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Comment by josephjrobison | Hacker News Reader

Data is the oil of the 21st century.

This one seems like the sleeping giant of the top venture-backed companies. I suppose the media can't as easily describe and talk about it and understand it as much as Uber or AirBnb, so they just move on to the more fun companies.

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I don't know, I'm not seeing a "sleeping giant" here... Plantir has been around for a long time already at this point- Getting an additional cash infusion, especially one so small for a company of Palantir's size, sounds like the move of a company that is struggling.

They are sleeping in the sense that they go under the radar of most of the public in spite of being massively influential.

This raise is relatively small because it is a continuation of the previous raise. To me, it actually sounds more like a bullish sign that they were able to raise more than their target amount at such a high valuation. The investors had access to far more information than we outsiders do. If Palantir were truly "struggling", then they likely would not have been able to secure more investments at that same high valuation.

I see what Joseph is saying about that macro trend. In Austin, RideScout (Kayak.com for transportation options) just sold for ~$100m to Daimler AG with only tens of thousands of user.

The importance to Daimler was seeing all the driving and traveling data for each user.

You're a couple of orders of magnitude off, my friend.

Ah ok - that's what I heard through Capital Factory. However, I can't imagine it would be more than 2 (you said a couple) orders of magnitude off.

Do you know approximately what the amount was?

number of users? price? which direction?

price.

I disagree with the analogy. Human population will not grow from 1 billion to 7 billion because of data, that is the kind of change we got with oil. Oil is a hard asset, data is not entirely hard asset.

can you explain how oil enabled human pop to go from 1b to 7b?

Not sure why you are getting down voted. It's a valid question.

Cheap, abundant energy makes in cheaper to produce and transport necessities for human life and allows us to invest more time into researching and improving the quality and availability of those necessities (food, clothing, housing, medicine, etc.).

Haven't read through all of this, but it seems to have some similar ideas. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-int...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Industrial fertiliser and transport, plastics, energy, etc.

> Data is the oil of the 21st century.

Interesting. So you're saying we'll reach "peak data" in about 100 years?

Well, we'll keep getting better and better at extracting more worthwhile data, and increase our ability to use the data we have. And data will allow extensive growth (of business). It might be reaching, but yes, kinda.

Interesting thought, I suspect there is something like peak computation per ft^3 and we will hit such barriers earthbound (with quantum computing being the equivalent to solar+cheap storage for this problem).

The SF term is 'computronium'.

I think like oil, we'll keep finding new ways to dig deeper and get more out of it through innovations and new technologies, don't you agree?

There's only so much to know. What's more important is what we do with it, and how we apply it.

Everyone in tech knows about Palantir.

Soon Palantir will also know about everyone in tech.

Well considering what their software actually does...yeah they most likely do in a data set somewhere.

Considering what their software actually does, which is basically displaying a dashboard of nice tables / visualizations / graphs, and knobs to turn those visualizations/graphs, no. Palantir barely does any machine learning.

Seems like you'd NOT want to do machine learning if you simply want to hold all of the data parent mentioned...

The snake oil?

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