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Everyone 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 th
by smeeth 6y ago
Everyone 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?
- Rebelgecko 6y agoBy treating their employees as if they were working for an abusive startup
- autokad 6y ago> "The only differences between Palantir and, say, Booz Allen Hamilton that I can see" I'll start by saying I am not invested in Palantir, and they are not my investment tastes, but I don't think you are looking at important numbers. Booz Allen has a growth rate of about 10%. Palantir grew by 24% in 2018 and yoy 45% (might come in at 60%) (Forbes). Some say that the growth rate may be because of covid (I dont know that's a bad thing), but it is fair if you are in that camp. However, looking at just the current revenue and ignoring growth seems like you are ignoring the important parts of the picture
- prepend 6y agoTo my knowledge Booz doesn’t have any significant revenue from licensing. I think to compare them, you need to break out consulting revenue from professional services from their licensing from their managed hosting (or whatever they call their cloud managed instances PaaS stuff). I used to work for a company that had dual streams and it was important to track the difference between license revenue and professional services because they are totally different with different growth rates. Consulting will have a pretty limited growth rate because at the end of the day they are just selling people. Software, of course, has the potential for exponential growth.
- trowaway888 6y agoI think it's more accurate to say Palantir is a data analysis company. The differences would be better compared to a company like Snowflake. Perhaps that would explain the greater number of engineers, the timeline and parallels to high-margin tech companies. In fact, the prospectus points to their surprisingly positive margins.