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Palantir Announces Confidential Submission of Draft S-1
- chdaniel 6y agoVery bold to do it in the current landscape but I'm sure they've got their reasons to do so
- par 6y agoOn the contrary, anything tech related is sky rocketing. The Fed is proving they are willing to buy up just about anything, market highs know no ceiling. Now is the time to pile in with absolutely any tech related offering.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- e74ururu 6y agoSo much this. Most people aren't privacy activists so Palantir is just a high profile contractor to invest in.
- albntomat0 6y agoBold in which sense? I can think of a range of reasons why any company, and Palantir specifically, could be hesitant.
- icey 6y agoIf I were Palantir I'd be worried about the funding from my primary customers (defense, law enforcement, ICE) in the likely coming very Democratic federal government. There's been a lot of noise made about changing how much money is being spent on law enforcement, which would directly impact Palantir's bottom line. If they can IPO and gracefully transition to private sector work, then they'll be golden; but afaict private sector hasn't gone as well as they'd hoped yet.
- ethbro 6y agoHence the rapid IPO. ;)
- deleuze 6y agoI'm expecting they'll have a pretty good IPO, but I'm considering going short for that very reason. They're almost a caricature of "evil" startup companies. Peter Thiel's association only makes it worse. Not committed to this thesis though, since it's possible they could be swept up in TINA mania for the next ?? months/years.
- yters 6y agoScott Adams claims evil businesses tend to do the best.
- andreilys 6y agoWhat issue do you take with Thiel? I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call him evil.
- patrickthebold 6y agoWell he _is_ a founder of Palantir.
- randycupertino 6y agoHe secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him.
- emilfihlman 6y ago>He secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him. You can't be serious. In a court of law, Gawker was found to be (extremely) wrong, and outing people ain't cool. It was anything but shady.
- lalos 6y ago
- paxys 6y agoI wonder if the looming possibility of Trump not winning the upcoming election is one of the reasons.
- runawaybottle 6y agoWhat does Palantir do again? Serious question.
- nikivi 6y agoBuild software to do data analysis + work with clients. From what I know.
- CamperBob2 6y agoBasically what it did in the LotR books and movies. Provide technology to questionably-ethical people that gives them insights into things they wouldn't ordinarily be able to discover, accompanied by longer-term downsides that aren't readily apparent at the time the technology is deployed and used.
- irq 6y agoThis analogy really works for me. Palantir is a well-named company.
- aidenn0 6y agoData mining for primarily government customers. Named after the seeing stones from Tolkien's mythology.
- deeblering4 6y agoTheir site should have some info about that, let’s see... “At Palantir, we build software that lets organizations integrate their data, their decisions, and their operations into one platform. Our software empowers entire organizations to answer complex questions quickly by bringing the right data to the people who need it.” Whoops! Never mind, I have no idea what this is describing.
- memexy 6y agoIt's vague on purpose. Their target demographic is CIOs and CTOs at large corporations and bureaucrats in governments. That language actually makes sense to them.
- aresant 6y agoLemonade and Agora's IPOs in the last two weeks both doubled right out of gate and have kept going (1) Bankrupt HERTZ pumped 500%+ over a couple of weeks in June, to such a degree that their board nearly got a $500m unprecedented "worthless" equity offering out into the public market before the SEC shut them down. (2) Tesla is trading at $1,400. Their latest competitor Nikola - who has no sales and no actual consumer product - was briefly worth more than ford (3) I would assume that board rooms & investment bankers are SCRAMBLING to get their IPOs pushed out in Q3 or early Q4 2020. In the meantime hold onto your hats, don't risk what you can't afford to lose :) (1) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates-controversial-stock-sale.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates-co... (2) https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-hertz-pulls-plan-to-issue-500-million-in-new-stock/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-hertz-... (3) *Was for a minute - off to an $18b valuation vs $25b for ford today haha - https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-more-than-doubles-nikola-founder-bo.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-mor...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoDon’t fight the fed.
- aresant 6y agoAmen.
- xwdv 6y agoAmen.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- beamatronic 6y agoThe trend is your friend until the end
- 0xTJ 6y agoWithout knowing what they actually do, Palantir is a terrifying name.
- Analemma_ 6y agoThe company lives up to its name, I promise.
- krick 6y agoDo you say that as somebody who doesn't actually know what they do? Because it's exactly what they do. You can only admire the honesty.
- whymauri 6y agoAll the Lord of the Rings inspired startups give me the heebie jeebies. Anduril literally translates to "Flame of the West."
- bigiain 6y agoKnowing a little bit, but undoubtedly barely the tip of the iceberg of what they actually do, Palantir is a terrifying name.
- castratikron 6y agoIt's what they call crystal balls in Lord of the Rings
- three_seagrass 6y agoJFC it just hit me that it's named after the seeing-stones in LOTR.
- iandanforth 6y agoIf there were any good in markets this IPO would fail. We are without conscience and this despicable enterprise will continue.
- mulmen 6y agoMarkets don't have ethics. That's why we have regulation and democracy.
- magila 6y agoMarkets in-and-of themselves do not have ethics, but the outcomes of a market reflect the ethics of the consumers within it.
- chii 6y agoand so far, the markets have overwhelmingly voted in favour of profit over ethics.
- iheartnetwork 6y agoShareholders only care about profits, nothing else.
- alangpierce 6y agoCertainly many of them do, but there are also plenty of people who want to focus on investments that also have a positive impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_investing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_investing One specific example of a robo-advisor that does this: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/feature/socially-responsible-investing https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/feature/socially-responsi...
- asdff 6y agoIf you feed a bunch of vegetarians beef stew and they don't realize it, are you allowed to call them unethical hypocrites?
- bane 6y agoFrom the long line of rounds of raises (what are they on now, their L round?) my guess is that Palantir is a money fire and is vastly overinflated in valuation. It'll be good to actually see their numbers now in Q statements.
- exogeny 6y agoAs someone who worked in defense consulting/IT contracting many moons ago, let me clue you in on a simple fact: there is an INSANE amount of money wasted on these contracts. The project that we were working on was projected to maybe go live in ten years (when the tech would be laughably outdated), and we were the sub-sub-sub-contractor of the massive company at the top. It was nothing more than a vaporware webapp built by 22 year olds right out of college who were white/American enough to get clearance immediately, and our team got $100 million for it. The money in these DoD contracts is truly nuts. And it never gets slashed because how politically terrible slashing defense is, and it never gets audited because too many people are making money. So as it relates to Palantir, sure, they're scammy and unethical as all hell, but they certainly know where the bread is buttered in America. Even in a (likely) Democratic adminstration.
- runawaybottle 6y agoWhat’s the best path to get on this gravy train?
- xenihn 6y agoA master's degree. Body shops can bill more for contractors if they have one. This often means they make it a requirement.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anonu 6y agohttps://beta.sam.gov/ https://beta.sam.gov/
- cheschire 6y agohttps://www.usa.gov/become-government-contractor https://www.usa.gov/become-government-contractor
- blaser-waffle 6y agoGet a security clearance. Higher the better. Military is a common way to get one, but plenty of civilian jobs will sponsor, too. Clearances cost a bunch of money to do though, so they usually pre-screen heavily.
- thesausageking 6y ago[redacted]
- baldajan 6y agoAnd the other founder, who is the CEO, absolutely hates Trump...
- PakG1 6y agoFor what it's worth, Thiel isn't supporting Trump like he used to so far. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21312154/peter-thiel-trump-2020-election-campaign-shying-away-distancing https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21312154/peter-thiel-trump...
- three_seagrass 6y agoI wouldn't take anything that Peter Thiel "says" he's thinking about doing too seriously. He also said this in 2016: >I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. … I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.
- earthtobishop 6y agoThe claim that Peter Thiel's connection to Trump has somehow benefited Palantir is completely absurd. According to Alex Karp, it takes ten years to build the kind of customer base with governments that they have built, the majority of which was built under the Obama administration.
- voz_ 6y agoCongrats to a wonderful company.
- AtHeartEngineer 6y agoIs this sarcasm?
- voz_ 6y agoNo. Most of the deriders here have no idea of the amount of good they do.
- jesterson 6y agoPerhaps you can enlighten us?
- voz_ 6y agoIts about helping organization utilize their data - nothing more, nothing less. Palantir does not own the data. They do not fuse some secret magic data source with other secret magic data sources. They provide tooling and platforms to allow companies to make sense of their data. Look at https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/platform-features/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/platform-features/ for instance. It lets you draw connections between data, it allows you to spin up graphs to look at relationships, or plot things on a map, or perhaps make a nice web-based pivot table. But it is not some draconian evil thing, where moustache twirling villains sit around, finding new ways to pry into your personal data. Nor are they some scary shadow government-corp that seeks to entrench itself in the military-industrial complex in order to control things from within. It's tooling, its refinements on data, and its your typical software as a service company. The value proposition is giant players are good at having lots of data, but bad at using it, or finding insights, or visualizing it, or whatever - so they offer a one-size-fits-all set of tools and solutions. I am very tired of the misconceptions around them because of their cool name. Some of the most intelligent, humble, and hardworking people I know work there. Their mission is misunderstood.
- 6y ago
- mtgp1000 6y agoI don't know anything about the legitimacy of this IPO, but if they have a competent ML team, then what terrible things they can do with their data are [unfortunately] worth killing for if you're an authoritarian government.
- manfredo 6y agoA lot of people in this thread are raising questions about what Palantir actually does. I worked as a software developer at Palantir in 2014, so maybe I can shed some light on this though this info may not be up to date. Back then they had two main products: Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis. Accompanying this was a big infrastructure to ingest data from various sources. First the two frontends: Gotham is focused on displaying entity based data. Entity based data was often things like people, reports of events, invoices, etc. Gotham let you do things like click on a person, and see all criminal records associated with them. Or their relatives and known associates. This was called "search around" and was apparently a very big deal. One sample use case for Palantir Gotham was to search for people that made more than one purchase of the same Schedule 2 drug, and plot those purchases on a map. A common method of finding pill mills was to plot these drug purchases on a map and see when there's a bunch of purchases along a highway route. Big indicator that someone is buying in bulk, but splitting up their purchases to fall under thresholds which traditional alerting mechanisms relied upon. Palantir Gotham is the product that people usually associate with Palantir - it's the one used by a lot of three letter agencies. I don't know too much about Metropolis. It was more about quantitative analysis. I think it was popular for insurance companies. IIRC it could do things like plot the frequency of adverse weather events on a map, and then insurance adjusters to fine tune premiums. I think there was also a Palantir Metropolis product aimed at small businesses. Now, the above covers the frontend. A huge part of Palantir's operations is data ingestion. Basically, this consisted of moving data out of government or enterprise databases and moving them into Palantir's format. This usually involved forward deployed engineers that would work with the government or business and work out a way to ingest the data. An un-glamorous job but one of the really important ones. Another huge component of the business was customer specific customization. When I worked there something like 40-50% of software engineers worked on business development. They rest worked either on infrastructure of UI platform (basically building the components of the UI that aren't customer specific). Business development at Palantir when I worked meant "software development for a given business (or agency)" not sales. If you worked in business development you were a developer for a given business or agency. This was also a lot of grunt work. One customer wanted to bucket items based on the phase of the moon. I distinctly remember this ask - maybe the FBI was investigating a werewolf. Implementing features and customizations like that was the role of business development. Is it a powerful tool or is it snakeoil? Well, given that the workflows it's replacing are often whiteboards and excel spreadsheets it may actually be a very significant gain. Ultimately what Palantir has is a flexible way of displaying and finding relationships between data. Flexible enough to ingest very different types of data. Perhaps more importantly they have a technical workforce capable of rapidly extending the product to meet new customer needs. And if customers are happy with the product I guess it's worth it. I just hope they've moved off of god-damn java swing for the UI.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoFrom the other thread: Forgive my ignorance: For most other companies, I've seen a direct link to an S-1. Is sending in a confidential draft first normal and we just don't hear about it, or is the confidential draft sent but not announced usually, or is this unusual?
- vechagup 6y agoIt's pretty common to submit a confidential draft. This started with the JOBS Act [1], which loosened disclosure requirements generally for "Emerging Growth Companies" [2] when they are going public and introduced the notion of a confidential draft registration statement. You originally had to meet certain requirements to qualify for confidential filing, but that privilege was subsequently expanded to all companies [3]. Exactly how common it is to announce your confidential filing is harder to assess, but it's not _that_ unusual. They likely decided their filing would leak and thus it was better to get ahead of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startup... [2] https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC [3] https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2017/07/sec-permit-issuers-submit-confidential https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2017/07/sec-pe...
- predictmktegirl 6y agoIt’s hard to watch the stock market right now as an underpaid employee at a pre-IPO unicorn. Who else here is desperately hoping the next S-1 post is about their company?
- aritraghosh007 6y agoThis was long overdue. Palantir has always been a darling of the valley. I often wonder how much of Palantir is actually owned by DoD and if that information would be made public after they IPO. Edit: Looks like In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, already owns some stake in the company. [1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-technologies-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-techn...]