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

[entee]

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?

[totalZero]

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.

[mattmarcus]

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.

[AznHisoka]

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.

[pbreit]

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

[mwfunk]

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]

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.

[jlgaddis]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

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

[bogomipz]

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.

[hendzen]

Main takeaway from that article - Alex Karp is a really odd guy.

[hkmurakami]

You should watch his interview with Charlie Rose.

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.

[6stringmerc]

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]

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.

[a-no-n]

"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.

[snissn]

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

[krona]

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.

[r00fus]

Yes

[rasz_pl]

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

[jorblumesea]

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?

[jdavis703]

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.

[throaway0xff]

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.

[rhizome]

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]

It sounds like the IPO is employee retention driven.

[jpeg_hero]

> 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?

[throaway0xff]

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

[malchow]

Yeah. And why is there always a man asking for a ticket at movie theaters?

[laxatives]

There's a button under the parent link that lets you skip the paywall labelled `web`.

[user5994461]

And here comes the paywall.

Can't read it from direct link, can't read it from web link, can't read it from private browsing.

:-(

[guessmyname]

Here you go: http://pastebin.com/raw/F6JN2A4k

[gregoryrueda]

Copy the title of the article then put it in a google search and click on the first result. You should be able to bypass the paywall.

[sctb]

Please don't comment like this on Hacker News.