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Comment by seper8 | Hacker News Reader

Palantir feels a lot like Enron to me.

Just check out their website and let me know if you feel the same...

My CTO is always talking about Palantir and how they are the future and how we need to figure out how to implement their services into our work.

However, I can't find any examples of what they really do or what kind of product they offer. I've watched multiple videos about Palantir including many interviews with Alex Karp. But I still can't figure out exactly what they do and how their products/services would help us at work.

Spoiler alert - they won't.

FYI there are countless tutorials about how to use Foundry on Youtube from Palantir. The docs are public too. It's just B2B data SaaS.

Pretty bog-standard analysis & import tools on top of a database, with a promise to give you the entire universe (but all of that's custom work, and you'll be paying dearly for it)

IOW I have yet to see anything that makes them look like more than your average data-centric service company. Pretty sure they're a normal business with a fairly typical offering that's been hyped so people in decision-making positions think it's Magic Sauce. Like a lot of companies that get talked about on HN, actually.

Exactly what I thought... But they seem far less popular than alternative solutions like databricks.

How is that PE ratio justified? I just cant wrap my mind around it.

And all the battleground tech they seem to offer? Good fucking luck selling it to any NATO country now.

I think it would be appropriate to ask him how much Palantir stock he holds.

That's a great question, especially considering he's openly acknowledged owning Palantir stock.

It's mckinsey but with tech people, not consultant babys. they actually have people who know how to speak to politics people, & they don't come from think-tanks like some other brands of loser. think outside the box. not every company is "really" a product company, i.e. Google is not computers company, it's an ads company, & so on.

> or what kind of product they offer

They offer Apollo <https://www.palantir.com/docs/apollo/core/overview/#apollo-a...> as part of their FedStart program, although their docs aren't sales-y enough for drive-by understanding of what it does. They had a demo-day video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kSGlg8d5mI?t=622> that is still too "blah, blah, words" but at least shows some of the UI

As compared to Argo et al, I'll say it's pretty slick, but it is unquestionably very "do things the Palantir way" and thus even as slick as it is I don't think it's appropriate for just any ole random startup. It's also evidently just recently been exposed outside of Palantir so it definitely is v0.0.00000009-alpha when trying to use it in anger

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