Palantir goes public but founders will have control for life | Hacker News Reader

Palantir goes public but founders will have control for life

ft.com

61 pointspavanyara54 comments

Everyone is missing the bad business forest for the privacy abuse trees.

Palantir is a consulting company that has somehow convinced the world they exist in the same universe as standard high-margin tech companies, like Away luggage. The only differences between Palantir and, say, Booz Allen Hamilton that I can see are that 1) Palantir hires more engineers and 2) Booz has 7x the revenue and actually turns a profit.

It reminds me of WeWork and Regus. On the one hand you have companies that have a corporate structure that resembles Lost's Dharma Initiative and on the other you have a company that actually makes money, yet for some reason investors seem to be infatuated with the former. Makes no sense to me.

Could you explain/elaborate about the Dharma Initiative structure and how it applies here, to a person who’s fascinated with lost but never found the time to actually watch it.

I have patiently watched Lost Seasons 1 through 5 before giving up. I still have no idea about the Dharma initiative. I guess that's what it would be like for a shareholder in Palantir.

it blows my mind that a company, let alone a tech company with a product to license, that targets the IC isn't super profitable. then again, when i was a contractor in the IC all i ever heard was that the product sucked.

By the way, how did a luggage company convince the world they are a tech company?

By treating their employees as if they were working for an abusive startup

> "The only differences between Palantir and, say, Booz Allen Hamilton that I can see"

I'll start by saying I am not invested in Palantir, and they are not my investment tastes, but I don't think you are looking at important numbers.

Booz Allen has a growth rate of about 10%. Palantir grew by 24% in 2018 and yoy 45% (might come in at 60%) (Forbes). Some say that the growth rate may be because of covid (I dont know that's a bad thing), but it is fair if you are in that camp. However, looking at just the current revenue and ignoring growth seems like you are ignoring the important parts of the picture

To my knowledge Booz doesn’t have any significant revenue from licensing.

I think to compare them, you need to break out consulting revenue from professional services from their licensing from their managed hosting (or whatever they call their cloud managed instances PaaS stuff).

I used to work for a company that had dual streams and it was important to track the difference between license revenue and professional services because they are totally different with different growth rates.

Consulting will have a pretty limited growth rate because at the end of the day they are just selling people.

Software, of course, has the potential for exponential growth.

Palantir is a real threat to liberty, I am surprised to see so many “freedom” types support them.

This update illustrates how important control is to the founders.

Genuinely curious, how is Palantir a threat to liberty?

They are a highly-secretive company that sell secret digital surveillance services to governments, including law enforcement.

As a private company, they're not subject to FOIA requests the same way govt orgs (including military, with obvious redactions) are.

I don't think it's correct to say that they sell surveillance services. When I think of "surveillance" I think it means data collection. Palantir doesn't build data collection tools, they build data visualization tools. The government already has the data, Palantir builds a tool to better browse that data. The tool Palantir replaces if often Microsoft Excel. Does it follow that Excel is a digital surveillance tool?

You've made this distinction a couple times in these comments and I just don't buy it. If Palantir doesn't provide any value, why does the government keep hiring them to build "visualizations" of domestic surveillance tools? I think we can both oppose this kind of policy politically, and rightfully call out the companies and the individual engineers who do this kind of anti-privacy work.

The ability to better visualize this info, is the value. Governments are willing to pay for Palantir because doing things tracking down pill mills is easier if you can perform operations like filtering for people that bought the same drug twice in a day, and then plotting those purchases on map. It's a lot harder to do this kind of analysis with Excel.

So what if Palantir is selling facial recognition software?

That's technically the same: post-processing (video) data that the government has already collected.

Or what if they are doing predictive crime? Or tracking suspected criminals across marketing data sets?

Surveillance is dangerous at its core because it gives the govt power to target one or more people. If Palantir is doing that (and it is), then it has the same potential for harm as any other surveillance product.

I’ve seen similar comments come up and have been trying to understand if there’s something specific to Palantir, or just data analysis in general.

From my limited analysis and use of Palantir, it’s just a data management and analysis stack like so many others (SAS, SAP, alteryx, RStudio, etc) and similar to stuff that AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle offer as well. In that it’s just a giant bucket of data with ways to link it and connect it.

Is there something special about how Palantir does it that makes it better at analyzing data and thus more of a threat?

What’s weird about using it is that it just seems to be a specific way (like so many others) of just scaling up what I’ve seen for decades of making big databases and using them.

This is my understanding as well, which is why I was hoping someone on HN might be able to clarify OP's claim it's threat to liberty. Instead I am being downvoted. Is there no room for genuine curiosity on HN?

I think what’s specific to Palantir is their insistence on working with only organizations like DHS and law enforcement. Intelligence data fusion centers are used to compile data from various agencies and they’re stocked with tools like Palantir and Dataminr but IBM, Microsoft and all the usual players also offer fusion center data management products which I would consider to be just as harmful.

I think that statement is inaccurate. They do not work with only organizations like DHS and law enforcement. In general, I think roughly 40-60% of their work is with what you described and the rest is commercial entities. I imagine many vendors service organizations like DHS and law enforcement. Are they all threats to liberty?

In concrete terms, what is the threat, or why are they a threat to liberty?

They are a threat to liberty because they are used to perform surveillance and intelligence gathering on American citizens. Before the Snowden revelation this kind of behavior would have been considered criminal.

Is that Palantir or the analysts that use it?

I think what confuses me is I still don’t understand your argument.

Is Excel a threat to liberty because it is also used massively to perform surveillance?

Palantir is a software company with professional services.

I’m not sure if you think they are a threat because you don’t understand what they do. Or because you think all software companies that do this work are a threat? Or because you think Palantir is so much better than Microsoft and IBM and all their competitors? Or something else.

Outside of SV, working with law enforcement and government agencies isn't viewed as a cardinal sin. I wouldn't claim they're a threat to liberty just because you don't like them.

Intelligence operations against your own citizens is a serious reason to have an issue with those organizations. It’s not just a personal preference.

> working with only organizations like DHS and law enforcement.

Is this true? I thought they work with all industries and they seem to have a big financial and healthcare practice.

Wikipedia [0] calls out major companies such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. And those aren’t part of homeland security.

Some random report I found online [1] lists their closest competitors as Cognizant, Infosys, Cerner, and Wipro. That are just big analytics consulting groups and an EHR vendor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

[1] https://incfact.com/company/palantirtechnologies-paloalto-ca...

Palantir is a critical component of the "homeland security apparatus" which employs enormous amounts of Americans (especially in N. Virginia) and is becoming a powerful political constituency unto itself.

This constituency has and will push for government expansion of surveillance, counterintelligence, the military, and domestic policing in order to enrich its constituent corporations and government bureaus and their employees. This is the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Americans. I hope there are enough terrorists out there, and criminals in here, to justify that expenditure......

You might as well consider N. Virginia and its "colonies" in other parts of the country (e.g. aerospace around Los Angeles) as an extra super-powerful but hidden state within the state. Or you can view it as another branch of government.

This hidden state is not partisan. It does not care which political party is in power. Both political parties kowtow to it.

I would highly suggest investing in stocks of affiliated companies (Palantir, Oracle, defense stocks, ATT, Verizon) as they aren't going anywhere - ever.

I think that’s true, but also true for the other companies I mentioned. Is Palantir more of a part of the apparatus than SAS?

I think it’s less so than dedicated military industrial firms like Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman and whatnot.

If anything, going public will more clearly show what percentage of revenue comes from government vs non-government.

I believe Palantir exists specifically to serve the government surveillance "industry."

Do you have information showing otherwise?

All that's happening with or without Palantir. We have Big Data, we have data scientists, we have ML/AI....it's going to be used for all of these goals no matter what. The genie is out of the bottle.

Blaming Palantir here is a bit like blaming Colt or Smith & Wesson. They're just one of many companies that are providing, or could be providing, or with they were providing, these same services.

And the services themselves, and the science behind them aren't inherently evil. It's not like the math behind their models is special "let's oppress society" math.

Blaming Palantir for the things the government is doing is as effective as blaming Boeing or Google - whose services are also used by the US Government for various (nefarious) purposes.

I believe Palantir exists specifically to serve the intelligence apparatus.

Do you have information showing otherwise?

Control is important to governments.

Your statement is true. However, I think broadly, control is important. In this case, we are talking about Founders maintaining control, creating mechanisms to avoid a loss of control, under circumstances where control might be at risk. This seems reasonable. I am also not aware of how Founders maintaining control is a threat to liberty.

many of these "freedom" types only care about a narrow set of freedoms for themselves. They're actually quite fond of authoritarian systems.

I've found that people who make this kind of statements often aren't familiar with the kind of work Palantir does.

Palantir doesn't collect any information. They build tools for the government to browse information they already have. For example they build a tool to visualize the flow of monetary transactions between different people as a graph. They didn't collect this information, the government already has this information on financial transactions.

Whether or not Palantir existed, the government collects the same information. Sometimes people make the argument that building better tools to make correlations between these pieces of information amounts to a threat to privacy. But that seems like a much weaker argument to me. The government already has the information being analyzed with Palantir, and if the people don't think the government should have this information we have mechanisms in place to remove leaders and elect ones that will eliminate this data collection.

Decreasing the cost of government mass surveillance by developing more efficient tools to do it will inevitably increase the amount/scope of surveillance. This is Econ 101: as cost goes down, demand goes up. Claiming that you aren't responsible for increased privacy intrusion just because you built the tools to do it cheaply and then handed the actual operation off to someone else is is a despicable abdication of obvious responsibility.

sure but then by that logic so does building more powerful computers. so intel and nvidia and amd employees are also evil. and don’t forget building a more efficient operating system

If we will generalize about "freedom" types supporting Palantir, allow me to generalize about the opposite as well - the people who never care about pro-privacy and anti-censorship matters, unless they believe there's an angle from which they can attack "American imperialism" or the "industrial-military complex" or what have you. I suspect the only reason some people get upset about Palantir is because they provide tools to the government and military, and it is popular to bash the American government and the American military. At least on the left, where building software for national security is seen in the same light as supporting hegemony and imperialism.

I am skeptical about the people who complain about liberty or democracy being at risk because of Palantir, Facebook, etc, because my experience with these people has been that they are never anti-censorship, pro-democracy except when it suits their own partisan side. They'll easily welcome censorship if it means Facebook shutting down "dangerous" groups, where dangerous is any group that is not their group.

https://archive.vn/XB2jb

So are these SPACs simply a method of avoiding standard public company disclosures, while providing liquidity to insiders? How would that be a good idea?

I don't think Palantir going public is about liquidity for insiders. Rather, I think it is about access to public capital markets. Obviously, it does both, but I think the impetus is access to public capital markets.

>Rather, I think it is about access to public capital markets.

I don't see anything, anywhere, regarding their goals for raising cash through this "IPO"; it looks like insiders selling shares to me. I could be wrong.

But they are a software service company. Why would they need an influx of public capital?

eh? for the same reason any company, saas or not, needs public capital.

Palantir did not go public via a SPAC but by simply directly listing their shares for public sale. A company might choose to do this if the number of shares it offers would not be significantly valued higher going through the "traditional" IPO process.

Even with a SPAC there's no avoidance of disclosures that are required per SEC filings.

it's good to be king

Unpaywalled URL: https://app.ft.com/content/27eddb59-1770-4ad8-a07f-6a940e20e...

It's also paywalled for me.

I still get “This article is only available to subscribers” garbage

http://archive.today/XB2jb

Can no longer edit/delete because I've been downvoted, but yes, this is no longer public. Sorry about that!

Another Facebook in the making only worse

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