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Now this is one company I don't understand. From everything I read, it sounds like a technology consulting company (which is going to have huge scaling issues).
by littletimmy 11y ago
Now this is one company I don't understand. From everything I read, it sounds like a technology consulting company (which is going to have huge scaling issues). Yet it raises money like a software startup. What's going on?
- bcg1 11y agohttps://www.iqt.org/ https://www.iqt.org/
- bjt 11y agoYeah, I don't get it either. > CEO Alex Karp announced in 2013 that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make “running a company like ours very difficult.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies 11 years old, 1500 employees, never planning to go public. At some point you have to stop calling it a "startup".
- mason55 11y agoI'm curious what they are telling investors about possible liquidity events. It's not like there are many companies out there that can do a $20B acquisition and if they're not planning to go public I wonder how the investors are planning to get enough money out to cover their risk and beat their expectation from other investments.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoDividends, kickbacks, etc.
- seizethecheese 11y agoThat's not how venture capital works. They need liquidity events to make their 10 year fund model work.
- hugs 11y agoNot all VC. :-) Indie.vc has a cash distributions (aka dividends) option in their investment terms.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoSales provides liquidity; dividends just bundle it into packages.
- bcg1 11y agoWhen the government is your VC it doesn't matter if your company is a roach motel for cash.
- tlogan 11y agoOracle, Microsoft, or IBM. Any other?
- jonknee 11y agoA large military contractor would be way more likely (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumann, etc).
- dworin 11y agoI could see any of the large professional services firms or government/defense contractors being interested.
- jonknee 11y agoIt's effectively a government intelligence contractor. You can charge a lot to help the government bend its way around privacy laws.
- stephenhuey 11y agoTheir revenues are growing incredibly fast. Yes, they started out in the intelligence sector, but since then they have typically been taking only one client in each new industry they throw their solutions at, e.g. finance, oil & gas, utilities. They look for some of the hardest problems in each industry and solve those and then move on to another industry trying to push their valuation as high as possible. Palantir actually rejects would-be customers who reach out to them if the potential customer is in an industry they have already tackled because they don't have the manpower to take on new challenges and also repeat solving of problems they have already solved. Most stories out there just cover their early work whereas they have been scaling by leaps and bounds. Some estimates put this amount of funding at 3% of their valuation.
- mmagin 11y agoThat makes no sense. Surely there are some efficiencies in "repeat solving" problems that they have "already solved". A cynical thought would be that perhaps they don't want to have to sell to a company in an industry where they already have a reputation. That may by no means be true, perhaps instead they just don't have the attention span to really product-ize a solution instead of making one-offs. Or something else, either way, it smells of their typical cultish marketing.
- boyaka 11y agoLoyal to the winners, helping the winners dominate.
- joeblau 11y agoThey are primarily consulting for the Government, which has caps on how much profit you can make (at least my company was capped). They are probably trying to diversify their tech into market verticals that have less restrictions.
- Zigurd 11y agoSome people believe PayPal's fraud detection was really really good.
- inmyunix 11y agoit was a necessity, otherwise Paypal wouldn't have survived.