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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
- fullshark 10y agoIs a million a lot to spend on lobbying?
- trimbo 10y agoNot sure relative to revenue, but the top lobbying group (US Chamber of Commerce) spent $85MM last year. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&indexType=s https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&inde...
- roymurdock 10y ago> While still a fraction of what the Pentagon's biggest contractors spend, Palantir's lobbying expenditures grew from $300,000 in 2010 to over $1 million by 2015. Expected this number to be a lot higher as this seems to be the articles thesis: palantir aggressively outspent and outmaneuvered the traditional war contractors. Also, given that palantir has secured $500m in gov contracts (1.2b*40%) the ROI on the ~$10m they've spent on lobbying is massive. I find it hard to believe that it accounts for a substantial portion of palantir's success.
- maxerickson 10y agoMaybe their intelligence is so good that they knew exactly which wheel to grease and that it didn't need a lot of grease. More seriously, it's interesting to consider them turning their expertise against their customers.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoLobbying can get great returns if you target it well plus bring in people on defense side into your organization for "old boy network." I don't recall if Palantir does that but I wouldn't be surprised. Far as lobbying, to illustrate the ROI's achievable: oil companies spending tens of millions got billions (Solendra too with less); casino industry got $650 million in tax breaks donating around $3 mil to Nevada reps; banks probably put in tens of millions then got $1 trillion bailout; big defense contractors put in millions plus give Pentagon chiefs or acquisition folks six-figure salaries to get billions in return at good margins. Common stuff, my man. Nothing unusual with effective bribery, err corporate participation in democracy. ;)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- somenomadicguy 10y agoThus the reason I hang up on startup recruiters the moment they say "A peter thiel funded start-up". I'm not sure what is a sadder waste of this amazing braintrust we have in the United States today, all of the advertising start-ups, or sociopathic dreck like Palantir.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoYou should see huge sectors of the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, you'd weep.
- dredmorbius 10y agoHowso? Both of those involve actual research, which is to say, trying the impossible and unknown, to discover the possible and knowable. Though I'm also aware that there's a tremendous difference between chasing markets, which gives you drugs such as Viagra, or lifetime (type-II) diabetes management, rather than, say, wiping out tropical disease or promoting diet which would avoid diabetes in the first place. But what did you have in mind?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoChasing markets, while antibiotic resistance grows for one.
- manigandham 10y agoThis is the wrong attitude - there is no "waste" of braintrust. Innovation doesnt work like that, it comes from all over by people working on what they want to work on. What's wrong with advertising startups? Some of the most valuable companies on this planet are advertising companies because it's an essential part of success for any business.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoMost people in most startups are not "working on what they want to work on" they are working on what their boss wants them to work on. Heck, I would wager that >50% of startup employees are not even doing the work they think is most important for the success of the startup. They are doing the work their boss (who by definition is further removed from the facts) thinks is most important. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if >50% of startup employees are doing work they know is not important for the success of the startup. That's what happens when you run a command and control organization. You lose >50% of your output, in exchange for guaranteed alignment of whatever is leftover. As long as you pay people <50% of what they are worth you can still make money.
- ktamura 10y agoI've always found Palantir's sales&marketing strategy to be unique and fascinating among Silicon Valley startups. Palantir is a high-touch, B2B enterprise software startup, and as such, they are no different than other startups when it comes to sales&marketing. They need to find leads (= potential customers), close them as customers and retain them. Yet, Palantir's leadership and employees have repeatedly emphasized that they don't do sales or marketing. The OP confirms that they meant that they do sales and marketing differently than other companies. Retaining lobbyists and policy advisers is one example. Typically, enterprise software companies retain industry analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, etc. and "influence" their opinions via briefing/consulting. These industry analyst firms also work with technology buyers and make recommendations to them based on their knowledge of software/service providers and the needs of the buyer. To be sure, no analyst firm is 100% pay to play because if they favor select vendors too much, they lose credibility, access to information and hence influence. That said, it's naive to think that they are 100% free from monied vendor incentives. It did not occur to me until reading this post that the same model applies to lobbying, and that's where Palantir invested their influencer marketing budget. Palantir often emphasizes their technological innovation and unique culture (again, a great marketing strategy to attract great technical talent and put them in sales engineering roles). However, I've come to believe that Palantir's greatest innovation is in their business strategy.
- bane 10y ago> Yet, Palantir's leadership and employees have repeatedly emphasized that they don't do sales or marketing. That was definitely a matra a few years ago, but then they started plastering adverts all over D.C.'s metro stations [1] and started hiring sales, BD, marketing and advertising people in huge numbers [2]. In addition, they've clearly hired some great PR firms to get "news" articles written about them in high profile newspapers. At this point, looking at their venture raises and the lack of major technology investment (outside of integration and customization), I'd say they're probably one of the best funded traditional sales & marketing organization in this space. 1 - https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Palantir-Technologies-spending-to-advertise-along-the-DC-metro-system https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Palantir-Technologies-spen... 2 - https://www.palantir.com/careers/ https://www.palantir.com/careers/
- ejcx 10y agoThis article makes Palantir sound really weak to me. Palantir makes money selling their product. They are not a real competitor or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. The big primes are massive and organized to win lots of different big contracts over a long time period. If they wanted to compete with the big primes they would be at a massive disadvantage paying expensive SV engineers who are hard to clear versus cheap DC engineers who are easy to clear. If they have had 1b in revenue I'm not sure what that means. They have raised about 1b, but paid like 5000 employees. Financially not bad but they are big, I kind of expect a lot more federal money than that to keep them in a good place. I'm not sure what the future of Palantir looks like.
- burkaman 10y agoThey have had a DC office for almost 10 years, and they hire plenty of engineers for it. Still lots of disadvantages, but hiring isn't one of them.
- jdavis703 10y agoHaving worked in DC and SV I'm not sure DC engineers are cheap, especially the ones who can clear.
- ejcx 10y agoI have too. The ceiling for an engineers salary is much lower in DC. Also young people have a much lower salary as well. Some managers might be pretty close in compensation though. We are talking about DMV. Working in the city is very uncommon for big primes. All their HQs are in Tysons It's more than DC though. Big primes have satellite offices everywhere.
- Yhippa 10y agoI have noticed that about DC. I've met plenty of quality engineers but the salaries seem surprisingly low here. It would almost be better to take a slight pay cut but live in Richmond, VA where the cost-of-living is much lower. Either way I have major doubts about having an engineering career in DC.
- swingbridge 10y agoI recently read how Palantir is currently suing the government because they got pissed the Army is considering dumping them and is trying to bid out the work to others. They're coming across as a bit desperate in this whole thing and to be fair they probably are since if Uncle Sam pulls out they're probably toast. There was a lot of press a few months back about how they've been dumped by a lot of their private sector customers for costing too much and delivering too little. If the government catches on and and does the same thing that sort of destroys their business model.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoMaybe after a few months, this is the PR course they've decided to take? If so... yikes.
- analogmemory 10y agoAre you kidding? The government LOVES to overpay for underwhelming software.
- davidu 10y agoThat's really not accurate. While it happens, there are many projects and efforts that are tightly controlled, managed, and executed. And when projects go off the rails, people are generally pretty unhappy. The government is huge though, so bad apples and bad actors exist... but it's not accurate to write hyperbolically as you do.
- bazqux2 10y agoI cannot say enough bad things about Palantir. Their technology is worse than the free alternatives and their consultants are not worth the money. They are losing their big commercial customers because of this and now need 'Hail Mary' contracts from the US govt to remain in business. There is already a lot of information out how bad Palantir is. I hear from friends who work there that the BuzzFeed article on them is accurate. In short, like much in the valley, Palantir financially set up as an unmaintainable pyramid scheme. One way for them to get out would be to pay Goldman Sachs to get Meg Wittman use HP shareholder money to buy Palantir at face value. This worked for Autonomy - a similar scam 'Big Data' company where the founders got away with it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 10y agoThis is the kind of Palantir criticism I want to hear more of on HN. Could you flesh it out? What are the open or free alternatives?
- bazqux2 10y agoSure, I'll give a few examples. A guy from BP told me in 2013 that they forked iPython, replaced all iPython references with Palantir and tried to sell it to them for $500K p.a. For me; back in the day (2010) they were less secretive about their technology which was essentially an ontological reasoner. This was pre the Big Data hype boom - and AFAIK Palantir has never been about Big Data. Ontological reasoners have problems that prevent them from scaling or generalizing so they generally fail. Due to a long long history of failing ontological systems have a very bad name. But they look good for guided demos and has a ton of academic backing so it's easy to sell - as long as you call it something else - which is what they did. So if you want to use ontologies a better open source alternative software is Protege. But for the problems Palantir targets I'd recommend using standard machine learning technology where all the good stuff is open sourced. As an aside, Peter Thiel also helped found Quid. A start-up that ripped off the Gephi layout engine and charges people $20K p.a. a seat. They've since rebuilt it but like Palantir it's still not solving people's problem and they've evolved into a consulting firm.
- bane 10y agoLots of questions over how much firms of this type spend on lobbying, here's an article with some figures. http://watchdog.org/124909/defense-spending/ http://watchdog.org/124909/defense-spending/ As an example Lockheed Martin spent around $14.4m in 2013 and does about $45b/year in revenue. According to this Palantir spent around $1m in 2015 and gets about $1b/year in revenue.
- tmd83 10y agoLobbying from what I understand is a more polite form of corruption for the most part. I think in the parts of the world where corruption is more direct (bribes) you actually have to pay a lot more to get this kind of returns.
- tmd83 10y agoLobbying from what I understand is a more polite form of corruption for the most part. I think in the parts of the world where corruption is more direct (bribes) you actually have to pay a lot more to get this kind of returns.
- JabavuAdams 10y agoI just love the name of the company and its perhaps unintended implications. The Palantiri were seeing stones ... allowing rulers to observe distant events, but ... The Orthanc-Palantir was used by Sauron (the big bad) to enslave Saruman (the lead Wizard), causing him to betray the forces of good. So, now we finally see why Thiel (Saruman) endorsed Trump (Sauron).
- carewornalien 10y agoFelt compelled to create an account to describe my experiences with Palantir as well. We tried to engage with them for some threat intel work. They set up an instance for a client and in the course of the engagement: - they exposed our data to other clients and other clients' data to us by accident - had significant unplanned downtime - their platform buckled under relatively small amounts of object graph data - provided a fat client app that was the most bloated mess of repackaged and unacknowledged open-source JAR files I've ever seen
- jgalt212 10y agoI look at consultants like home improvement, if you can spend $100 and improve the value of your home by $70, you've basically won. As an aside, there should be a JP Power rankings for consultancies. Is there?
- ajb 10y agoMaybe this is a typo, but the way you wrote it, you lost $30.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- avs733 10y agono, it very much depends on what your time is worth and the time it would take you vs. someone you pay to do a job. If I pay someone $100 to raise the value of my home $70, but it would take me 10hrs and I value my time at $100 an hour then it would cost me $1,000 to do what I hired someone to do for $100
- jomamaxx 10y agoPalantir is just a secretive CGI: mediocre devs doing outsourced work. There is no product. Just a brand.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago>mediocre devs Really? They pretty much hire from the best (Stanford, etc) - how are they mediocre?
- jomamaxx 10y agoJust because someone studied biology at standford - or even computer science at Stanford - does not necessarily make one a good dev., that said, smart kids who get into such programs are likely higher in potential. Moreover, good devs usually have a few years under the belt. They hire from a lot of places and do piecemeal, often shoddy consulting work, it's not a product company, there's nothing special about them.
- pikzen 10y agoBecause coming out of a prestigious school doesn't make you good by default. It just means you were able to pass their tests well enough, whether it is from actual skill or playing the tests.
- argonaut 10y agoGoing off akhilcacharya's point, some of the best CS college classmates I knew went to Palantir after graduation.