15 ms·

Palantir Raises $90 Million

115 points by revorad 16y ago

andymoe 16y ago
I saw a demo of their stuff at Joel's stackoverflow.com tour in sf last year. They were a sponsor and were recruiting. I got a save the shire t-shirt, anyway, It's a really cool product. At least then they were going after defense and government markets primarily. It sounded like they had oracle prices since every installation is basically a custom setup and their system is infinitely customizable. I don't doubt the valuation if they get traction. I know the big financial guys are also a prime market for this kind of product.
stuff4ben 16y ago
Awesome! I know Palantir from when I was learning Groovy. Their dev blog was extremely helpful. Good to know that they're doing well.
- andymoe 16y ago
  Yeah, that reminds me. It's one of the best looking Java apps I've seen. Tech Crunch screenshots not withstanding.
  - wallflower 16y ago
    Thanks! I completely forgot and was driving myself slightly annoyed trying to remember where I'd heard of this company before. http://blog.palantirtech.com/2007/09/11/palantir-screenshots/ http://blog.palantirtech.com/2007/09/11/palantir-screenshots...
brosephius 16y ago
wow, not bad. interesting product, smart engineers. bombed an interview with them some time ago :P
joshwa 16y ago
Jesus Christ. Their product is straight out of every CIA/NSA/SecretGovernmentAgency movie of the last 20 years. All that 'magical' integration of news reports, signal and visual intelligence, financial records, military incidents, relationships and alliances, all kinds of intelligence, and making connections and performing analysis using a wide variety of really cool tools (that, judging by the videos, have incredible performance). One can't help but think that the company started by some guy who was watching a bunch of spy movies and said "why don't we build that product and sell it to the government?"
- doron 16y ago
  As i recall the company was actually mentioned in a book i read - Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World by Trevor Paglen. so you are on the mark here.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  I'm sure Jesus thanks you for reminding him of this product but probably wonders what your point was, you prayer seems to have wandered off somewhere ... ;0)>
- tlrobinson 16y ago
  I assumed the government already had that product...
- andymoe 16y ago
  They should give a copy to the NCIS show...
- elblanco 16y ago
  Well, they actually sell two products simultaneously. They have a flashy, pretty good, front end tool. But what they really pitch is their very large and super scalable integrated ontologically driven back end.
  - Perceval 16y ago
    When you say "ontologically driven", what do you mean?
gruseom 16y ago
This is astonishing: There is no publicist, no sales or marketing team and Karp adamantly believes that there will never be one. He says he is perfectly content to let word of mouth drive his business, in press and in sales. It means they are completely rewriting the rules for selling enterprise software.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >There is no publicist, no sales or marketing team and Karp adamantly believes that there will never be one. When the press call to ask for an interview, or just for info about the product, who do they speak to? That person/those people are your publicist(s). Who writes copy for the website? That's your marketing team. Who do I speak to when I want to buy? That's your sales team. Not labelling some thing doesn't stop it from being that thing.
  - sachinag 16y ago
    Folks, their customers are intelligence agencies and the government. They spread through referrals from the CIA to NSA to State to DOD to NIH to whatever the hell. Then they get referrals to their counterparts at friendly governments. The hard part was getting their first sale. Hell, I bet they're still not on the GSA schedule, even with tens of millions in government revenue. Palantir Finance sells to hedge funds and financial institutions, but the whisper referrals work in that insular industry just the same. These guys need salespeople and marketing folks like I need a hole in the head. EDIT: turns out I was wrong about the GSA schedule: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ffLq8fxcGdAJ:https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0086U/0HVEE7.25KU1G_GS-35F-0086U_PALANTIRGS35F0086U05262010.PDF+palantir+GSA&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjxti9x2gZKk_OXsAIzdnayt-fwXkGo2-3xgCf68IFXVxltcKfZo5z2Bi9dnTvORo0AHAQkJ8wnZ-Kr5TcZUWx8_2tdE4U6ALjdzuA8ut88cpEUZ13j9VJnssnmNfo_zww3O9H2&sig=AHIEtbSHH_LfTQ9_BvxYBNE7QXcrTjE3Aw http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ffLq8fxcGdAJ:h... EDIT 2: Ha! The last page has their pricing. And it comes with a 90 day warranty! EDIT 3: Double ha! "Implementation Ninja Services" is the official name for their lowest-level customer support.
    - RK 16y ago
siculars 16y ago
As long as congress does not allow the nsa/dod/cia/fbi to do this themselves, Palantir will have more than enough money getting thrown at them. Hmm... better that a private corporation has this power or the government? Jump ball.
MLnick 16y ago
I wonder what exactly a "human-based" algorithm is? How do you not use stats, NLP, ML and/or network based approaches at that scale?
- jauer 16y ago
  When I was playing with it, it seemed like a really handy way for a human to sift through a lot of data. Possibly that's where the human-based spin is coming from. If you want to try it, they have a training instance online at https://www.optradestop.com/ https://www.optradestop.com/
- elblanco 16y ago
  A very large part of their strategy is crowdsourcing named entity extraction. Basically, as you read a report, you hilight and tag all the entities of interest. It provides incredibly high quality entities and relationships on an enterprise ontology. The problem is that it scales incredibly poorly. Imagine hilighting every person, phone number, location, etc. in a document. Then linking them all together manually. Then imagine having a few million documents you have to do that on. It's been an enormous problem at all the sites I've seen it deployed at.
jawn 16y ago
Are relationships discovered automatically across DBs? Does anyone have any insight as to how this might work technically?
- slashclee 16y ago
  Depends on the kind of relationship you're talking about, but generally speaking, someone has to map the data from the original databases into Palantir entities/properties/links. But—and this is kind of a big deal—the Palantir product does not have a fixed set of entities/properties/links/etc. So if you're more interested in tracking, say, computer systems, networks, and packet traffic than terrorists and bank transactions, it's fairly straightforward to define a new ontology that only contains the things you care about. https://devzone.palantirtech.com/display/pgdz/Integrating+Structured+Data+Into+Palantir+With+Groovy https://devzone.palantirtech.com/display/pgdz/Integrating+St... has a pretty useful overview of how you can take raw data from an existing source (granted, this source is XML data, but it could just as easily come directly from a regular database) and map it into a Palantir stack.
  - jawn 16y ago
    Thanks for the links and info. Great stuff. So basically, the heavy lifting palantir does is in the presentation and data abstraction. With a person still needed to define mappings across data sources. Is this a correct statement? With (seemingly) limited off the shelf mapping abilities I'm surprised that they are looking to sell more as an appliance, and less as a turn key service with consulting engagements etc... Neat product.
    - slashclee 16y ago
      I should probably mention that I work at Palantir, but [insert boilerplate disclaimer here]. Yes, you definitely need a person to define the mappings across data sources. However, this is basically a one-time setup task; once the mappings have been established, new data from the existing databases can be continuously imported. I don't have any stats on how long this initial setup phase takes at real customer sites, and if I did I'm sure I couldn't share them publicly, but the goal is definitely for it to be something that doesn't require an entire team of consultants to deploy and babysit. If you want to see the actual government product, and how it works, you can sign up at https://analyzethe.us/ https://analyzethe.us/ for an account. This is a real live Palantir instance with real data from data.gov and it's open to the public.
rjett 16y ago
Given the sensitive nature of some of the data they work with and the fact that 70% of their business comes through the [US] government, I wonder if their engineers all have at least some level of security clearance. Or would palantir just as easily sell the same product to the US government as it would to another government?
- elblanco 16y ago
  Their "forward deployed engineers" need clearances to work on site. Palantir installations are an extremely lengthy process required a couple full-time people on-site. The places I've seen it, it's typically taken 6-12 months to get it "turned on".
nostrademons 16y ago
Palantir is known around the valley - at least, I've heard of it from other Googlers (some of which have spouses/friends that work there). It's mostly known for treating their employees very, very well. Like, Google-level well. They also happen to be working on really cool technical problems, which makes them a big draw for talented engineers in the valley.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  Does Google pay well? I'm under the impression that they are more about perks and cool projects than salary and benefits.
  - earle 16y ago
    you are correct
    - purtyfce2 16y ago
      Earle, You posted the fermilabs mystery letter: full cryptanalysis, you last comment is drink you ovaltine. I am incredibly interested in where this fits into the code...f0be58f2fd63 6c79d2e493e6..I am trying to break a code that is very similar to this but have no experience breaking codes so I have been researching codes and how to break them, this is the closest I have come, but still would love to ask you some questions, if you have time. I dont want you to break it for me, I just need a little guidance, when thinking this thru.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    "Pay well" is relative. I believe they target the 75th percentile in total compensation, i.e. 25% of the time, people that receive offers from Google would receive more money by working elsewhere. Perks are included in that, but they're pretty tiny, eg. the free food is valued at about $5k/year (it actually only costs about $2-3k/year, which is why Google does it). That's pretty decent, particularly considering that people that receive offers from Google tend to be a small, highly-valued slice of the total programmer pool. I make more than twice as much (including bonus + stock options) at Google than I did at my previous employer, though that's not really a fair comparison since that employer was my first job out of college and there was a startup I founded in between. The other reason I say it's relative is because your market value after working for Google at a couple years is significantly more than when you joined. After all, you made it through their hiring process, and then you've had a couple years to learn all about their search algorithms and infrastructure and data-driven culture and tons of other stuff that makes you more valuable to prospective employers. But if you haven't gotten a promotion (and promotions can be kinda difficult at Google, because all your peers excel too), you're being paid maybe 6-7% more than when you started, barely above inflation. So your salary - which was probably significantly above other offers when you joined - is now probably significantly under what those companies would pay you now. Curiously, barring people that didn't fit in with the culture and left in their first 6 months, I know very few people that ever leave for another job. Most of the coworkers I know that have left (and that I miss) went to found startups. One is in YC WFP10. Ex-Googler startups seem to be getting picked up a lot for $5-10M nowadays, which is of course a whole lot more than a Googler would ever make in salary.
elblanco 16y ago
I'm concerned, they've pretty much started to saturate their target vertical in the government (military/intel). I've also noticed that new installs are starting to go in at pretty large discounts over a year ago. The government, while large, is finite in size. It doesn't take too many enterprise deals to max it out. If they aren't making money yet, and at their tremendous burn rate, is another $90million really going to bring them to self-sustainment? I'd bet that the curve on their growth rate is starting to drop off now, the next logical place for them to push into is local law enforcement. But at their prices, compared to the de facto competitor (i2) I can't see them getting much traction except for maybe the very largest municipalities (I know they have one in the DHS funded NYC Fusion Center for example). Their going to have to put more resources behind their non gov/intel verticals I think for this to make sense.
- MaysonL 16y ago
  Well, I'd guess it depends on what their support/upgrade revenues are like.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    Their initial installs are quite expensive. Small orgs <50 have been getting prices from $250k-$750k depending. I've seen larger organizations with $5-6million per install prices, but there are fewer of those. I've heard that their quoted maintenance fees are a bit higher than that. I think at their last conference they said they had ~200 staff and still growing. So their burn rate is ~$30-$40 million a year. This latest round will keep them alive for another year or two.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - elblanco 16y ago
    I agree, it's actually where they were born -- financial fraud detection. Their finance product is really mature and quite powerful. Not sure how big the market for it is though. They'll probably do well in other types of research areas, think tanks, large news agencies, etc. They'll definitely have to start to push out into non-US governments though to survive. But from my experience, just due to funding differences, other governments are far more stingy with their purchases.
barmstrong 16y ago
Does anyone else get the feeling this sort of software is probably sold for tons of money but rarely useful? I could be way off here but just from glancing at it, it looks like one of those things that is probably too complicated for the average government employee to use. So they end up having to hire outside consultants or something. It looks like a research tool that is one step removed from the lab.
- elblanco 16y ago
  Most of the people that will be using this tool are intel analysts. Most intel analysts used to be in the military at some point. To be an intel analyst in the military you have to score relatively high on a test called the ASVAB (basically an aptitude test). There's still lots of old guard in the field who can't work a mouse, but the recent crop of analysts were all trained and worked on systems of similar complexity and size (ASAS, JIOC, DCGS, etc.). In other words, we're not talking about the typical government paper pusher. That being said, it's still a complicated tool requiring the training and understanding of some pretty complicated concepts that most analysts don't know about or understand (like ontologies).
regs 16y ago
Palantir is hiring: https://www.palantir.com/careers/positions https://www.palantir.com/careers/positions I'll be the first to vouch for the fact that this is the most amazing place to work. Interesting technical work, huge impact on real problems in the world, great culture, talented coworkers, and stock options that mean something.
muhfuhkuh 16y ago
I smell gov't opportunity for SAS to acquire Palantir, as they kinda-sorta are in the same industry (data mining and analytics). And, the way they treat their employees is very similar (i.e., good work-life balance, in-house healthcare and childcare, killer culture that is the envy of even Google): http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/21/technology/sas_best_companies.fortune/ http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/21/technology/sas_best_companie...
- elblanco 16y ago
  Word on the street is that they are trying to position themselves as an Oracle acquisition. Their valuation seems a bit inflated, but I could see them selling for $300-500million.
limist 16y ago
Gandalf: A Palantir is a dangerous tool! Saruman: Why should we fear to use it? Gandalf: They are NOT all accounted for. We don't know who may be watching-

115 points by revorad 16y ago

I saw a demo of their stuff at Joel's stackoverflow.com tour in sf last year. They were a sponsor and were recruiting. I got a save the shire t-shirt, anyway, It's a really cool product. At least then they were going after defense and government markets primarily. It sounded like they had oracle prices since every installation is basically a custom setup and their system is infinitely customizable. I don't doubt the valuation if they get traction. I know the big financial guys are also a prime market for this kind of product.

stuff4ben 16y ago

Awesome! I know Palantir from when I was learning Groovy. Their dev blog was extremely helpful. Good to know that they're doing well.

andymoe 16y ago
Yeah, that reminds me. It's one of the best looking Java apps I've seen. Tech Crunch screenshots not withstanding.
- wallflower 16y ago
  Thanks! I completely forgot and was driving myself slightly annoyed trying to remember where I'd heard of this company before. http://blog.palantirtech.com/2007/09/11/palantir-screenshots/ http://blog.palantirtech.com/2007/09/11/palantir-screenshots...

brosephius 16y ago

wow, not bad. interesting product, smart engineers. bombed an interview with them some time ago :P

joshwa 16y ago

Jesus Christ. Their product is straight out of every CIA/NSA/SecretGovernmentAgency movie of the last 20 years. All that 'magical' integration of news reports, signal and visual intelligence, financial records, military incidents, relationships and alliances, all kinds of intelligence, and making connections and performing analysis using a wide variety of really cool tools (that, judging by the videos, have incredible performance). One can't help but think that the company started by some guy who was watching a bunch of spy movies and said "why don't we build that product and sell it to the government?"

doron 16y ago
As i recall the company was actually mentioned in a book i read - Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World by Trevor Paglen. so you are on the mark here.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
I'm sure Jesus thanks you for reminding him of this product but probably wonders what your point was, you prayer seems to have wandered off somewhere ... ;0)>
tlrobinson 16y ago
I assumed the government already had that product...
andymoe 16y ago
They should give a copy to the NCIS show...
elblanco 16y ago
Well, they actually sell two products simultaneously. They have a flashy, pretty good, front end tool. But what they really pitch is their very large and super scalable integrated ontologically driven back end.
- Perceval 16y ago
  When you say "ontologically driven", what do you mean?

gruseom 16y ago

This is astonishing: There is no publicist, no sales or marketing team and Karp adamantly believes that there will never be one. He says he is perfectly content to let word of mouth drive his business, in press and in sales. It means they are completely rewriting the rules for selling enterprise software.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>There is no publicist, no sales or marketing team and Karp adamantly believes that there will never be one. When the press call to ask for an interview, or just for info about the product, who do they speak to? That person/those people are your publicist(s). Who writes copy for the website? That's your marketing team. Who do I speak to when I want to buy? That's your sales team. Not labelling some thing doesn't stop it from being that thing.
- sachinag 16y ago
  Folks, their customers are intelligence agencies and the government. They spread through referrals from the CIA to NSA to State to DOD to NIH to whatever the hell. Then they get referrals to their counterparts at friendly governments. The hard part was getting their first sale. Hell, I bet they're still not on the GSA schedule, even with tens of millions in government revenue. Palantir Finance sells to hedge funds and financial institutions, but the whisper referrals work in that insular industry just the same. These guys need salespeople and marketing folks like I need a hole in the head. EDIT: turns out I was wrong about the GSA schedule: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ffLq8fxcGdAJ:https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0086U/0HVEE7.25KU1G_GS-35F-0086U_PALANTIRGS35F0086U05262010.PDF+palantir+GSA&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjxti9x2gZKk_OXsAIzdnayt-fwXkGo2-3xgCf68IFXVxltcKfZo5z2Bi9dnTvORo0AHAQkJ8wnZ-Kr5TcZUWx8_2tdE4U6ALjdzuA8ut88cpEUZ13j9VJnssnmNfo_zww3O9H2&sig=AHIEtbSHH_LfTQ9_BvxYBNE7QXcrTjE3Aw http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ffLq8fxcGdAJ:h... EDIT 2: Ha! The last page has their pricing. And it comes with a 90 day warranty! EDIT 3: Double ha! "Implementation Ninja Services" is the official name for their lowest-level customer support.
  - RK 16y ago

siculars 16y ago

As long as congress does not allow the nsa/dod/cia/fbi to do this themselves, Palantir will have more than enough money getting thrown at them. Hmm... better that a private corporation has this power or the government? Jump ball.

MLnick 16y ago

I wonder what exactly a "human-based" algorithm is? How do you not use stats, NLP, ML and/or network based approaches at that scale?

jauer 16y ago
When I was playing with it, it seemed like a really handy way for a human to sift through a lot of data. Possibly that's where the human-based spin is coming from. If you want to try it, they have a training instance online at https://www.optradestop.com/ https://www.optradestop.com/
elblanco 16y ago
A very large part of their strategy is crowdsourcing named entity extraction. Basically, as you read a report, you hilight and tag all the entities of interest. It provides incredibly high quality entities and relationships on an enterprise ontology. The problem is that it scales incredibly poorly. Imagine hilighting every person, phone number, location, etc. in a document. Then linking them all together manually. Then imagine having a few million documents you have to do that on. It's been an enormous problem at all the sites I've seen it deployed at.

jawn 16y ago

Are relationships discovered automatically across DBs? Does anyone have any insight as to how this might work technically?

slashclee 16y ago
Depends on the kind of relationship you're talking about, but generally speaking, someone has to map the data from the original databases into Palantir entities/properties/links. But—and this is kind of a big deal—the Palantir product does not have a fixed set of entities/properties/links/etc. So if you're more interested in tracking, say, computer systems, networks, and packet traffic than terrorists and bank transactions, it's fairly straightforward to define a new ontology that only contains the things you care about. https://devzone.palantirtech.com/display/pgdz/Integrating+Structured+Data+Into+Palantir+With+Groovy https://devzone.palantirtech.com/display/pgdz/Integrating+St... has a pretty useful overview of how you can take raw data from an existing source (granted, this source is XML data, but it could just as easily come directly from a regular database) and map it into a Palantir stack.
- jawn 16y ago
  Thanks for the links and info. Great stuff. So basically, the heavy lifting palantir does is in the presentation and data abstraction. With a person still needed to define mappings across data sources. Is this a correct statement? With (seemingly) limited off the shelf mapping abilities I'm surprised that they are looking to sell more as an appliance, and less as a turn key service with consulting engagements etc... Neat product.
  - slashclee 16y ago
    I should probably mention that I work at Palantir, but [insert boilerplate disclaimer here]. Yes, you definitely need a person to define the mappings across data sources. However, this is basically a one-time setup task; once the mappings have been established, new data from the existing databases can be continuously imported. I don't have any stats on how long this initial setup phase takes at real customer sites, and if I did I'm sure I couldn't share them publicly, but the goal is definitely for it to be something that doesn't require an entire team of consultants to deploy and babysit. If you want to see the actual government product, and how it works, you can sign up at https://analyzethe.us/ https://analyzethe.us/ for an account. This is a real live Palantir instance with real data from data.gov and it's open to the public.

rjett 16y ago

Given the sensitive nature of some of the data they work with and the fact that 70% of their business comes through the [US] government, I wonder if their engineers all have at least some level of security clearance. Or would palantir just as easily sell the same product to the US government as it would to another government?

elblanco 16y ago
Their "forward deployed engineers" need clearances to work on site. Palantir installations are an extremely lengthy process required a couple full-time people on-site. The places I've seen it, it's typically taken 6-12 months to get it "turned on".

nostrademons 16y ago

Palantir is known around the valley - at least, I've heard of it from other Googlers (some of which have spouses/friends that work there). It's mostly known for treating their employees very, very well. Like, Google-level well. They also happen to be working on really cool technical problems, which makes them a big draw for talented engineers in the valley.

dpritchett 16y ago
Does Google pay well? I'm under the impression that they are more about perks and cool projects than salary and benefits.
- earle 16y ago
  you are correct
  - purtyfce2 16y ago
    Earle, You posted the fermilabs mystery letter: full cryptanalysis, you last comment is drink you ovaltine. I am incredibly interested in where this fits into the code...f0be58f2fd63 6c79d2e493e6..I am trying to break a code that is very similar to this but have no experience breaking codes so I have been researching codes and how to break them, this is the closest I have come, but still would love to ask you some questions, if you have time. I dont want you to break it for me, I just need a little guidance, when thinking this thru.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  "Pay well" is relative. I believe they target the 75th percentile in total compensation, i.e. 25% of the time, people that receive offers from Google would receive more money by working elsewhere. Perks are included in that, but they're pretty tiny, eg. the free food is valued at about $5k/year (it actually only costs about $2-3k/year, which is why Google does it). That's pretty decent, particularly considering that people that receive offers from Google tend to be a small, highly-valued slice of the total programmer pool. I make more than twice as much (including bonus + stock options) at Google than I did at my previous employer, though that's not really a fair comparison since that employer was my first job out of college and there was a startup I founded in between. The other reason I say it's relative is because your market value after working for Google at a couple years is significantly more than when you joined. After all, you made it through their hiring process, and then you've had a couple years to learn all about their search algorithms and infrastructure and data-driven culture and tons of other stuff that makes you more valuable to prospective employers. But if you haven't gotten a promotion (and promotions can be kinda difficult at Google, because all your peers excel too), you're being paid maybe 6-7% more than when you started, barely above inflation. So your salary - which was probably significantly above other offers when you joined - is now probably significantly under what those companies would pay you now. Curiously, barring people that didn't fit in with the culture and left in their first 6 months, I know very few people that ever leave for another job. Most of the coworkers I know that have left (and that I miss) went to found startups. One is in YC WFP10. Ex-Googler startups seem to be getting picked up a lot for $5-10M nowadays, which is of course a whole lot more than a Googler would ever make in salary.

elblanco 16y ago

I'm concerned, they've pretty much started to saturate their target vertical in the government (military/intel). I've also noticed that new installs are starting to go in at pretty large discounts over a year ago. The government, while large, is finite in size. It doesn't take too many enterprise deals to max it out. If they aren't making money yet, and at their tremendous burn rate, is another $90million really going to bring them to self-sustainment? I'd bet that the curve on their growth rate is starting to drop off now, the next logical place for them to push into is local law enforcement. But at their prices, compared to the de facto competitor (i2) I can't see them getting much traction except for maybe the very largest municipalities (I know they have one in the DHS funded NYC Fusion Center for example). Their going to have to put more resources behind their non gov/intel verticals I think for this to make sense.

MaysonL 16y ago
Well, I'd guess it depends on what their support/upgrade revenues are like.
- elblanco 16y ago
  Their initial installs are quite expensive. Small orgs <50 have been getting prices from $250k-$750k depending. I've seen larger organizations with $5-6million per install prices, but there are fewer of those. I've heard that their quoted maintenance fees are a bit higher than that. I think at their last conference they said they had ~200 staff and still growing. So their burn rate is ~$30-$40 million a year. This latest round will keep them alive for another year or two.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- elblanco 16y ago
  I agree, it's actually where they were born -- financial fraud detection. Their finance product is really mature and quite powerful. Not sure how big the market for it is though. They'll probably do well in other types of research areas, think tanks, large news agencies, etc. They'll definitely have to start to push out into non-US governments though to survive. But from my experience, just due to funding differences, other governments are far more stingy with their purchases.

barmstrong 16y ago

Does anyone else get the feeling this sort of software is probably sold for tons of money but rarely useful? I could be way off here but just from glancing at it, it looks like one of those things that is probably too complicated for the average government employee to use. So they end up having to hire outside consultants or something. It looks like a research tool that is one step removed from the lab.

elblanco 16y ago
Most of the people that will be using this tool are intel analysts. Most intel analysts used to be in the military at some point. To be an intel analyst in the military you have to score relatively high on a test called the ASVAB (basically an aptitude test). There's still lots of old guard in the field who can't work a mouse, but the recent crop of analysts were all trained and worked on systems of similar complexity and size (ASAS, JIOC, DCGS, etc.). In other words, we're not talking about the typical government paper pusher. That being said, it's still a complicated tool requiring the training and understanding of some pretty complicated concepts that most analysts don't know about or understand (like ontologies).

regs 16y ago

Palantir is hiring: https://www.palantir.com/careers/positions https://www.palantir.com/careers/positions I'll be the first to vouch for the fact that this is the most amazing place to work. Interesting technical work, huge impact on real problems in the world, great culture, talented coworkers, and stock options that mean something.

muhfuhkuh 16y ago

I smell gov't opportunity for SAS to acquire Palantir, as they kinda-sorta are in the same industry (data mining and analytics). And, the way they treat their employees is very similar (i.e., good work-life balance, in-house healthcare and childcare, killer culture that is the envy of even Google): http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/21/technology/sas_best_companies.fortune/ http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/21/technology/sas_best_companie...

elblanco 16y ago
Word on the street is that they are trying to position themselves as an Oracle acquisition. Their valuation seems a bit inflated, but I could see them selling for $300-500million.

limist 16y ago

Gandalf: A Palantir is a dangerous tool! Saruman: Why should we fear to use it? Gandalf: They are NOT all accounted for. We don't know who may be watching-