Big Data, Big Bucks: Palantir Valued at $9 Billion | Hacker News Reader

Big Data, Big Bucks: Palantir Valued at $9 Billion

blogs.wsj.com

54 pointsKopion52 comments

> In-Q-Tel, a non-profit venture-capital firm established by the CIA

Good old Mussolini style fascism is steaming full speed ahead in the land of the free.

Sssh, we've got to keep the children safe by recording all the minutia of your online life. Because terrorism.

This is a reddit-level shitty comment. Unless you agree that the CIA has no right to exist (and you'd be insane [one of the nicest words I can think to put here] to think so), I fail to see why it's bad that the government would contract to people who can do things 100% more efficiently. Also the form of "shh...don't bring your logic here" comments is especially discussion-killing and really doesn't belong here.

Full disclosure: I work for Palantir, but I speak for myself, not the company.

Fair enough. I'll dispense with the snark and provide a more specific summary of my thoughts on the matter:

1) Not everybody who works for the government (either directly or as a contractor) is a power-hungry closet totalitarian. In fact, these people are rare.

2) Nevertheless, these people exist, and the ambitious ones often claw their way to the upper echelons of whatever organization they work for. Their goals are likely not as diabolic or lofty as overthrowing a country or subverting the Constitution, but rather to check the requisite boxes their bosses deem important and to further their own careers by "empire building".

3) The by-product of these goals can result in the waste of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, if they over promise and under deliver. They may exaggerate the scope of a problem in order to make their pet solution seem all the more critical. Technical problems have more taxpayer dollars thrown at them, to ensure a fix. Legal restrictions are tackled by lawyers, who seek to find workarounds.

4) In the end, rules are bent and billions are wasted to solve a "problem" that really wasn't a serious problem. Most of the hands that touched the "solution" did not intend to waste money or subvert laws, but either believed that the end result was for the greater good or simply didn't care one way or the other.

I see Palantir in this light: not an evil entity, not a shadowy puppet master plotting the demise of America. But they happily accept contracts from agencies full of men and women far more interested in checking boxes and furthering personal careers than any effect it may have on spending or the personal liberties of strangers.

I see them in the same light as I do the people who built the backscatter machines used by the TSA in the airports: an interesting tool being misused by the wrong people in power.

Individuals who work on a project that can be turned against their fellow citizens and sleep well at night because the work is interesting or the pay is good have none of my sympathy and are earning an increasing amount of my contempt as the scope of unconstitutional government espionage becomes more and more clear.

The CIA -- as well as any other government agency -- is an organization and has no inherent "right" to do anything, including exist. I don't care about efficiency if it means that my children and their children grow up in a country where every electronic record associated with their lives is harvested and analyzed so they may supposedly be safer from "bad guys".

A pox on anyone who supports this guilt-by-association, pro-precrime, "efficient" America. It is an Orwellian hell.

How's THAT for a comment?

If you're going to have a CIA, and they're going to have technology, why not have them look outside their corporate walls to create it? I can't imagine that a big government organization is capable of creating groundbreaking technical innovation better than small groups of hungry silicon valley individuals.

Think of it as an involuntary social network!

For most of us, it's also write-only. (Barring observation and analysis of resulting effects.)

Their next project, now in closed alpha, aims "to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"; the preliminary logo is O-shaped.

Whether they buy a tower for their office remains to be seen.

</TheOnionMode>

Remember that the "original" Palantir (the ones in the novel) were created by the good guys for communication but were used by the bad guys for spying so is pretty close.

Not too far removed from tracking for advertising purposes, honestly. Just a lot more sources to work with, presumedly.

Pretty shoddy reporting from the WSJ, Peter Thiel isn't (just) an investor in Palantir he's a cofounder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

And editing: > ... the “big data” miner that the counts the CIA and the FBI among its clients...

An extraneous 'the' in the first sentence.

Great for them; Palantir is definitely a company I respect. I went to their office for an interview about 10 months ago for a job I didn't really want. I didn't get the job and I'm in a better position today, but I have nothing except great things to say about their people and office. During the visit, I learned a decent chunk about how big agencies use software like their's just in a 1-hour demo. They also use their own software to do a lot of humanitarian work.

I would have thought post Snowden, Palantir and others like them, would have diminished prospects in the future.

I guess I am wrong.

That's like saying that if a gigantic oil deposit is confirmed, the petroleum industry would collapse.

To stick with the oil analogy. Yes, but all of sudden now the world at large has soured on gasoline so Palantir has built this massive refinery that has no demand because the people no longer trust how folks are a. refining the oil and b. what they are doing with the gasoline.

We would all like to believe people care about being spied on and all, but the truth is everyone is just busy preparing their christmas shopping.

I would have thought the same, but damn.... that Soylent Green is just so darn tasty.

To acquire the NSA or to be acquired by them? That is the question.

Is it odd to raise $200m at a $5b valuation in September and follow it with $60m-100m at a $9b valuation a few months later?

Its a little odd that its a smaller round, but other than that, it just seems to indicate rapid growth, which usually needs financing i.e. "growth capital."

Maybe now, that they've got more publicity, the value went up :)

You mean because they took less money or because it gained 4B in value in a few months?

The follow-up money is twice as cheap because of the larger valuation. I guess someone really wanted to invest in them?

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3052

Podcast with Stephen Cohen speaking at Stanford on starting Palantir.

this round of funding is strange to me. Is it necessary? Its already well established and probably generates sufficient revenue to fund itself - or at a minimum raise debt if its in need of cash.

    s/Big Data/Big Brother/g;

More like Big Spying.

I'll risk even more downvotes -- but -- Palantir may be the creepiest company in the valley.

The relationship they have with the DOD/NSA is simply unreal. their offices on the east coast are full of high-ranking officials, generals, etc -- all the time.

Palantir powers a lot of the retina-database insurgent tracking software in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I've personally heard from US Army Special Operations forces that the imaging software they use to plan "missions" is powered by Palantir (but is frequently slow and buggy, so they resort to Google maps)

I noticed that an Operator featured in Sanjay Gupthas CNN documentary on Marajuana had a Palantir patch next to his US Flag patch on his carrier chest rig.

Creepy stuff.

Additionally - their logo, while they sheepishly claim is inspired by The Lord of the Rings (along with their name and product names) -- honestly looks like something supporting the earth.

Looks like the top half of a person to me. Arms and head.

> sheepishly claim is inspired by The Lord of the Rings

And, for those who missed the reference, the Palantir is the "all-seeing" device used by the formerly good wizard who defects to the dark side partway through the series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir

Ah. It does look like a crystal ball on a stand, once you know what you're looking at.

Which the founders surely know. Unless you believe they model themselves after the evil wizards (and barely anyone ever thinks of themselves as evil), it's more of an acknowledgement of the risk.

I've wondered whether the name is intentionally a kind of warning. I'm assuming that the company founders knew LoTR well enough to understand what connotations 'Palantir' brings, and while I expect not every customer would, enough might that it might give pause.

here's an interesting quora post by Garry Tan about designing the Palantir logo -- it's both supposed to be a crystal ball & look like a human reading a book. you can read the whole thing here: http://www.quora.com/Logos/What-does-Palantirs-logo-symboliz...

Apologies, my post is riddled with misspellings. I haven't had coffee yet.

I don't know what's "creepy" about it. Any DOD contractor will have high-ranking military people coming in and out. The military is an extremely high-tech organization, and there are lots and lots of people building all that software and hardware.

Anecdote: when I was working at a company developing military radio technology, we spent a month doing field testing on a military base. There were a bunch of military people watching the trials (including a general), not to mention dozens of engineers from other defense contractors. There was nothing creepy or unusual about it. Who do you think builds the radios soldiers carry, the radio jammers they use, the binoculars they use, infrared gear, etc? It's all the product of thousands of projects by thousands of engineering teams, and every year there are probably thousands of occasions in which military brass drop by or check in to see what's up.

I won't downvote you, but I'll disagree with you.

We live in the world we live in, and counter intelligence is necessary. The fact that it's privatized is nothing different that what's happening with KBR, Blackwater, Lockheed-Martin, L3, et al. It's more a function of political realities where critical functions are being subcontracted out.

I'd rather have a Palantir than not have one and be outmaneuvered by other geopolitical rivals.

edit: hey, rayiner, fair point. I think that logistics and 'private security contractors' are in a different category than traditional defense contractors. I'm not really sure where Palantir belongs on that spectrum, so I intentional casted a wide net.

At least with Blackwater you can raise the complaint that mercenaries privatize aspects of the military that should be under public control. But to the extent that we have soldiers who carry equipment, nobody seriously thinks that the military should build all that equipment itself.

>We live in the world we live in, and counter intelligence is critical.

especially against your own citizens. Do "fusion center" and "Suspicious Activity Reports" generated by Palantir software ring a bell?

If you remember history, the most amount of intelligence gathered and acted upon in USSR, East Germany were against their own people, while it was supposedly under the great goal of counter intelligence against [foreign] enemy spies, agents, collaborators. Fusion centers with modern equipment and software is KGB & Stasi wet dream.

If you remember history, every single extant liberal democracy has had surveillance capabilities for decades, and continue to be healthy free societies.

>If you remember history, every single extant liberal democracy has had surveillance capabilities for decades, and continue to be healthy free societies.

the difference here is the actual massive surveillance (basically total possible by the technological means of the time) performed by the KGB/Stasi outside of the due process inside the jurisdiction of their respective countries. It is exactly the emerging characteristic of fusion centers and NSA activities. Please name an "extant liberal democracy" which has had such massive surveillance capabilities and applied them in such a way.

The FBI during the 1950's and almost certainly Britain's intelligence agencies post WWII.

Remember, the FISA mechanism that attracts so much flak these days was put into place because in the past the NSA had no restrictions or oversight, effective or ineffective.

>The FBI during the 1950's

yes, great example. If people want back to that game of witch hunting, and with incomparably, multiple orders of magnitude, increased capabilities of witch hunters (like J. Edgar Hoover looking into a fusion center palantir by Palantir) - well, i rest my case.

Hoover would have killed for the kind of capabilities that Palantir provides.

But then again, so would have the KGB and East German Stasi.

Palantir's developers aren't evil, but the fact that so many folks wish to don the rose-colored glasses and assume that their work cannot be used for the wrong things makes me nauseous.

Palantir doesn't generate anything except visualization a and an environment in which to manipulate those visualizations. There's no printer hooked up to Palantir that prints out new people to arrest every hour. In fact, the philosophy (and it's well maintained in their product) is that humans make every decision. The software simply helps elucidate options, costs and benefits, and most importantly, to revert the human decision.

I'm not sure KBR and Blackwater are the best examples of companies in good public standing.

The argument for Palantir is that pattern recognition applied to big data can save lives. That's enough for me.

> The relationship they have with the DOD/NSA is simply unreal. their offices on the east coast are full of high-ranking officials, generals, etc -- all the time.

Silicon Valley in general has always, and will always, be heavily intertwined with military technology.

http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/inconvenient-history-of-...

I would be much more creeped out if Peter Thiel wasn't running the company. I'm intrigued by that man, and for some reason he seems to be able to bank that for trust, at least for me.

It sounds to me as though you find anything security, law enforcement, or military-related to be inexcusably "creepy". Otherwise, it would seem pretty silly to describe customers hovering over critical suppliers as "simply unreal". Would high-ranking Apple execs constantly showing up at Foxconn offices show a relationship to Apple that you would describe as "simply unreal"? Otherwise, it would seem pretty silly to put scare quotes around Special Forces "missions". Do Special Forces not conduct real missions in your world, only so-called "missions"?

"Creepy stuff"? Silly stuff.

Negative. I have nothing but love for LEO/MIL.

However, when a company has access to state data, and banking data, and social data, and... etc.

Not hard to see how they can build a network.

You think DOD isn't begging Palantir for AMEX's customer data, even anonymized? Or any of the other financial institutions they provide services for?

... probably not. But it's easy to see how they could.

Hey, they recruit on LinkedIn like everyone else, leave them alone! /s

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