As someone who worked in defense consulting/IT contracting many moons ago, let me clue you in on a simple fact: there is an INSANE amount of money wasted on these contracts.<p>The project that we were working on was projected to <i>maybe</i> go live in ten years (when the tech would be laughably outdated), and we were the sub-sub-sub-contractor of the massive company at the top. It was nothing more than a vaporware webapp built by 22 year olds right out of college who were white/American enough to get clearance immediately, and our team got $100 million for it.<p>The money in these DoD contracts is truly nuts. And it never gets slashed because how politically terrible slashing defense is, and it never gets audited because too many people are making money.<p>So as it relates to Palantir, sure, they're scammy and unethical as all hell, but they certainly know where the bread is buttered in America. Even in a (likely) Democratic adminstration.
Lemonade and Agora's IPOs in the last two weeks both doubled right out of gate and have kept going (1)<p>Bankrupt HERTZ pumped 500%+ over a couple of weeks in June, to such a degree that their board nearly got a $500m unprecedented "worthless" equity offering out into the public market before the SEC shut them down. (2)<p>Tesla is trading at $1,400. Their latest competitor Nikola - who has no sales and no actual consumer product - was briefly worth more than ford (3)<p>I would assume that board rooms & investment bankers are SCRAMBLING to get their IPOs pushed out in Q3 or early Q4 2020.<p>In the meantime hold onto your hats, don't risk what you can't afford to lose :)<p>(1) <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates-controversial-stock-sale.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates-co...</a><p>(2) <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-hertz-pulls-plan-to-issue-500-million-in-new-stock/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-hertz-...</a><p>(3) *Was for a minute - off to an $18b valuation vs $25b for ford today haha - <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-more-than-doubles-nikola-founder-bo.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-mor...</a>
From the long line of rounds of raises (what are they on now, their L round?) my guess is that Palantir is a money fire and is vastly overinflated in valuation.<p>It'll be good to actually see their numbers now in Q statements.
A lot of people in this thread are raising questions about what Palantir actually does. I worked as a software developer at Palantir in 2014, so maybe I can shed some light on this though this info may not be up to date. Back then they had two main products: Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis. Accompanying this was a big infrastructure to ingest data from various sources. First the two frontends:<p>Gotham is focused on displaying entity based data. Entity based data was often things like people, reports of events, invoices, etc. Gotham let you do things like click on a person, and see all criminal records associated with them. Or their relatives and known associates. This was called "search around" and was apparently a very big deal. One sample use case for Palantir Gotham was to search for people that made more than one purchase of the same Schedule 2 drug, and plot those purchases on a map. A common method of finding pill mills was to plot these drug purchases on a map and see when there's a bunch of purchases along a highway route. Big indicator that someone is buying in bulk, but splitting up their purchases to fall under thresholds which traditional alerting mechanisms relied upon. Palantir Gotham is the product that people usually associate with Palantir - it's the one used by a lot of three letter agencies.<p>I don't know too much about Metropolis. It was more about quantitative analysis. I think it was popular for insurance companies. IIRC it could do things like plot the frequency of adverse weather events on a map, and then insurance adjusters to fine tune premiums. I think there was also a Palantir Metropolis product aimed at small businesses.<p>Now, the above covers the frontend. A huge part of Palantir's operations is data ingestion. Basically, this consisted of moving data out of government or enterprise databases and moving them into Palantir's format. This usually involved forward deployed engineers that would work with the government or business and work out a way to ingest the data. An un-glamorous job but one of the really important ones.<p>Another huge component of the business was customer specific customization. When I worked there something like 40-50% of software engineers worked on business development. They rest worked either on infrastructure of UI platform (basically building the components of the UI that aren't customer specific). Business development at Palantir when I worked meant "software development for a given business (or agency)" not sales. If you worked in business development you were a developer for a given business or agency. This was also a lot of grunt work. One customer wanted to bucket items based on the phase of the moon. I distinctly remember this ask - maybe the FBI was investigating a werewolf. Implementing features and customizations like that was the role of business development.<p>Is it a powerful tool or is it snakeoil? Well, given that the workflows it's replacing are often whiteboards and excel spreadsheets it may actually be a very significant gain. Ultimately what Palantir has is a flexible way of displaying and finding relationships between data. Flexible enough to ingest very different types of data. Perhaps more importantly they have a technical workforce capable of rapidly extending the product to meet new customer needs. And if customers are happy with the product I guess it's worth it.<p>I just hope they've moved off of god-damn java swing for the UI.
This was long overdue. Palantir has always been a darling of the valley. I often wonder how much of Palantir is actually owned by DoD and if that information would be made public after they IPO.<p>Edit: Looks like In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, already owns some stake in the company. [1] [<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-technologies-ipo.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-techn...</a>]
It’s hard to watch the stock market right now as an underpaid employee at a pre-IPO unicorn. Who else here is desperately hoping the next S-1 post is about their company?
From the other thread: Forgive my ignorance: For most other companies, I've seen a direct link to an S-1. Is sending in a confidential draft first normal and we just don't hear about it, or is the confidential draft sent but not announced usually, or is this unusual?
I don't know anything about the legitimacy of this IPO, but if they have a competent ML team, then what terrible things they can do with their data are [unfortunately] worth killing for if you're an authoritarian government.