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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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...

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

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