4 ms·

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 conten

by 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
    I used to work at a company that had basically one client, the US Navy, and it would still go to expos to show of its products to different parts of the Navy. The government is not a monolith, where everyone shares the same hallway (although the Pentagon might come close...).
- gruseom 16y ago
  That I vacuum the floor in our workspace doesn't mean my startup has a janitor. There is a well-established game around enterprise sales. It involves golf, steak, strip clubs, and (as tptacek memorably put it) gnawing off your own toes. If these guys are succeeding at selling big-box enterprise software while refusing to play it, then they are rewriting the rules and others will follow. I don't want to be over-optimistic about this, but it sure would be a good thing, and I find it more interesting than either their analytics platform or their bubble machine.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    "Who's your janitor?" "We don't have one" "Who cleans the floors?" "I do." "You're the janitor" FWIW I'm the cleaner, kiln technician, website team, chief scrubber and bottle washer, etc., for a company too. I realise they're doing things differently. If people come to them all ready set to buy they still have to go through some process even if that process is only payment - someone manages that in some way. Maybe they take online payment and do delivery with no human interactions from the company side but someone still set that up, they still have a sales person.
gojomo 16y ago
This is strategic spin -- an emphasis on having technically-savvy people fill sales roles under the 'Business Development' label. About half the titles advertised as open positions on Palantir's website, across all locations, fall under the 'Business Development' category. They're requesting engineer-level technical aptitude, sure, but the work is lots of pre-sales customer contact.
- gruseom 16y ago
  Ok, that sounds more like an incremental improvement than a complete rewriting of the rules. I wonder what percentage of their total effort goes into that as opposed to building the product.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    It's more like an increase in efficiency. The turn all of the engineers into what are essentially BD and sales staff. It saves them from having to deal with high-commissioned sales people, while enjoying the benefits of low salaried, just out of grad school, smart engineer types that clean up well (the company branded track jackets and massive quantities of hair product on display at any of the conferences helps too).
jamesbritt 16y ago
"It means they are completely rewriting the rules for selling enterprise software" Or we're hearing about it because this approach just happens to work for them; others trying it out may not fare so well and quietly go away.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  I'm calling it now: Palantir is the 37Signals of govt/finance. :)
danielnicollet 16y ago
Well, it's easy to re-write the rules when you have a cash cow called the US government buying loads of your applications. You just don't need to chase after customers anymore. Right?
elblanco 16y ago
What an amazing line of BS. Anyone who's ever dealt with them deals with sales people. Please don't buy into this, they are by far the most marketing and sales oriented companies I've ever seen in 15 years in the government/military intel space.
- gruseom 16y ago
  It sounds like you have direct experience with them. If so, would you please describe what you personally saw or heard, that sheds light on this question? If it's BS, perhaps it's BS designed to hoodwink engineers. It certainly got me excited thinking that it might be true.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    Outside of my own, or my colleagues experience with them, they literally wallpapered the metro station at the Pentagon with adverts. I've never seen that anywhere else in the system - ever. We're talking one of the most competitive advertising stations in the system, with many multi-billion dollar companies competing for the eyes of the senior military decision makers, and it's Palantir Tech that has everything from the floor to the ceiling completely covered, not Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, etc. I refuse to believe that an engineer in a back room, one day, decided he was tired of hashing out java code and picked up the phone and rang WMATA and bought a quarter million in advertising. No, that was done by their sales and marketing staff. Their last conference had ~700 attendees, fully 100 of the attendees were Palantir employees flown out from the home office to fill out the space and make a big presence felt. That's fully 50% of the staff at the time. Oh, and to helpfully answer questions I suppose, but very few were able to coherently answer questions beyond a superficial level. Me and some of my colleagues kept getting passed off to probably the same half dozen engineers over and over again -- sometimes humorously so ("didn't we just meet upstairs at the breakout and talked about something completely different?"). It also doesn't help when there's so many Palantir people hanging out in reception area that it's impossible to walk a straight line from one part of the conference to the next because of the clusters of track jacketed employees lounging about and giggling excitedly whenever a uniformed Army officer walks by. And let's not forget the conference itself, two floors in the Ritz Carlton, with catered lunch of Filet Mignon and similar fare for 1000 people? With an open bar after the conference? (Thanks for the coffee cups guys! They're actually pretty nice!) That's not a DBA running that. Some other colleagues of mine at a different site described a team of "slick haired, googly dressed, sales guys" (actual quote) descending on their facility to hawk their wares. The brass was impressed that "even the sales guys knew the technical stuff". Which of course happens when your sales guys have engineering degrees -- I'd actually like to see more of this in the future in general, so it's a trend I like. Direct personal experience? For every decent engineer of theirs I find at a site, I find 2 or 3 that don't seem to do anything except hand out stock business cards with direction to go check out operation tradestop or whatever their online demo is called. If that doesn't persuade you that they have invested large dollars in a sales and marketing apperatus, my own interactions have been through people with "Business Development" in their titles. Yes my friend, just because they happened to have graduated from Stanford or CalTech or wherever with an Engineering degree does not prevent a person from being in sales and marketing. Like most things that come from the company, there's actually a pretty interesting kernel at the core of a giant pile of BS. The fact that their sales staff actually are engineers by training is a great thing to see in a large company. I've been on the receiving end of too many pitches by clueless sales guys with marketing degrees, when what I needed in that hour I was able to allocate to hear the pitch, was some hard technical answers. Having guys who know their stuff getting out there and pound pavement is no doubt a big part of their rapid success. But let's not be mistaken, they are salesmen, and the company does spend large amounts of money on marketing, press releases, advertisements, etc. They actually stand out as much for their product as they do for the fact that they're by far the most "present" company in their competitive space on billboards and marketing materials in the entire area.

by gruseom 16y ago

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
  I used to work at a company that had basically one client, the US Navy, and it would still go to expos to show of its products to different parts of the Navy. The government is not a monolith, where everyone shares the same hallway (although the Pentagon might come close...).
gruseom 16y ago
That I vacuum the floor in our workspace doesn't mean my startup has a janitor. There is a well-established game around enterprise sales. It involves golf, steak, strip clubs, and (as tptacek memorably put it) gnawing off your own toes. If these guys are succeeding at selling big-box enterprise software while refusing to play it, then they are rewriting the rules and others will follow. I don't want to be over-optimistic about this, but it sure would be a good thing, and I find it more interesting than either their analytics platform or their bubble machine.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  "Who's your janitor?" "We don't have one" "Who cleans the floors?" "I do." "You're the janitor" FWIW I'm the cleaner, kiln technician, website team, chief scrubber and bottle washer, etc., for a company too. I realise they're doing things differently. If people come to them all ready set to buy they still have to go through some process even if that process is only payment - someone manages that in some way. Maybe they take online payment and do delivery with no human interactions from the company side but someone still set that up, they still have a sales person.

gojomo 16y ago

This is strategic spin -- an emphasis on having technically-savvy people fill sales roles under the 'Business Development' label. About half the titles advertised as open positions on Palantir's website, across all locations, fall under the 'Business Development' category. They're requesting engineer-level technical aptitude, sure, but the work is lots of pre-sales customer contact.

gruseom 16y ago
Ok, that sounds more like an incremental improvement than a complete rewriting of the rules. I wonder what percentage of their total effort goes into that as opposed to building the product.
- elblanco 16y ago
  It's more like an increase in efficiency. The turn all of the engineers into what are essentially BD and sales staff. It saves them from having to deal with high-commissioned sales people, while enjoying the benefits of low salaried, just out of grad school, smart engineer types that clean up well (the company branded track jackets and massive quantities of hair product on display at any of the conferences helps too).

jamesbritt 16y ago

"It means they are completely rewriting the rules for selling enterprise software" Or we're hearing about it because this approach just happens to work for them; others trying it out may not fare so well and quietly go away.

mkramlich 16y ago
I'm calling it now: Palantir is the 37Signals of govt/finance. :)

danielnicollet 16y ago

Well, it's easy to re-write the rules when you have a cash cow called the US government buying loads of your applications. You just don't need to chase after customers anymore. Right?

elblanco 16y ago

What an amazing line of BS. Anyone who's ever dealt with them deals with sales people. Please don't buy into this, they are by far the most marketing and sales oriented companies I've ever seen in 15 years in the government/military intel space.

gruseom 16y ago
It sounds like you have direct experience with them. If so, would you please describe what you personally saw or heard, that sheds light on this question? If it's BS, perhaps it's BS designed to hoodwink engineers. It certainly got me excited thinking that it might be true.
- elblanco 16y ago
  Outside of my own, or my colleagues experience with them, they literally wallpapered the metro station at the Pentagon with adverts. I've never seen that anywhere else in the system - ever. We're talking one of the most competitive advertising stations in the system, with many multi-billion dollar companies competing for the eyes of the senior military decision makers, and it's Palantir Tech that has everything from the floor to the ceiling completely covered, not Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, etc. I refuse to believe that an engineer in a back room, one day, decided he was tired of hashing out java code and picked up the phone and rang WMATA and bought a quarter million in advertising. No, that was done by their sales and marketing staff. Their last conference had ~700 attendees, fully 100 of the attendees were Palantir employees flown out from the home office to fill out the space and make a big presence felt. That's fully 50% of the staff at the time. Oh, and to helpfully answer questions I suppose, but very few were able to coherently answer questions beyond a superficial level. Me and some of my colleagues kept getting passed off to probably the same half dozen engineers over and over again -- sometimes humorously so ("didn't we just meet upstairs at the breakout and talked about something completely different?"). It also doesn't help when there's so many Palantir people hanging out in reception area that it's impossible to walk a straight line from one part of the conference to the next because of the clusters of track jacketed employees lounging about and giggling excitedly whenever a uniformed Army officer walks by. And let's not forget the conference itself, two floors in the Ritz Carlton, with catered lunch of Filet Mignon and similar fare for 1000 people? With an open bar after the conference? (Thanks for the coffee cups guys! They're actually pretty nice!) That's not a DBA running that. Some other colleagues of mine at a different site described a team of "slick haired, googly dressed, sales guys" (actual quote) descending on their facility to hawk their wares. The brass was impressed that "even the sales guys knew the technical stuff". Which of course happens when your sales guys have engineering degrees -- I'd actually like to see more of this in the future in general, so it's a trend I like. Direct personal experience? For every decent engineer of theirs I find at a site, I find 2 or 3 that don't seem to do anything except hand out stock business cards with direction to go check out operation tradestop or whatever their online demo is called. If that doesn't persuade you that they have invested large dollars in a sales and marketing apperatus, my own interactions have been through people with "Business Development" in their titles. Yes my friend, just because they happened to have graduated from Stanford or CalTech or wherever with an Engineering degree does not prevent a person from being in sales and marketing. Like most things that come from the company, there's actually a pretty interesting kernel at the core of a giant pile of BS. The fact that their sales staff actually are engineers by training is a great thing to see in a large company. I've been on the receiving end of too many pitches by clueless sales guys with marketing degrees, when what I needed in that hour I was able to allocate to hear the pitch, was some hard technical answers. Having guys who know their stuff getting out there and pound pavement is no doubt a big part of their rapid success. But let's not be mistaken, they are salesmen, and the company does spend large amounts of money on marketing, press releases, advertisements, etc. They actually stand out as much for their product as they do for the fact that they're by far the most "present" company in their competitive space on billboards and marketing materials in the entire area.