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Palantir goes public but founders will have control for life
- cjbenedikt 6y agoAnother Facebook in the making only worse
- jamisteven 6y agopaywall 4lyfe
- timdorr 6y agoUnpaywalled URL: https://app.ft.com/content/27eddb59-1770-4ad8-a07f-6a940e20e00c https://app.ft.com/content/27eddb59-1770-4ad8-a07f-6a940e20e...
- hundchenkatze 6y agoIt's also paywalled for me.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI still get “This article is only available to subscribers” garbage
- suls 6y agohttp://archive.today/XB2jb http://archive.today/XB2jb
- timdorr 6y agoCan no longer edit/delete because I've been downvoted, but yes, this is no longer public. Sorry about that!
- glenda 6y agoPalantir is a real threat to liberty, I am surprised to see so many “freedom” types support them. This update illustrates how important control is to the founders.
- trowaway888 6y agoGenuinely curious, how is Palantir a threat to liberty?
- smt88 6y agoThey are a highly-secretive company that sell secret digital surveillance services to governments, including law enforcement. As a private company, they're not subject to FOIA requests the same way govt orgs (including military, with obvious redactions) are.
- manfredo 6y agoI don't think it's correct to say that they sell surveillance services. When I think of "surveillance" I think it means data collection. Palantir doesn't build data collection tools, they build data visualization tools. The government already has the data, Palantir builds a tool to better browse that data. The tool Palantir replaces if often Microsoft Excel. Does it follow that Excel is a digital surveillance tool?
- NationalPark 6y agoYou've made this distinction a couple times in these comments and I just don't buy it. If Palantir doesn't provide any value, why does the government keep hiring them to build "visualizations" of domestic surveillance tools? I think we can both oppose this kind of policy politically, and rightfully call out the companies and the individual engineers who do this kind of anti-privacy work.
- manfredo 6y agoThe ability to better visualize this info, is the value. Governments are willing to pay for Palantir because doing things tracking down pill mills is easier if you can perform operations like filtering for people that bought the same drug twice in a day, and then plotting those purchases on map. It's a lot harder to do this kind of analysis with Excel.
- mellosouls 6y agohttps://archive.vn/XB2jb https://archive.vn/XB2jb
- COVardsStayHome 6y agoI remember when these cunts gave a lecture in my CS masters degree...they were so so proud of their achievements.
- itsoktocry 6y agoSo are these SPACs simply a method of avoiding standard public company disclosures, while providing liquidity to insiders? How would that be a good idea?
- trowaway888 6y agoI don't think Palantir going public is about liquidity for insiders. Rather, I think it is about access to public capital markets. Obviously, it does both, but I think the impetus is access to public capital markets.
- itsoktocry 6y ago>Rather, I think it is about access to public capital markets. I don't see anything, anywhere, regarding their goals for raising cash through this "IPO"; it looks like insiders selling shares to me. I could be wrong. But they are a software service company. Why would they need an influx of public capital?
- jiveturkey 6y agoeh? for the same reason any company, saas or not, needs public capital.
- trowaway888 6y agoI'm speculating here, which is in part, why I am interested in this discussion. I think they will issue additional shares shortly. The most likely use of funds is to scale and manage their sales division.
- thrill 6y agoPalantir did not go public via a SPAC but by simply directly listing their shares for public sale. A company might choose to do this if the number of shares it offers would not be significantly valued higher going through the "traditional" IPO process. Even with a SPAC there's no avoidance of disclosures that are required per SEC filings.
- smeeth 6y agoEveryone is missing the bad business forest for the privacy abuse trees. Palantir is a consulting company that has somehow convinced the world they exist in the same universe as standard high-margin tech companies, like Away luggage. The only differences between Palantir and, say, Booz Allen Hamilton that I can see are that 1) Palantir hires more engineers and 2) Booz has 7x the revenue and actually turns a profit.
- Barrin92 6y agoIt reminds me of WeWork and Regus. On the one hand you have companies that have a corporate structure that resembles Lost's Dharma Initiative and on the other you have a company that actually makes money, yet for some reason investors seem to be infatuated with the former. Makes no sense to me.
- tW4r 6y agoCould you explain/elaborate about the Dharma Initiative structure and how it applies here, to a person who’s fascinated with lost but never found the time to actually watch it.
- manishsharan 6y agoI have patiently watched Lost Seasons 1 through 5 before giving up. I still have no idea about the Dharma initiative. I guess that's what it would be like for a shareholder in Palantir.
- stevehawk 6y agoit blows my mind that a company, let alone a tech company with a product to license, that targets the IC isn't super profitable. then again, when i was a contractor in the IC all i ever heard was that the product sucked.
- andrewg 6y agoBy the way, how did a luggage company convince the world they are a tech company?
- keeganpoppen 6y agoit's good to be king