Copy paste of Joe_Doe's comment. Which seems dead but sais "[noobtor]" instead of [dead]. Never seen that before?! However should he have registered via tor to leak a bit of insider info I don't want to let this die because of tor flagging.
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Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The 'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product company.
Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil company, that should stay unamed). However, with oil trading at 50s, they are scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract cancellation.
> Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors.
That was my reading as well - Techcrunch essentially reprinted marketing materials as incontrovertible fact for this story (continuing a long tradition of similar journalistic excellence). One particularly troublesome sentence:
"...[Palantir] is capable of building comprehensive models of activity to detect suspicious anomalies and is even able to provide immunity to fraud thanks to strategies the founders learned while still at PayPal."
Well there's an objective, accurate statement. Even Paypal itself is far from "immune to fraud". Palantir appears to be doing some interesting things, but this article is ridiculous.
Comments by new accounts posting from Tor IPs get autokilled because of past abuses by trolls. We restore the legit ones when we see them (or users tell us about them), and mark the accounts legit so future comments won't be killed. That's what I've done here.
It is more of an "under moderation" thing than a "dead" thing. It's on our list to make that explicit and to provide a mechanism for the community to make most of the moderation decisions.
So, in case I need to be truly anonymous on HN, I need to register by a non-tor exit node IP (say an I2P address?) post a couple of comments (but how many?) and then I can use tor freely?
So that's what....$1.3b in funding over a lot of rounds?
I'm not sure I can think of many software companies with that kind of startup investment.
WP says they have about 1,200 employees, or a burn rate of about $300m/yr. Those figures are old, so this new round must be for another year of operations.
I believe I had heard in a previous discussion that they were planning on going public in 2015, so this is a bit of a surprise.
Last I heard they were still also a Java client application for the analytics. They appear to have had an HTML5 client in development several years ago, but that doesn't appear to be the current product (even videos as new as a month old still use the old client which they had up as a free demo for years on their site). [1][2]
So is this just for continued expansion or is Palantir some kind of hi-tech charity case people prop with more money than sense continue to prop up? My guess is the former, but there's some arguments it's really the second.
It's interesting to see that the HTML5 client never went anywhere evidently -- I interviewed there for an internship in 2013 and remember that they were showing it off a lot.
Honestly, it sounds like traditional enterprise software and should be valued similarly. Software like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Electronic Health Record (EHR) always require very expensive integration/training/support. The contracts take forever to negotiate but are very lucrative with a huge lock in and expensive support contracts.
I've heard this as well. They essentially hire customer-facing engineers to go out and scope specific contracts and literally implement custom solutions with small generic software frameworks they developed in house.
I would debate that...if your 'product' takes a team of stanford engineers to actually deploy at an enterprise, then it's probably closer to a dev framework.
No, it's a bog-standard on-premise "Enterprise" product, like Oracle, SAP, etc. This is how that business model works. The customer pays _both_ for the software _and_ for the on-site engineers, usually through the nose.
Well, they need a way to get up-to-date data into the system from whatever it's coming from. That alone requires someone to write code. They probably also do some customizing of what data is displayed; maybe via a GUI or maybe via code. But that's just the last mile (on each end) that needs customization.
I don't see how you can simplify that into calling it a "dev framework".
> if your 'product' takes a team of stanford engineers to actually deploy at an enterprise, then it's probably closer to a dev framework
Fair enough. But you may be underestimating the value of production-quality fast-development dev frameworks in enterprise.
Remember, these are guys who are used to seeing 5-year project timelines for anything that touches more than one system. (And every business case touches more than one system...)
One other thing to note is that while they build these custom solutions, the second you touch their stuff that support policy goes out the window, not unlike what Oracle does.
Hm, I don't see nothing deceptive about this. It goes without saying that some software must be custom given the (rather obscure) market Palantir is in.
EDIT: n/m @dang answered this indirectly a couple of comments below.
They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product.
To be fair, this description makes it sound like an ETL tool, just like Ab Initio, Datastage or Teradata, where the companies involved all make serious amounts of money from consulting (and the server licenses don't come cheap either!).
These tools can be pretty powerful if set up and programmed correctly; it's definitely not as simple as pointing them at a bunch of data sources and expecting magic to happen.
If Palantir haven't found a magic way to integrate data sources without any configuration, it does sound rather deceptive.
That said, if they manage to get systems up and running without 30-stories-high stacks of never-to-be-read paper, that'd be a revolution in itself.
Ever worked with ERP or other enterprise data products? Nothing is plug and play. These guys have to analyze data sets to first understand how to connect the dots, and then they have to integrate with whatever front-end their "product" is.
On the plus side, it is extremely difficult for another provider to provide a business case for replacing Palantir once they're (Palantir) in place due to the upfront analysis, implementation, and data migrations required.
Yeah I have. You know who actually does that low margin work? Deployment companies, consultants and implementors, outsourcing firms. There's a reason why "SAP Certified Specialists" exist. There's a reason that there are programs and credentials that teach people to deploy this stuff. Because SAP and Oracle are actual software companies unlike Palantir.
Palantir hires young smart (but not street smart) Ivy league engineers that have no clue how actual enterprise software works ... much like the founders and management team of Palantir.
> You know who actually does that low margin work? Deployment companies, consultants and implementors, outsourcing firms.
Not always. A lot of software companies that provide enterprise-level software but aren't the SAPs and Oracles of the world often supply in-house implementors, who work for weeks or months with customers to integrate those products into existing system (at a cost).
Wouldn't be surprised if this is an idealisticly minded young employer. I have seen them agressively interviewing on campuses, conferences. Perhaps in light of Snowden's releases and other leaks, maybe some of them were a bit dissapointed in what they saw there and decided to do something about it...
In-Q-Tel as an investor doesn't mean much, IMO. It does mean the product is of interest / value to the government, but that doesn't imply any sinister motive (or a ton of control). I work for a company that was invested in by In-Q-Tel, and the only influence I've seen from that was really to benefit the users in the community and develop a project for RBAC in Big Data - which is something I really hope the NSA has in place internally.
edit: and I'm a Libertarian, so I'm biased against reaching this conclusion based on my own observations.
I have some firsthand experience with this overseas. Palantir creates intelligence products for the US military and other government organizations such as the "State Department"...
Well, they do actually have a product but it's my understanding that almost every purchase requires a set of engineers to integrate it. So I dunno if you could call it a consulting company but there is truth to this.
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Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The 'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product company.
Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil company, that should stay unamed). However, with oil trading at 50s, they are scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract cancellation.
To be continued...