Palantir Technologies Raises $450M
on.wsj.com
on.wsj.com
> CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make “running a company like ours very difficult.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies
11 years old, 1500 employees, never planning to go public. At some point you have to stop calling it a "startup".
A cynical thought would be that perhaps they don't want to have to sell to a company in an industry where they already have a reputation. That may by no means be true, perhaps instead they just don't have the attention span to really product-ize a solution instead of making one-offs. Or something else, either way, it smells of their typical cultish marketing.
If you dislike Palantir, though, you should also dislike Sqrrl.
Just seems like there's a weird (and generally incorrect) fascination with Palantir that I don't understand.
In my field specifically, Palantir has this reputation for being a good cybersecurity company that simply doesn't come from anywhere concrete.
It's just confusing.
Have you forgotten, that your metadata is still being scooped up at large and propably sifted through thanks to companies such as this very exact Palantir?
In the same line, some of us are watching when tech which can be used to single out targets (yes, that what big data is used for in intelligence) is featured in the news or here on HN.
We shall not work for them or the target's blood will be at our very own hands.
It's a source of frustration for me that this line of comments is even getting any attention at all, considering its personal nature (the topic seems to be what I find interesting).
Of what relevance is it to the submission whether or not I personally find what Palantir does to be interesting? Wouldn't a much more valuable conversation be about the apparent-but-perhaps-not-actual uniqueness of what Palantir does?
Contrary to the WSJ article, I don't think Palantir does any data mining. Instead, Palantir's core competence is taking a customer's existing data and appropriately modeling it in their software.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#2013
I wouldn't call these fellas "non-technical users" myself.
*I don't know if Palatir is an unethical company or not, just responding to the accusations.
According to crunchbase [1], they've raised over $1.6 Billion, last raise was $50m in December and $444.2m last September! For a software startup making knowledge management software with a nice interface!
I feel like they'd be pretty easy to disrupt technology-wise. There's enough big-data, open source graph, visualization and mapping front-ends to probably build a reasonable competitor pretty quick.
If they ever have to run as a real business, it's going to hurt real fast. Either that or I'm horribly wrong and something else is going on, and hiding it all behind private equity markets is making it hard to see.
One thing is for sure, most of the options the employees have are probably diluted beyond all recognition at this point.
1 - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/palantir-technologie...
There's a reason why most of the companies in the government contracting world in the US are large established companies.
Furthermore, the vast majority of government work does not require any sort of formal security clearances.
I think their success is a mix of massive investment in sales, marketing and BD, plus reasonably good execution on purchase.
This competitive intersection allows them to position themselves against all kinds of seemingly unrelated companies.
Like saying that the Mona Lisa is a nice painting of a woman.
Also, if you have worked with a govt. institution you'll quickly learn that the processes and human capital used by the govt. are quite poor compared to the private sector. As a result, govt. contractors quickly figure out special tools/processes/training to serve the govt. which are not easy to replicate without the experience of actually serving a govt. dept.
Many things, which in the private sector you might leave to your intelligent counterpart at the customer, with the govt. you have to handle yourself, or develop a special training program. The govt. can budget for these training programs or additional assistance, so it will not affect the bottom line ... but you have to develop those programs and processes, and you can't underestimate the importance of it.
In the private sector if on the customer side an engineer cannot figure out how to go through a simple 3 step process to configure some software, he may be fired by his supervisor. In the govt., you will be asked to break the 3 step process down into 10 smaller, simpler steps, and to create a special video tutorial for govt. workers. Even after that, you may need to staff a help-line that is open during East Coast working hours.
It is very easy in Silicon Valley to overestimate the capabilities of the people who will be using your software, because you may be dealing with very good talent at your early customers in California. The minute you get your first govt. contract you'll see that you were badly mistaken about what kind of resources you need for customer support.
- products, which Palantir claims to be
- services, which Palantir appears to be by offices and head count
You are right that product contracts (and associated services like installation and training, O&M, etc.) can be fairly sticky, but the government has been on a trend towards open-standards, open-source etc. and proprietary software products are under lots of pressure to be incomparably better than anything else out there.
But "cheeks-in-seats" service contracts are not. The government is notorious at tossing out incumbents on service contracts and bringing in new companies, who then simply hire all the people who worked on the previous contract.
Palantir seems to push themselves out there as a two-product company with some sales-staff. It's obviously not going to be turn-key software, there's likely to be some configuration and support stuff up-front. But once you, as a product company, get big enough, even those tasks can be handled competently by other companies. [1] But their product sales don't look to be a huge dollar amount. fbo has a couple awards from 2011 for ~$750k licenses. This is four years ago, but we're not looking at dozens of millions of dollars.
edit here's an award for $20m for Palantir support to the war in Afghanistan. Note that DoD only reports contracts over $6.5m. So the bulk of their DoD awards must be falling under that threshold.
edit here's a 5 year contract from DoJ for ~$10m. http://www.govconwire.com/2014/04/doj-selects-palantir-softw... hardly $20billion dollar valuation contract sizes.
So it's likely most of their growth trajectory has been in specialized consulting services that direct customers to their products, but also use other tools and solutions. But again, once the ecosystem is big enough, the government can just try to compete that work out and hire another company to handle that work...companies that might not direct the solution-space towards Palantir's products.
1 - https://www.palantir.com/partnerships/service-providers/
Such a company might have a general software package but that package has to be changed for every customer.
The term is being diluted...
Same goes with Uber, etc.
As Paul Graham says, "A startup is a company designed to grow fast." and it seems like Palantir is still growing incredibly fast.
By that definition, Palantir is certainly a startup.
> Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations.
ok, two years?
Considering they just raised about $500m in the last 12 months before this...they're either buying expansion at an insane rate, or they're not making any money and are trying to figure out how to float this many people.
Their careers page says they have 73 openings across 19 offices...places that include Abu Dhabi, Canberra, London, LA, NYC, Tokyo, D.C., Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Sydney, Wellington...so they're no longer just a U.S. concern.