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Palantir CEO Says Data-Mining Company Is Positioned to Go Public
- mwfunk 10y agoI'm curious if going public would lead to more transparency about what they do and for whom. Enron was famously opaque to its own investors until it was too late, but I would hope that public companies have greater requirements for transparency nowadays.
- williamscales 10y agoI don't think that Palantir being a public company would necessarily give the kind of insight into what they do to satisfy our curiosity. As far as I understand, Palantir could be very financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are and what they are doing for them. I think it's worth remembering that Enron was public.
- SapphireSun 10y agoI agree with you on the whole, but Enron was pre Sarbanes-Oxley which initiated a raft of reporting requirements on companies, so Enron is often a poor comparison to the present day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
- bogomipz 10y agoCan you elaborate on: "financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are" How would this work in practical terms?
- jlgaddis 10y agoIf you mean anything more specific than "we do stuff for the government we can't tell you about", probably not. Look at Boeing, Northop-Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc. Hell, for that matter, look at AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 -- the companies that we didn't really expect to be doing the kinds of things they were doing.
- bogomipz 10y agoThat was my response as well. Going public means filing 10K statements which will lay all their business dealings out. Something I wouldn't think they or their clients would be interested in.
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoBoeing and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are public companies. Being public doesn't mean publishising customer lists.
- jonathankoren 10y agoEveryone knows who is the Military Industrial Complex's customers are, and what contracts are up. The questions are more about capabilities.
- stevehawk 10y agoBut you don't know about the contracts, because a lot of the contracts are classified and never released publicly.
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- user5994461 10y agoAnd here comes the paywall. Can't read it from direct link, can't read it from web link, can't read it from private browsing. :-(
- gregoryrueda 10y agoCopy the title of the article then put it in a google search and click on the first result. You should be able to bypass the paywall.
- stepanhruda 10y agoThere is this "web" button underneath the link, that does this if you're lazy
- Arnavion 10y agoThat's what the web link does, that user5994461 said they tried.
- gregoryrueda 10y agoClose the paywall ad by clicking the x on the top right corner and it lets you read the article.
- yomly 10y agoTry web link + incognito / private mode?
- guessmyname 10y agoHere you go: http://pastebin.com/raw/F6JN2A4k http://pastebin.com/raw/F6JN2A4k
- pschneidr 10y agoGod I hate paywalls.
- malchow 10y agoYeah. And why is there always a man asking for a ticket at movie theaters?
- jsprogrammer 10y agoFunny, I saw no man coming here.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoBecause movie studios haven't fully embraced the economics of merchandise and DLC markets yet.
- laxatives 10y agoThere's a button under the parent link that lets you skip the paywall labelled `web`.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
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- hendzen 10y agoMain takeaway from that article - Alex Karp is a really odd guy.
- hkmurakami 10y agoYou should watch his interview with Charlie Rose. He's not your usual corporate leader, but there's an unmistakable intellect in the way he articulates himself which must work for both leading this particular workforce as well as selling to this particular customer base.
- gorer 10y agoHe softened his stance, they soften his balls pressure :)
- sctb 10y agoPlease don't comment like this on Hacker News.
- jorblumesea 10y agoCan someone shed some light on the asian claim? Seems like a really weird thing: a) to bring up at all b) to bring up in an article about ipo what does it have to do with the company going public?
- throaway0xff 10y agoI will shed light on the fact that at one point over 70% of my team were extremely bright and talented Asians and South Indians.
- iambateman 10y ago$10 says 'throaway0xff' is, in fact, Alex Karp himself.
- jdavis703 10y agoIf a company trying to go public is being sued by one of its largest customers (i.e. the US federal government), that's pretty material. The USDOJ is (IIRC) trying to ban contracts while the matter is under investigation.
- rhizome 10y agoPalantir’s workers “need to know they will have liquidity at a fair price,” said Mr. Karp Unless there's a subtlety I missed, isn't this more likely to be driven by their VCs?
- dsl 10y agoIt sounds like the IPO is employee retention driven.
- rhizome 10y agoThey're famous for underpaying and overworking, which I supposed could affect hiring, but yeah, maybe the subtlety is that employees were carrot-and-stick'ed with promises of IPO and now word has got around about work conditions there. Still, it's usually because VCs want their payday.
- entee 10y agoI'm curious about how Palantir works as a public company. It has always looked like a data-centric McKinsey clone to me, and those kinds of consulting companies are usually partnerships. Granted, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks that were once partnerships are now public. But that move hasn't necessarily been a good thing for the companies in question, and some argue it has been damaging. Basically, Palantir looks to me like a law firm/consultancy, those firms typically find it advantageous to stay private, what is the advantage for Palantir to go public except to provide a cash out to investors?
- AznHisoka 10y agoisnt that the number one advantage companies go public? to cash out? if companies could cash out and remain private, 100% of companies would choose that option.
- jdavis703 10y agoWell no one would buy in at IPO time if they thought it was some kind of pump and dump scheme (of course this does happen, but is hopefully rare). An IPO is generally designed to raise cash that will be invested back into the business, and as a side effect give the investors a return.
- cloudjacker 10y agoyeah for the banks that underwrote the IPO and dumped the shares on your mom's pension plan. the liquidity of the secondary stock market is a purely American phenomenon.
- jstanley 10y ago> the liquidity of the secondary stock market is a purely American phenomenon. What do you mean by that? Loads of countries have adequately liquid stock markets.
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- a-no-n 10y ago"Government (political), law-enforcement and security agency software company whom happens to use data-mining" Perhaps this is shaking the trees of institutional/sovereign wealth funds/investors is in order to make them seem like they'll miss out. IPO, these days, is a move of desperation and often a murdering of remaining agility.
- jpeg_hero 10y ago> saying he is focused on customers who can promise accounts worth at least $100 million. What!?! Is there a market for that? Who pays that much? Republic of Turkey Secret Police?
- throaway0xff 10y agoYes - there is a market. Legitimate companies that make things you use and ride in every day.
- snissn 10y agoIs Palantir a "Data-Mining Company" or is a military, law enforcement and surveillance company?
- r00fus 10y agoYes
- krona 10y agoYou could define Palantir more easily by which customers buy its products (Nat sec/law enforcement/military intelligence), and who specifically in those organisations use their software (mostly intelligence analysts.) By saying they are a "Data-Mining Company" is an obvious (to me) sign that they want to be able to position themselves in the public sector (e.g. banking, retail) with counter-fraud services/solutions, and perhaps more generic cyber security solutions for large organisations.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoPalantir has been deployed into banks for years.
- rasz_pl 10y agoThink highway patrol stealing money company, or DEA tracking every cellphone company.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoAnybody with first-hand knowledge able to explain to me the difference between Acxiom[1] and Palantir in the grand scheme of things? [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quie...
- throwaway746878 10y agoPalantir doesn't own any data whatsoever. It is in no way a data mining company, which makes it strange that it's constantly referred to as such. It makes software to allow organizations to do analysis on their own data, which Palantir has varying degrees of access to. Another crucial difference is that marketing is a tertiary use case for Palantir, at best.