Palantir CEO Says Data-Mining Company Is Positioned to Go Public | Hacker News Reader

Palantir CEO Says Data-Mining Company Is Positioned to Go Public

wsj.com

119 pointsmayneack56 comments

I'm curious about how Palantir works as a public company. It has always looked like a data-centric McKinsey clone to me, and those kinds of consulting companies are usually partnerships.

Granted, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks that were once partnerships are now public. But that move hasn't necessarily been a good thing for the companies in question, and some argue it has been damaging.

Basically, Palantir looks to me like a law firm/consultancy, those firms typically find it advantageous to stay private, what is the advantage for Palantir to go public except to provide a cash out to investors?

isnt that the number one advantage companies go public? to cash out?

if companies could cash out and remain private, 100% of companies would choose that option.

Well no one would buy in at IPO time if they thought it was some kind of pump and dump scheme (of course this does happen, but is hopefully rare). An IPO is generally designed to raise cash that will be invested back into the business, and as a side effect give the investors a return.

yeah for the banks that underwrote the IPO and dumped the shares on your mom's pension plan.

the liquidity of the secondary stock market is a purely American phenomenon.

> the liquidity of the secondary stock market is a purely American phenomenon.

What do you mean by that? Loads of countries have adequately liquid stock markets.

Exactly what I wrote, the liquidity is crap. Adequate? It's just down hill

That's actually not how underwriting works. If an IPO is a flop right out the gate sometimes the bank can get stuck with the shares.

That's the risk they take on. I listen to retail investors, they clamor for IPOs no matter what the S-1 says.

in fact companies can cash out and remain private. private placement or selling the company are two big alternatives, and there are others.

Not 100% of companies have been choosing those options, however the # of US IPOs is lower now than it has been: https://www.quandl.com/data/RITTER/US_IPO_STATS-Historical-U...

They have made buckets of dough at the height of American surveillance activity and now they want to cash out while the getting is good.

What indication do you have that the surveillance state will shrink in the near future?

It doesn't have to shrink for Palantir to lose share to newcomers in a growing industry.

Or for certain classes of their customers (maybe governments?) to develop in-house solutions that become "good enough" that they expect to lose those customers in the future.

I'm not sure I see the "good getting" changing any time soon. If anything I believe surveillance capitalism is here to stay and unfortunately increase.

More like Accenture which is a $75 billion public company.

I believe that Palantir thinks they can scale their business in a way traditional consulting firms cannot. Since they have pretty powerful data and software tools, they can actually reduce the cost per client as their client base grows. Going public could give them more access to capital to keep growing, which they should do if their economic model scales.

I'm curious if going public would lead to more transparency about what they do and for whom. Enron was famously opaque to its own investors until it was too late, but I would hope that public companies have greater requirements for transparency nowadays.

I don't think that Palantir being a public company would necessarily give the kind of insight into what they do to satisfy our curiosity. As far as I understand, Palantir could be very financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are and what they are doing for them.

I think it's worth remembering that Enron was public.

I agree with you on the whole, but Enron was pre Sarbanes-Oxley which initiated a raft of reporting requirements on companies, so Enron is often a poor comparison to the present day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

Can you elaborate on:

"financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are"

How would this work in practical terms?

If you mean anything more specific than "we do stuff for the government we can't tell you about", probably not. Look at Boeing, Northop-Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc.

Hell, for that matter, look at AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 -- the companies that we didn't really expect to be doing the kinds of things they were doing.

That was my response as well. Going public means filing 10K statements which will lay all their business dealings out. Something I wouldn't think they or their clients would be interested in.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are public companies. Being public doesn't mean publishising customer lists.

Everyone knows who is the Military Industrial Complex's customers are, and what contracts are up. The questions are more about capabilities.

But you don't know about the contracts, because a lot of the contracts are classified and never released publicly.

Main takeaway from that article - Alex Karp is a really odd guy.

You should watch his interview with Charlie Rose.

He's not your usual corporate leader, but there's an unmistakable intellect in the way he articulates himself which must work for both leading this particular workforce as well as selling to this particular customer base.

Anybody with first-hand knowledge able to explain to me the difference between Acxiom[1] and Palantir in the grand scheme of things?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quie...

Palantir doesn't own any data whatsoever. It is in no way a data mining company, which makes it strange that it's constantly referred to as such. It makes software to allow organizations to do analysis on their own data, which Palantir has varying degrees of access to.

Another crucial difference is that marketing is a tertiary use case for Palantir, at best.

"Government (political), law-enforcement and security agency software company whom happens to use data-mining"

Perhaps this is shaking the trees of institutional/sovereign wealth funds/investors is in order to make them seem like they'll miss out.

IPO, these days, is a move of desperation and often a murdering of remaining agility.

Is Palantir a "Data-Mining Company" or is a military, law enforcement and surveillance company?

Yes

You could define Palantir more easily by which customers buy its products (Nat sec/law enforcement/military intelligence), and who specifically in those organisations use their software (mostly intelligence analysts.)

By saying they are a "Data-Mining Company" is an obvious (to me) sign that they want to be able to position themselves in the public sector (e.g. banking, retail) with counter-fraud services/solutions, and perhaps more generic cyber security solutions for large organisations.

Palantir has been deployed into banks for years.

Think highway patrol stealing money company, or DEA tracking every cellphone company.

Can someone shed some light on the asian claim? Seems like a really weird thing:

a) to bring up at all b) to bring up in an article about ipo

what does it have to do with the company going public?

I will shed light on the fact that at one point over 70% of my team were extremely bright and talented Asians and South Indians.

$10 says 'throaway0xff' is, in fact, Alex Karp himself.

If a company trying to go public is being sued by one of its largest customers (i.e. the US federal government), that's pretty material. The USDOJ is (IIRC) trying to ban contracts while the matter is under investigation.

Palantir’s workers “need to know they will have liquidity at a fair price,” said Mr. Karp

Unless there's a subtlety I missed, isn't this more likely to be driven by their VCs?

It sounds like the IPO is employee retention driven.

They're famous for underpaying and overworking, which I supposed could affect hiring, but yeah, maybe the subtlety is that employees were carrot-and-stick'ed with promises of IPO and now word has got around about work conditions there. Still, it's usually because VCs want their payday.

> saying he is focused on customers who can promise accounts worth at least $100 million.

What!?! Is there a market for that? Who pays that much? Republic of Turkey Secret Police?

Yes - there is a market. Legitimate companies that make things you use and ride in every day.

And here comes the paywall.

Can't read it from direct link, can't read it from web link, can't read it from private browsing.

:-(

Copy the title of the article then put it in a google search and click on the first result. You should be able to bypass the paywall.

There is this "web" button underneath the link, that does this if you're lazy

That's what the web link does, that user5994461 said they tried.

Close the paywall ad by clicking the x on the top right corner and it lets you read the article.

Try web link + incognito / private mode?

Here you go: http://pastebin.com/raw/F6JN2A4k

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