I interviewed there for a product management position. It was clear they were not a product company, but they badly wanted to be one. Being a product company i

I interviewed there for a product management position. It was clear they were not a product company, but they badly wanted to be one. Being a product company is so much better in Silicon Valley. Revenues scale. Engineers work on general problems. Skills are reusable. At the time (2014) they were building Gotham and Metropolis. There was a small team of product evangelists in the team, whose role was to find commonalities between projects. I could feel they were conflicted. It looked like the platforms were not valued by the customers. Customers valued answers to their operational problems. And problems across companies and industries get solved very differently. Crossing data between license plates wasn't the same as extracting data from credit card statements. Platforms may provide foundations to speed up implementation and save money, but nothing customers could value directly. I could tell they wanted to be a product company. Palantir is structured like a regular Silicon Valley company. They have a CEO, a COO, and product roles. They give stock options and now are forced to go public. And they never never present themselves as consultants. One of my friends there took offense at describing the company as 'Tech McKinsey'. Compare it with firms such as McKinsey and BCG. They are private partnerships. They pay junior consultants higher than any other company at equivalent positions, they give no shares until partners. The partners at these firms possess the network. They do the selling, and that's all they are focused on. Answering customers' problems. It might scale less, but it provides a 100% tailored solution to the customer. The only question is that what customers value. Do they value Palantir platforms with high recurring fees? Or did they like the first data joins, but eventually thought it was too expensive, or they should build it themselves? Which would mean Palantir has to constantly generate new contracts, much like McKinsey and BCG. Only Palantir knows.