Palantir x Arnav Chauhan

hey palantir!

i'm arnav chauhan, and here's why i think i'd be a great fit for the Meritocracy Fellowship and the hospitals team.

about me

• • 17 years old, high schooler from North Carolina, currently living in San Francisco
• • started my first company when I was 15 building AI video analysis tools for tennis players, scaled to $40k ARR
• • last summer, I made my own position as employee #13 at vitalize — we build AI scheduling and workforce management tools for hospitals
  • i visited the poker night they hosted after YC Startup School for the free pizza, ended up hanging out with the CTO until 4am, and then spent the rest of the summer with them
• • i turned down a full-time offer last August to finish my senior year of high school
• • ended up trying to fix schools with AI my first semester, got tired of beauracracy and decided SF was the place to be if i actually wanted to learn anything
• • for the past 3 months now, I've been doing FDE + Deployments work at Vitalize

why i get the hospitals team

• • at vitalize, we're also building labor optimization tools for hospital systems. i regularly tell customers how we're different from Palantir
• • i've sat in the rooms, talking to nurses, charge nurses, and staffing office managers.
• • i've done the deployments — i've been present for 4 hospital deployments, played a role in 3 of them, and have led 1 on my own
• • i already do the FDE job — fly to customer sites, deploy software, gather feedback, fix things on the ground

things i'd think about on day one

• • day-of scheduling — dynamically reallocating staff in real-time as census and acuity shift. most tools (including timpani, iirc) only handle advance scheduling. this is the feature that wins contracts
• • predictive float pool optimization — use historical census data to pre-position float pool nurses before demand spikes, cutting agency labor costs
• • nurse-facing mobile UX — adoption is everything. a dead-simple app for nurses to view schedules, swap shifts, and flag availability is how you make the software sticky on the floor

what i bring

• • technical: typescript, next.js, react, python, node.js, supabase, aws, postgresql, hardware (ESP32, drones)
• • domain expertise in hospital operations that you normally can't hire for — i've been in the units, not just the boardrooms
• • i know how to get a hospital to actually use software. deployment strategy isn't overhead, it's the product
• • i chose this over college. no safety net, no structured program. just showed up and started building
• • i will outwork anyone

things i've built

• • vitalis — central AI command center for nurses. IoT sensors on ESP32 hardware piping real-time patient data to a unified dashboard. won 1st place healthcare at hacknyu github
• • vitalize care — hospital workforce management. AI scheduling, float pool optimization, capacity planning. this is my full-time job
• • onefootgo — AI video analysis for tennis players. built through buildspace. six-figure contract
• • buildrtp — nonprofit startup accelerator for high school founders in raleigh-durham. ~$10k raised

how i got my current job

went to a YC startup school event last summer because i wanted free dinner. ended up at the poker after-party, met the vitalize team, and talked my way into a position that didn't exist. spent the summer shipping features and visiting hospitals. went back to finish high school, got bored within weeks, moved back to SF, and went full-time.

i'd love to chat about the hospitals team and the fellowship. i'll respond fast.