business and automate a lot
  22. 00:57of the manual work that finance teams would be traditionally doing.
  23. 01:00We debuted as number 97 on the Deloitte Fast 500, and so that's
  24. 01:04for the fastest 500 growing tech companies from a revenue perspective.
  25. 01:08Pretty happy to be top 100 on that list.
  26. 01:10And I think it's just a testament to all the team's hard work over
  27. 01:13the last few years to hit those numbers.

  28. 7 Years at Palantir : Lessons from Scaling to $3B

  29. 01:37My dad moved to the United States when he was 18 to escape the revolution in Iran,
  30. 01:42working three jobs to pay for college.
  31. 01:44He was sending money back to his family, ended up getting two degrees
  32. 01:47in three years.
  33. 01:48And so I think that work ethic, that tenacity was something that he had,
  34. 01:53something that my mom had and was just kind of the way that I was raised.
  35. 01:56For me, I think the first time that I really started to see
  36. 01:59to see that in myself.
  37. 02:00Was on the tennis court, played competitive tennis.
  38. 02:02Growing up for me was never the most talented person,
  39. 02:05never the most athletic on the court.
  40. 02:06But I felt like if I was training harder than everyone, that would put me in
  41. 02:10a position to where I would have a chance to win any match before I'd get ready
  42. 02:14for tennis tournaments.
  43. 02:14They'd always have these national tournaments over the summer
  44. 02:17and they would be in the hottest places.
  45. 02:19So San Antonio in August, which is 100 degrees, 100% humidity, or maybe it's Fort
  46. 02:24Lauderdale, Florida, and the weather here doesn't really get you prepared for that.
  47. 02:27What that would mean for me is going out to Palm Springs, training in sweatpants
  48. 02:31and a hoodie in 100 degree weather for a week, getting ready for those tournaments.
  49. 02:35And that's definitely the attitude that I've kind of taken with me
  50. 02:39throughout my entire life.
  51. 02:40I think that's the attitude that you can't really lose
  52. 02:42because you're always getting better.
  53. 02:43And in the long run, we feel like that'll help us win.
  54. 02:48Palantir is an amazing company.
  55. 02:50The company was just over 100 people when I joined.
  56. 02:52The finance function wasn't really built out yet, and so we went on
  57. 02:55this incredible journey for seven years,
  58. 02:57building and scaling the finance team, doing close to 3 billion of a quarter
  59. 03:01dollars in revenue by the time we left.
  60. 03:03When you've got a rocket ship and you've got a company who doesn't
  61. 03:05have their finances in order, the business was asking these reasonable
  62. 03:09questions what's our cash balance?
  63. 03:11How much revenue do we have? Who owes us money?
  64. 03:13And early on, because we didn't have the infrastructure,
  65. 03:16we couldn't answer those questions.
  66. 03:17Ultimately, we were working really hard.
  67. 03:19I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time.
  68. 03:21We were taking the first Caltrain down to Palo Alto in the morning,
  69. 03:24taking the last Caltrain back up.
  70. 03:26But because we were doing our work kind of the old fashioned way,
  71. 03:29which is using Excel to do everything, we were spending so much time pulling data,
  72. 03:33cleaning data, mapping it, doing the analysis that if the business
  73. 03:37asked us an important question, it would take us days or weeks to answer it.
  74. 03:40And with the pace of business these days, if it takes you two weeks to answer
  75. 03:44the question, people have moved on.
  76. 03:46They need something that is faster.
  77. 03:47They need something that's real time or proactive.
  78. 03:50Palantir was step one.
  79. 03:51My co-founders and I, we each went on to be CFOs
  80. 03:54at other high growth VC backed companies.
  81. 03:56If you don't have the billion dollars on the balance sheet like Palantir had
  82. 04:00at the time, you don't have a technical finance team, which most teams don't.
  83. 04:04You're actually in a big disadvantage.
  84. 04:05And the problem that we were solving at Palantir, it's mission critical.
  85. 04:08Every company needs to understand their finances.
  86. 04:11We realize that, hey, everything we did at Palantir,
  87. 04:14this is actually something that's needed.
  88. 04:15And it's ubiquitous for all companies. It's not just a Palantir specific problem.
  89. 04:20As we were just getting the company built, we spent a really long time
  90. 04:23thinking about the name.
  91. 04:24We bought a dictionary, and so my co-founder and I,
  92. 04:26we'd probably spend 2 or 3 hours a day just paging through the dictionary.
  93. 04:30We landed on mosaic.
  94. 04:31The name itself, if you think about a mosaic tile, one tile on its own could
  95. 04:35be one system of data, and that's valuable, but it's only so valuable.
  96. 04:39But when you zoom out and you've got 1000 tiles representing all the data across
  97. 04:43the business, you can actually paint.
  98. 04:45Beautiful mosaic, this beautiful vision about the company.
  99. 04:48We're a small startup.
  100. 04:49We haven't hadn't raised any money at the time.
  101. 04:51There's other mosaics out there. It's a somewhat common name.
  102. 04:54And we landed on tech because we're a technology company first and foremost, and
  103. 04:59mosaic is really all about pulling in data from various systems across the business,
  104. 05:03using that data to plan, forecast, analyze,
  105. 05:07do all the most strategic, important work that a finance team is responsible for.

  106. How 60 Rejections Turned a Finance Expert into a CEO

  107. 05:16For myself and one of my co-founders, we're finance people.
  108. 05:19We're not the most outgoing.
  109. 05:21That isn't really the most natural thing for us, but it had to be done.
  110. 05:25And so back to us, and the way that we sold and the way that we were probably
  111. 05:28presenting herself, we got a lot of no's.
  112. 05:30And it's not always fun to get no's when people tell you,
  113. 05:34no, I'm not interested or they don't really understand what you're selling.
  114. 05:37It probably took a few months and 50 or 60 no's for us
  115. 05:41to really start to figure selling out.
  116. 05:43The memorable no that we have actually is more on the investing side.
  117. 05:48So I remember early on there were a handful of investors that that we were
  118. 05:53talking to, and we felt like our pitch was pretty good at the time.
  119. 05:57We were starting to get a little bit of traction, and we got kind of late stage
  120. 06:01in these processes with these investors,
  121. 06:03and we're in, I think, the closet, because the room itself, that was my
  122. 06:07office, we had like 7 or 8 people in.
  123. 06:09So I'm in my master bedroom closet getting a call from an investor hoping for a yes.
  124. 06:14And we got to know that was super painful.
  125. 06:16We weren't ready for that, but it motivated us to be better
  126. 06:20and move faster, build the product faster, build the business faster.
  127. 06:26And things moved on.
  128. 06:27And so later that year we were raising a series A and that same investor
  129. 06:31came back around without us reaching out, actually saying,
  130. 06:34hey, I've heard about the progress.
  131. 06:35I'm seeing everything you guys are doing. I'd love to be a part of the round.
  132. 06:38So I don't see no as a failure if I'm doing the same thing over and over
  133. 06:43and not learning, that's failure.
  134. 06:45But if there's mistakes along the way, if there's something that goes wrong
  135. 06:48and I'm learning from that, I actually see that as a positive thing.
  136. 06:51I don't necessarily see that as a failure.
  137. 06:53Ultimately, that's that's just part of the journey in a tennis match.
  138. 06:57If I'm playing a match and I lose a point,
  139. 06:59I can't worry about the point that I lost.
  140. 07:01Because if I'm still thinking about the point that I lost, I'm gonna
  141. 07:04lose the next point and the next game and I'm going to lose the match.
  142. 07:06So you need to have this attitude where you analyze it, okay,
  143. 07:09what can I do better?
  144. 07:10But then as you're starting the next point,
  145. 07:12you kind of it's water under the bridge.
  146. 07:13You move on.
  147. 07:14The same is true in a startup where everyone that's involved in a startup.
  148. 07:17But I think really for founders, you feel it.
  149. 07:20Orders of magnitude more. The highs are high.
  150. 07:23The lows are low.
  151. 07:24And there's days where you don't want to get out of bed.
  152. 07:27You don't know what the next step is, but I think it's really all around persistence
  153. 07:31and giving 110% and doing that day in, day out over a long period of time.
  154. 07:36If you're thinking about starting a company, are you ready to be persistent?
  155. 07:40Are you ready to overcome those tough days?
  156. 07:42Are you ready to do that for many years?
  157. 07:43And if you are, being a founder is the most amazing thing,
  158. 07:46but it's it's not for everyone.

  159. How to Build Lasting Customer Loyalty

  160. 07:53One of our core beliefs across the business.
  161. 07:56And we have three core values.
  162. 07:58But the first one is champion the customer.
  163. 08:00The way to improve your retention is to really understand
  164. 08:03what your customers want, what they need, and the more time that you can spend with
  165. 08:06them, the better off you're going to be.
  166. 08:08Listening to customers, I think two things are important.
  167. 08:11Number one, you have to make sure that you're listening to the right customer.
  168. 08:14And the right customer from last year may not be the right customer
  169. 08:17for today or tomorrow.
  170. 08:18So that's something that you have to keep in mind.
  171. 08:20For us, the customer that we were serving early on was kind of the SMB,
  172. 08:24the small market customer.
  173. 08:26The things that we were hearing from customers
  174. 08:28when we had those customers was everything that they cared about in the SMB.
  175. 08:31Now, the last couple years, the focus for us has been pushing at market,
  176. 08:35really trying to wean off of some of those smaller customers and focus more on
  177. 08:39the mid-market and the upper mid-market.
  178. 08:40We do still have customers that are in that SMB space we'll sometimes sell
  179. 08:44to them, but the feedback that we hear from customers at this point,
  180. 08:48we're going to listen more to the mid-market customer than we are to
  181. 08:52the SMB customer, and that's just because of the business that we want to build
  182. 08:55and where we're trying to go.
  183. 08:57And I think second is it's really easy to fall into the trap
  184. 09:00when you have a large customer to bend the roadmap and do exactly
  185. 09:04what a big customer wants you to do.
  186. 09:06And you have to be making sure that you're listening to the broader
  187. 09:09customer base and not focusing on what one individual customer might be saying.
  188. 09:13I think our approach I'm really proud of this is we've spun up this team,
  189. 09:18we call it the Rapid Response Team, where it's a handful of engineers.
  190. 09:21It's a smaller team, but it allows us to take the requests that we're hearing
  191. 09:24from customers and if they're smaller or medium type features, we'll try
  192. 09:28to weave those things into the roadmap.
  193. 09:29It's a nice way to get quick wins for customers, make them feel like their
  194. 09:33voice is heard without actually bending and changing the bigger roadmap
  195. 09:37that most of the teams working on.
  196. 09:39I think customers value it, but at the same time
  197. 09:41it's allowed us to stay very focused.
  198. 09:43I think focus is probably the most important thing as a startup.
  199. 09:46It's less around, what are you building?
  200. 09:48It's actually more around what are you not building?
  201. 09:53I think for us, as we started mosaic, we saw other folks across the business
  202. 09:58at Palantir, folks in legal, folks in HR, folks in sales, folks in marketing,
  203. 10:03all other departments.
  204. 10:04And they'd been blessed with these amazing technologies.
  205. 10:07These tools made them better at their job. It made their work faster, easier.
  206. 10:11And on the finance side, for the most part, over the last 40 years,
  207. 10:15things haven't changed.
  208. 10:16You're still doing your work in spreadsheets and Google Sheets and Excel.
  209. 10:20It's rows and columns, and the technology hasn't really advanced.
  210. 10:24And so we felt like there was an opportunity to really push forward
  211. 10:27and bring this technology to the finance persona, a persona that has been needing
  212. 10:32innovative technology for for years now.
  213. 10:34So it's something that we're passionate about.
  214. 10:36And I think if we can play a part and make the role the CFO a little bit easier,
  215. 10:41I'd be proud of of what we're building.