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Data is the oil of the 21st century. This one seems like the sleeping giant of the top venture-backed companies. I suppose the media can't as easily describe a
by josephjrobison 11y ago
Data is the oil of the 21st century.
This one seems like the sleeping giant of the top venture-backed companies. I suppose the media can't as easily describe and talk about it and understand it as much as Uber or AirBnb, so they just move on to the more fun companies.
- argonaut 11y agoEveryone in tech knows about Palantir.
- personjerry 11y agoSoon Palantir will also know about everyone in tech.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoWell considering what their software actually does...yeah they most likely do in a data set somewhere.
- argonaut 11y agoConsidering what their software actually does, which is basically displaying a dashboard of nice tables / visualizations / graphs, and knobs to turn those visualizations/graphs, no. Palantir barely does any machine learning.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoSeems like you'd NOT want to do machine learning if you simply want to hold all of the data parent mentioned...
- drcode 11y agoI don't know, I'm not seeing a "sleeping giant" here... Plantir has been around for a long time already at this point- Getting an additional cash infusion, especially one so small for a company of Palantir's size, sounds like the move of a company that is struggling.
- huntermonk 11y agoI see what Joseph is saying about that macro trend. In Austin, RideScout (Kayak.com for transportation options) just sold for ~$100m to Daimler AG with only tens of thousands of user. The importance to Daimler was seeing all the driving and traveling data for each user.
- fluxic 11y agoYou're a couple of orders of magnitude off, my friend.
- amatix 11y agonumber of users? price? which direction?
- fluxic 11y agoprice.
- huntermonk 11y agoAh ok - that's what I heard through Capital Factory. However, I can't imagine it would be more than 2 (you said a couple) orders of magnitude off. Do you know approximately what the amount was?
- duaneb 11y agoThey are sleeping in the sense that they go under the radar of most of the public in spite of being massively influential.
- ryporter 11y agoThis raise is relatively small because it is a continuation of the previous raise. To me, it actually sounds more like a bullish sign that they were able to raise more than their target amount at such a high valuation. The investors had access to far more information than we outsiders do. If Palantir were truly "struggling", then they likely would not have been able to secure more investments at that same high valuation.
- hyperbovine 11y ago> Data is the oil of the 21st century. Interesting. So you're saying we'll reach "peak data" in about 100 years?
- paulddraper 11y agoWell, we'll keep getting better and better at extracting more worthwhile data, and increase our ability to use the data we have. And data will allow extensive growth (of business). It might be reaching, but yes, kinda.
- joshmn 11y agoThere's only so much to know. What's more important is what we do with it, and how we apply it.
- alex_hirner 11y agoInteresting thought, I suspect there is something like peak computation per ft^3 and we will hit such barriers earthbound (with quantum computing being the equivalent to solar+cheap storage for this problem).
- jacquesm 11y agoThe SF term is 'computronium'.
- josephjrobison 11y agoI think like oil, we'll keep finding new ways to dig deeper and get more out of it through innovations and new technologies, don't you agree?
- sremani 11y agoI disagree with the analogy. Human population will not grow from 1 billion to 7 billion because of data, that is the kind of change we got with oil. Oil is a hard asset, data is not entirely hard asset.
- wbc 11y agocan you explain how oil enabled human pop to go from 1b to 7b?
- mchaver 11y agoNot sure why you are getting down voted. It's a valid question. Cheap, abundant energy makes in cheaper to produce and transport necessities for human life and allows us to invest more time into researching and improving the quality and availability of those necessities (food, clothing, housing, medicine, etc.). Haven't read through all of this, but it seems to have some similar ideas. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-interrelationship-between-population-growth-and-energy-resources http://www.resilience.org/stories/2009-04-20/peak-people-int...
- dnissley 11y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
- angry_octet 11y agoIndustrial fertiliser and transport, plastics, energy, etc.
- sawwit 11y agoThe snake oil?