Poptip Joins Palantir
blog.poptip.com
blog.poptip.com
And what exactly is it that you think Palantir's products do? :)
They also use Congressman Hunter as a paid shill to push their product all over the government as if its a panacea to every data integration issue. Its not.
You didn't answer my question.
Yet another reason to loathe palantir.
A good example is the history of tracking cars. Privacy concerns with police tracking were originally non-existent since the first versions were police literally following cars, so the number of potential targets was limited by the number of officers. Then came tracking beacons that were physically attached to the car, enabling a single officer / command center to track hundreds or thousands of vehicles. Undoubtedly more accurate and detailed, but mildly more invasive. The latest iteration of this is to simply track every car on the road via cameras with OCR or through RFID on toll passes. After you've collected a history of every vehicle in an area, you can pick-and-choose which ones are interesting. This is astronomically more detailed since you now have a history of where every baddie was at various points in time, but I think most would agree that it's much more invasive than ever before.
That assumes that there exists some objective, mutually agreed-upon measure of "accuracy".
For example, Glenn Greenwald has said that there is no definition of what constitutes "terrorism" that is not inherently based on race[0]. This isn't saying that the measures we take to prevent "terrorism" are racist; it's saying that the actual pursuit - the goal itself - is inherently racist, albeit implicitly.
The argument in support of that claim is too long to go into here[1], but suffice to say that, if you believe that the word "terrorism" is simply a euphemism for rationalizing racist behaviour or suppressing legitimate political dissent, then no, you're not going to be happy when people find more accurate ways to target those individuals.
[0] You may or may not agree with this premise personally, but that's not the point.
[1] though easy to find online
I generally fall into the same anti-paranoia camp as you seem to, as in "how bad can they really be?" But then I read articles like one posted here a while back, which I'm having trouble finding (anyone?), that described massive, tens-of-millions-of-dollars government research contracts ostensibly to "study the Arab Spring." The article talked about the discomfort of researchers, who were surprised to be pressured by the Pentagon into focusing their efforts on "potentially disruptive" American groups like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street.
Again, I can't find the article, but I remember my takeaway from it was that the Pentagon is actively pursuing research into how to identify, control, and suppress grass roots movements and protests in the US.
So, maybe we haven't seen evidence of suppression yet, but I suspect that's because there has yet to be an adequate trigger event in the US, or an "American spring" of sorts. When that happens, which I'm sure it will at some point, we will see the NSA putting their data to use against American citizens.
Perhaps not consciously, no, but we're talking about this in the same lens that people use when describing the war on drugs as "The New Jim Crow"[0], to assert that the war on (some) drugs is inherently a race- and class-driven fight, even if not done consciously by most parties involved.
> It seems far more plausible that using race as a judge of threatfulness is a result of not having anything more accurate to go on.
Again, you're assuming an uncontroversial, objective, and non-racist definition of "threatfulness". This is one of the few instances in which the phrase "begging the question" can be used correctly in an online discussion.
It might seem at first that such a definition would obvious, but that's actually very far from the case, as people like Greenwald have explained.
I don't want to try and explain this reasoning any further myself, not for lack of patience, but simply because Greenwald has already written about this this very eloquently and at great length, so anything I could write in this comment would be an ersatz rehashing of what he's said.
His essays on this are very easy to find online, so out of respect to his beliefs, I'd encourage you to read it "straight from the lion's mouth" rather than rely on whatever summary I could muster.
Terrorism is a low risk in the US, these programs seem to add little to just having investigators follow leads and intentionally infiltrate groups or paying informants or similar, and the US government has a long record of targeting groups that the powerful don't like.
There doesn't seem to be many uses for that type of NLP other than surveillance and brand monitoring.
Their burn rate looks to be around $275m/yr based on employee head count and they've received ~$900m in funding:
- Seed - In-Q-Tel (~$2m)
- Debt Financing - $8.3m
- Series C - $35m
- Series D - $90m
- Secondary Market (unk amount, 137 investors)
- Series E - $50m
- Series F - $70m
- Series G - $56m
- Secondary Market (unk amount, 137 investors)
- Private Equity - $196.5m (Founders Fund)
- Private Equity - $390.4m (Feb 2014)
As of August 2013 they were not yet profitable but estimates for 2013 revenue were around $450m and <$300m in 2012.
Other revenue estimates (they're all over the place honestly it seems like every time they give an interview it's a different number)
- 2010 - $50m - >$80m
- 2011 - $250m
- 2012 - <$300m
- 2013 - $450m
Some questions for people who understand this mess better than I.
- What's their exit strategy honestly look like? At $9b valuation, I can't imagine too many companies who might be interested in buying them.
- All the private equity investment tells me they're burning money faster than they can find investors, keeping it private keeps their financials private, which smells like trouble to me if they were to go public. Am I right in this analysis or wrong?
- Does dilution basically make everybody who has shares or options through 11 (eleven!) rounds of investment basically holding onto worthless paper? Even if they go public? A review of glassdoor on the company says that people are underpaid and salary capped, they must be holding on for a big payday somewhere. Are they going to end up disappointed?
Anything else that might be interesting to discuss? Their fundraising seems really crazy and unusual from anything I've seen before.
Here's a longform history [1] of the company which shows they spend over $1m/yr on lobbying (IBM spent $6m, Raytheon $7.5m, Lockheed Martin, $14.5m, Boeing, $15m). To put that in percentage terms, if Palantir is worth $9b
Palantir spends .012% of their value on lobbying
IBM spends .003%
Raytheon .026%
Lockheed Martin .027%
Boeing .017%
1 - http://www.mausstrategicconsulting.com/topical-analysis-blog...
Some people want to build actual sustainable businesses. Why are you assuming they have a secret exit strategy when they've stated they're not interested in exiting?
They are obviously going to IPO at some point. With the hassle of IPOing, the nature of their business and the easy access to private capital, they'd be dumb to IPO sooner than later.
The secondary market for shares is extremely active and employees can sell a limited number. So almost anyone has probably cashed out as much as desired at this point.
That's an interesting point. Can you go into more about how that might work? I had assumed they were just internally selling shares to other employees, but could it be they're selling shares to external buyers? I'm not clear on how that works.
Basically buyers and sellers need to find each other, agree on terms, send it to the company for right of refusal and then transact (and pay a large legal fee).
Different companies have different degrees of willingness to entertain the secondary market. With a stated desire to remain private for an extended period, Palantir may be more amenable than most to secondary.
Butts in seats baby, butts in seats.
That said, only time will tell.
I think Palantir's goal is to burn as hot as it can for as long as it can, then coast on the residuals of its government contracts. [e.g. Make the kind of "open bid contacts" that require automatically fails anyone not Palantir]
For example, if you assume a 15% dilution over 11 fundraising rounds, then it's 0.0167% which is +$1.5MM at a $9B valuation.
at 20%: +730k
at 25%: +$380k
I picked 15% because it seemed a good middle ground. Seed rounds are often <15%, Series A/B is around 20-30%, and later rounds target <5-10%. Because Palantir did so many rounds, I would guess only a few were significantly (> 15%) dilutive.
I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.