7 ms·

For those of us who are curious, who is referenced in #4? I have a good suspicion, but am not 100% sure.

by jcdavis 13y ago

fiatmoney 13y ago
Palantir at one point had a pay cap on base salary (I think they still do). Theoretically it's made up by equity.
- mikhailfranco 13y ago
  Yes, Palantir will be 10 years old next year, has already taken Series G funding: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies and the salary cap is $127k: http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/killer-app/ http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/killer-app/
  - bane 13y ago
    Good example, so let's say I started there 5 years ago and received a $100k salary, hit the pay cap last year and took a thousand shares in options. And then tomorrow somebody bought them for whatever their current valuation is, what would that be worth? After 7 rounds of funding, I gotta say, probably not much (especially after I divide it by my number of years). But that should be an easy thing to compute for any employee there and for them to decide if that's worth it. Perks: Free food and laundry service is cool, but I'd rather make more money that covers the food and laundry with some leftover.
    - candybar 13y ago
      Palantir is worth multiple billions of dollars (based on secondary market trading).
      - bane 13y ago
        Right, but if they never exit, or keep taking funding rounds, the equity the employees have becomes either worth nothing, or worth not a hell of a lot. Again, divide the money they might see by the number of years and add it the base to see if it was worth it. There's a couple others I know that went public, but still have pay caps, but implemented a preferred stock option system for bonuses and such that works out very well for many of the employees.
        mikhailfranco 13y ago
        It's difficult to get a handle on the real business value of Palantir: homeland security bubble has burst (sequester and US govt debt); big fight against DCGS for Army procurement; high cost of doing business overseas; financial product line is a drag; low cost competitors building product from OSS/COTS components (e.g. Hive/Hadoop, graph DBs, HTML5 front end) .... The strangest thing is that Palantir is almost 10 years old, but it still prides itself on behaving like a startup. The flat all-for-one structure means there's no specialization of labor, so over-qualified CS wizards work as Forward Deployed Engineers, building servers and doing post-sales support. Imagine how much fragile spaghetti code 100s of really smart hackers can produce in 10 years - it's a lot. But Palantir is not an algorithms and data mining play, it also prides itself on having a human-in-the-loop, so there's no real underlying IPR value or barriers-to-entry either. That prejudice also inclines them against a real-time (CEP) front-end: you can't squeeze the human into streaming algorithms. Where's the enterprise platform? The elegant API and the end-to-end SDK? The vision for a strategic data processing and BI pipeline? Palantir's principal asset is its collection of amazing employees. The biggest benefit to workers is not $$, but toiling alongside other great people. These are strong, creative and independent minds, any IPO or acquisition will disperse many of them to the four winds, to create a future networked diaspora of Palantir Mafia, building the next generation of great Valley companies. The one area that Palantir does not behave like a startup is frugality. Where has all the money gone? We know it's expensive to build fabs in Asia, but Palantir doesn't have any. We know that companies sometimes acquire their way to a customer base, but Palantir hasn't. Series G for a software company! Palantir is not a spartan ramen noodle kinda place. There is free food, but most of the over-catered lobster dinners are donated to homeless people. Seven rounds of VC money buying lobster dinners for tramps. Only in Palo Alto.
- jcdavis 13y ago
  that was my guess as well.
bane 13y ago
For various reasons, I'd rather not say, but it's a Valley Startup. The information is out there publicly on a few forums and glassdoor, a few folks I know who work there confirm it. There's an internal exchange there where they can internally trade their options, but with no exit plan and becoming too big to acquire, I'm not sure why I'd want to buy more options. Most of the staff there is very young and it's literally their first job out of college so they frankly don't know any better. But any digging into how they expect to get dollars for those options are usually met with really deep concerns.

For those of us who are curious, who is referenced in #4? I have a good suspicion, but am not 100% sure.

by jcdavis 13y ago

For those of us who are curious, who is referenced in #4? I have a good suspicion, but am not 100% sure.

fiatmoney 13y ago

Palantir at one point had a pay cap on base salary (I think they still do). Theoretically it's made up by equity.

mikhailfranco 13y ago
Yes, Palantir will be 10 years old next year, has already taken Series G funding: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies and the salary cap is $127k: http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/killer-app/ http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/killer-app/
- bane 13y ago
  Good example, so let's say I started there 5 years ago and received a $100k salary, hit the pay cap last year and took a thousand shares in options. And then tomorrow somebody bought them for whatever their current valuation is, what would that be worth? After 7 rounds of funding, I gotta say, probably not much (especially after I divide it by my number of years). But that should be an easy thing to compute for any employee there and for them to decide if that's worth it. Perks: Free food and laundry service is cool, but I'd rather make more money that covers the food and laundry with some leftover.
  - candybar 13y ago
    Palantir is worth multiple billions of dollars (based on secondary market trading).
    - bane 13y ago
      Right, but if they never exit, or keep taking funding rounds, the equity the employees have becomes either worth nothing, or worth not a hell of a lot. Again, divide the money they might see by the number of years and add it the base to see if it was worth it. There's a couple others I know that went public, but still have pay caps, but implemented a preferred stock option system for bonuses and such that works out very well for many of the employees.
      - mikhailfranco 13y ago
        It's difficult to get a handle on the real business value of Palantir: homeland security bubble has burst (sequester and US govt debt); big fight against DCGS for Army procurement; high cost of doing business overseas; financial product line is a drag; low cost competitors building product from OSS/COTS components (e.g. Hive/Hadoop, graph DBs, HTML5 front end) .... The strangest thing is that Palantir is almost 10 years old, but it still prides itself on behaving like a startup. The flat all-for-one structure means there's no specialization of labor, so over-qualified CS wizards work as Forward Deployed Engineers, building servers and doing post-sales support. Imagine how much fragile spaghetti code 100s of really smart hackers can produce in 10 years - it's a lot. But Palantir is not an algorithms and data mining play, it also prides itself on having a human-in-the-loop, so there's no real underlying IPR value or barriers-to-entry either. That prejudice also inclines them against a real-time (CEP) front-end: you can't squeeze the human into streaming algorithms. Where's the enterprise platform? The elegant API and the end-to-end SDK? The vision for a strategic data processing and BI pipeline? Palantir's principal asset is its collection of amazing employees. The biggest benefit to workers is not $$, but toiling alongside other great people. These are strong, creative and independent minds, any IPO or acquisition will disperse many of them to the four winds, to create a future networked diaspora of Palantir Mafia, building the next generation of great Valley companies. The one area that Palantir does not behave like a startup is frugality. Where has all the money gone? We know it's expensive to build fabs in Asia, but Palantir doesn't have any. We know that companies sometimes acquire their way to a customer base, but Palantir hasn't. Series G for a software company! Palantir is not a spartan ramen noodle kinda place. There is free food, but most of the over-catered lobster dinners are donated to homeless people. Seven rounds of VC money buying lobster dinners for tramps. Only in Palo Alto.
jcdavis 13y ago
that was my guess as well.

bane 13y ago

For various reasons, I'd rather not say, but it's a Valley Startup. The information is out there publicly on a few forums and glassdoor, a few folks I know who work there confirm it. There's an internal exchange there where they can internally trade their options, but with no exit plan and becoming too big to acquire, I'm not sure why I'd want to buy more options. Most of the staff there is very young and it's literally their first job out of college so they frankly don't know any better. But any digging into how they expect to get dollars for those options are usually met with really deep concerns.