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Inside Palantir

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Re: Inside Palantir

#251

SAP-like scam. Highly refined, Oxford-educated sales and execs, selling with high-status deceptive techniques grossly overpriced, lovest quality outdated by a decade crap, for support and maintenance of which they are billing their victims for each hour spend by expensive suit wearing nonsense talking consultants. BTW, the guys who went there for sweatshop positions are those who barely managed to graduate. But in sa…

> BTW, the guys who went there for sweatshop positions are those who barely managed to graduate Bullshit. I work at the London office, most of the FDEs have firsts from cambridge/oxford/imperial/some other top european university.

Oh, come on. I have seen enough of consultants and witnessed a SAP takeover of a small retailer.

This looks like as if a whole bunch of hotshots in $3k suits take you to a head office in, say, Germany, with a five star hotel, top tier restaurants and business class flights, while telling you that you are too successful and too rich to drive your own car, that only struggling, unsuccessful losers do it, etc.

Eventually, one finds oneself with a few guys in expesive suits who are sitting in the car right on your lap, totally obstructing the view, but telling you when to accelerate, stop or turn, claiming that this is a much safer and the most effective way to drive a car, so they bill you for each kilometer and each turn taken.

They, moreover, have replaced your car with their own ancient vehicle, to which there is not a single mechanic in a 1000 miles and the only spare parts available from their own garage, with the replacing procedure which requires to remove everything from the salon and from under the hood and then to reassemble it all back, which takes a few days and for which you are billed for each hour of each of twenty certified technicians, half of them flown from the head office at your expense.

And, please, don't tell me that consulting companies are different.

Btw, really smart top grads would never even come close to these scam shops, like sane people would avoid Ponzi schemes or a telemarketing crap with a hidden charges. Being fooled by meaningless titles and certificates instead of working with a cutting edge technologies and obtaining skills which could be sold later.. I can't imagine top grads being so clueless.

Re: Inside Palantir

#252
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. Do we actually have any data on Palantir's hiring practices? Because my personal anecdata is that I have a friend working there and he's from a tier 2 school (University of Toronto, maybe even tier 3?).

Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools." I'm old enough now to know where you went to school doesn't correlate to who you are as a person and your level of intelligence (however you may wish to define the different types of intelligence). That and I've met way too many people from "Top Schools"…

> Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools."

From what I understand, Thiel is not super-involved in the day-to-day running of Palantir.

Re: Inside Palantir

#253
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would have been a very big assumption http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-sa...

I think Palantir has been overtly committed to avoiding an IPO for a while. Yes, the "liquidity event" mentioned in the article is extremely vague. I'll reach out to my colleagues that are still at Palantir to find out what that actually meant.

It's the ability to do board-sanctioned sales of stock to buyers. It's basically an equity follow-on sale to previous investors (or new investors if there's a round concurrently underway).

This is significant because private companies typically have clauses in their option agreements that you can only sell shares pre-IPO if the board approves. So, a company like Palantir structures things so that, before an IPO, you can only make money off your options if you're still working at the company. Oh yeah, and if you leave and want to exercise your options so they don't expire (so that you can have a nest egg that vests when they IPO), be prepared to pay AMT on the difference between the strike price and the current value.

They call it "golden handcuffs" for a reason.

Re: Inside Palantir

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's nuts. My gmail account is the gateway to password resetting a bunch of different accounts, not to mention all the private correspondences. It would have to be quite the value proposition to make me give up the keys. And these idiots give it away for nothing at all?

Yes. We had numerous SSN and bank account details, basically anything you might find in a personal or professional email inbox. Obviously we weren't making use of any of this, but if we had one malicious engineer, things could have gone very poorly. One automated tool inadvertently posted an individual's SSN on the paid version of our site was very angry. The level of access was something we were always discouraged f…

Can you actually give that kind of gmail access to third party apps? Luckily I don't but it's unnerving to think that doing so can have those ramifications.

Re: Inside Palantir

#255

My understanding is that Palantir is running an engineering mill/sweatshop using fresh out of school CS grads (particularly from Stanford). That much of their time is spent simply writing client-specific code that imports and cleans up data from disparate enterprise systems. That its not challenging, innovating, or exciting. Of course this is all anecdotal based on what I've heard from friends and a Palantir engineer…

Questions:

What language are they using for cleaning up the data for import?

Is there a market for a middleman (i.e., something as a service) that cleans up enterprise data, using customized solutions if necessary, for import into different databases?

If this type of company already exists who are some examples?

This is very unsexy work which I happen to enjoy. Its the phase that routinely comprises 80% or more of any so-called "Big Data" project.

Re: Inside Palantir

#256
post #148

I don't think this is all that surprising. If you look at their staffing numbers and their fundraises, they appear to not be sustaining business but just growing staff because that's what startups do. > Lisa Gordon, said that “the majority of the company’s customer relationships are multiple years in length, and many are as long as 10 years.” This is not good at all. Customer loyalty is important, but considering tha…

They hire like a consultancy. Your topline scales linearly with the staff you can ship out to client sites.

What's interesting is that despite that being the case, and they charge out their staff at huge rates (especially compared to what they pay them), they're still losing money.

Re: Inside Palantir

#258
post #193

I'm curious if any positions require pre employment drug tests, random urinalysis, or security clearances. What a miserable life for a 20 something in the private sector!

Clearly some jobs at the org require security clearances, but most don't, and access to career growth isn't gated on that at all. Look up the forbes article from 2013 about the CEO Alex Karp (can't link easily due to adblocker BS) entitled "How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir", and tell me again with a straight face that you'd be worried about this.

[deleted]

Re: Inside Palantir

#259
post #213

My understanding is that Palantir is running an engineering mill/sweatshop using fresh out of school CS grads (particularly from Stanford). That much of their time is spent simply writing client-specific code that imports and cleans up data from disparate enterprise systems. That its not challenging, innovating, or exciting. Of course this is all anecdotal based on what I've heard from friends and a Palantir engineer…

Yes, it's consulting. Palantir has done an amazing job branding itself as a product company even tho it's mostly not, and for a long time, up to ~1000 employees in 2012, branding itself as a startup. A surprising number of my friends and classmates (Stanford '12/'13) ended up working there. Stanford emails out a jobs summary for each graduating class. For 2013 graduates the #1 most common job title was Forward Deploy…

>Stanford emails out a jobs summary for each graduating class. For 2013 graduates the #1 most common job title was Forward Deployed Engineer lol

This actually gives some credence to the sweatshop narrative. A Stanford education is so much about getting placed in a titled job that a manifest goes out every year about where graduates were allocated?

100k/yr as a rented contractor to a multi-billion dollar hedge fund does have a sweatshop feel. In-house programmers or independent contractors would be making much, much more.

Re: Inside Palantir

#260
Palantir is probably worth less than the money invested. At $420 million in revenue, they would need to be worth more than 6x revenue to match the $2.5 billion invested. They certainly have "special sauce" over and above their value as a consulting firm (which are worth maybe 2x revenue).

But how big is the market for that "special sauce"?

The intelligence customers are low-capability, have massive datasets and really do need Palantir. But they've tapped out that market. So look at the consumer brands in their customer list: low capability, yes. But you could fit the data for any of them into the RAM on one server.

Yes Palantir has super smart guys who can find fascinating relationships in the data. But there are only so many relationhips to find. And once that's done, the IT staff of the customer can do the work easily themselves.

So I'm sorry but I think Palantir is a washout (worth less than the money invested). Nice offices though.

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