Palantir CEO Says Data-Mining Company Is Positioned to Go Public

He's not your usual corporate leader, but there's an unmistakable intellect in the way he articulates himself which must work for both leading this particular workforce as well as selling to this particular customer base.

jorblumesea• 10 years ago

Can someone shed some light on the asian claim? Seems like a really weird thing:

a) to bring up at all b) to bring up in an article about ipo

what does it have to do with the company going public?

throaway0xff2• 10 years ago

I will shed light on the fact that at one point over 70% of my team were extremely bright and talented Asians and South Indians.

iambateman• 10 years ago

$10 says 'throaway0xff' is, in fact, Alex Karp himself.

jdavis7033• 10 years ago

If a company trying to go public is being sued by one of its largest customers (i.e. the US federal government), that's pretty material. The USDOJ is (IIRC) trying to ban contracts while the matter is under investigation.

rhizome2• 10 years ago

Palantir’s workers “need to know they will have liquidity at a fair price,” said Mr. Karp

Unless there's a subtlety I missed, isn't this more likely to be driven by their VCs?

dsl• 10 years ago

It sounds like the IPO is employee retention driven.

rhizome2• 10 years ago

They're famous for underpaying and overworking, which I supposed could affect hiring, but yeah, maybe the subtlety is that employees were carrot-and-stick'ed with promises of IPO and now word has got around about work conditions there. Still, it's usually because VCs want their payday.

entee• 10 years ago

I'm curious about how Palantir works as a public company. It has always looked like a data-centric McKinsey clone to me, and those kinds of consulting companies are usually partnerships.

Granted, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks that were once partnerships are now public. But that move hasn't necessarily been a good thing for the companies in question, and some argue it has been damaging.

Basically, Palantir looks to me like a law firm/consultancy, those firms typically find it advantageous to stay private, what is the advantage for Palantir to go public except to provide a cash out to investors?

AznHisoka• 10 years ago

isnt that the number one advantage companies go public? to cash out?

if companies could cash out and remain private, 100% of companies would choose that option.

jdavis7033• 10 years ago

Well no one would buy in at IPO time if they thought it was some kind of pump and dump scheme (of course this does happen, but is hopefully rare). An IPO is generally designed to raise cash that will be invested back into the business, and as a side effect give the investors a return.

dsjoerg• 10 years ago

in fact companies can cash out and remain private. private placement or selling the company are two big alternatives, and there are others.

Not 100% of companies have been choosing those options, however the # of US IPOs is lower now than it has been: https://www.quandl.com/data/RITTER/US_IPO_STATS-Historical-U...

totalZero2• 10 years ago

They have made buckets of dough at the height of American surveillance activity and now they want to cash out while the getting is good.

cossatot• 10 years ago

What indication do you have that the surveillance state will shrink in the near future?

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure I see the "good getting" changing any time soon. If anything I believe surveillance capitalism is here to stay and unfortunately increase.

pbreit• 10 years ago

More like Accenture which is a $75 billion public company.

mattmarcus• 10 years ago

I believe that Palantir thinks they can scale their business in a way traditional consulting firms cannot. Since they have pretty powerful data and software tools, they can actually reduce the cost per client as their client base grows. Going public could give them more access to capital to keep growing, which they should do if their economic model scales.

a-no-n• 10 years ago

"Government (political), law-enforcement and security agency software company whom happens to use data-mining"

Perhaps this is shaking the trees of institutional/sovereign wealth funds/investors is in order to make them seem like they'll miss out.

IPO, these days, is a move of desperation and often a murdering of remaining agility.

mwfunk• 10 years ago

I'm curious if going public would lead to more transparency about what they do and for whom. Enron was famously opaque to its own investors until it was too late, but I would hope that public companies have greater requirements for transparency nowadays.

williamscales• 10 years ago

I don't think that Palantir being a public company would necessarily give the kind of insight into what they do to satisfy our curiosity. As far as I understand, Palantir could be very financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are and what they are doing for them.

I think it's worth remembering that Enron was public.

SapphireSun• 10 years ago

I agree with you on the whole, but Enron was pre Sarbanes-Oxley which initiated a raft of reporting requirements on companies, so Enron is often a poor comparison to the present day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate on:

"financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are"

How would this work in practical terms?

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

If you mean anything more specific than "we do stuff for the government we can't tell you about", probably not. Look at Boeing, Northop-Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc.

Hell, for that matter, look at AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 -- the companies that we didn't really expect to be doing the kinds of things they were doing.

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

That was my response as well. Going public means filing 10K statements which will lay all their business dealings out. Something I wouldn't think they or their clients would be interested in.

JumpCrisscross• 10 years ago

Boeing and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are public companies. Being public doesn't mean publishising customer lists.

jonathankoren• 10 years ago

Everyone knows who is the Military Industrial Complex's customers are, and what contracts are up. The questions are more about capabilities.

jpeg_hero• 10 years ago

saying he is focused on customers who can promise accounts worth at least $100 million.

What!?! Is there a market for that? Who pays that much? Republic of Turkey Secret Police?

throaway0xff2• 10 years ago

Yes - there is a market. Legitimate companies that make things you use and ride in every day.

snissn• 10 years ago

Is Palantir a "Data-Mining Company" or is a military, law enforcement and surveillance company?

r00fus• 10 years ago

Yes

krona• 10 years ago

You could define Palantir more easily by which customers buy its products (Nat sec/law enforcement/military intelligence), and who specifically in those organisations use their software (mostly intelligence analysts.)

By saying they are a "Data-Mining Company" is an obvious (to me) sign that they want to be able to position themselves in the public sector (e.g. banking, retail) with counter-fraud services/solutions, and perhaps more generic cyber security solutions for large organisations.

jsprogrammer• 10 years ago

Palantir has been deployed into banks for years.

rasz_pl• 10 years ago

Think highway patrol stealing money company, or DEA tracking every cellphone company.

6stringmerc• 10 years ago

Anybody with first-hand knowledge able to explain to me the difference between Acxiom[1] and Palantir in the grand scheme of things?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quie...

throwaway746878• 10 years ago

Palantir doesn't own any data whatsoever. It is in no way a data mining company, which makes it strange that it's constantly referred to as such. It makes software to allow organizations to do analysis on their own data, which Palantir has varying degrees of access to.

Another crucial difference is that marketing is a tertiary use case for Palantir, at best.

Palantir CEO Says Data-Mining Company Is Positioned to Go Public

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