How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
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How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
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Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#2> While still a fraction of what the Pentagon's biggest contractors spend, Palantir's lobbying expenditures grew from $300,000 in 2010 to over $1 million by 2015.
Expected this number to be a lot higher as this seems to be the articles thesis: palantir aggressively outspent and outmaneuvered the traditional war contractors.
Also, given that palantir has secured $500m in gov contracts (1.2b*40%) the ROI on the ~$10m they've spent on lobbying is massive. I find it hard to believe that it accounts for a substantial portion of palantir's success.
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#3[deleted]
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#4> While still a fraction of what the Pentagon's biggest contractors spend, Palantir's lobbying expenditures grew from $300,000 in 2010 to over $1 million by 2015. Expected this number to be a lot higher as this seems to be the articles thesis: palantir aggressively outspent and outmaneuvered the traditional war contractors. Also, given that palantir has secured $500m in gov contracts (1.2b*40%) the ROI on the ~$10m t…
Maybe their intelligence is so good that they knew exactly which wheel to grease and that it didn't need a lot of grease.
More seriously, it's interesting to consider them turning their expertise against their customers.
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#5Thus the reason I hang up on startup recruiters the moment they say "A peter thiel funded start-up". I'm not sure what is a sadder waste of this amazing braintrust we have in the United States today, all of the advertising start-ups, or sociopathic dreck like Palantir.
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#6I've always found Palantir's sales&marketing strategy to be unique and fascinating among Silicon Valley startups.
Palantir is a high-touch, B2B enterprise software startup, and as such, they are no different than other startups when it comes to sales&marketing. They need to find leads (= potential customers), close them as customers and retain them.
Yet, Palantir's leadership and employees have repeatedly emphasized that they don't do sales or marketing. The OP confirms that they meant that they do sales and marketing differently than other companies.
Retaining lobbyists and policy advisers is one example. Typically, enterprise software companies retain industry analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, etc. and "influence" their opinions via briefing/consulting. These industry analyst firms also work with technology buyers and make recommendations to them based on their knowledge of software/service providers and the needs of the buyer.
To be sure, no analyst firm is 100% pay to play because if they favor select vendors too much, they lose credibility, access to information and hence influence. That said, it's naive to think that they are 100% free from monied vendor incentives.
It did not occur to me until reading this post that the same model applies to lobbying, and that's where Palantir invested their influencer marketing budget.
Palantir often emphasizes their technological innovation and unique culture (again, a great marketing strategy to attract great technical talent and put them in sales engineering roles). However, I've come to believe that Palantir's greatest innovation is in their business strategy.
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#7This article makes Palantir sound really weak to me.
Palantir makes money selling their product. They are not a real competitor or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. The big primes are massive and organized to win lots of different big contracts over a long time period.
If they wanted to compete with the big primes they would be at a massive disadvantage paying expensive SV engineers who are hard to clear versus cheap DC engineers who are easy to clear.
If they have had 1b in revenue I'm not sure what that means. They have raised about 1b, but paid like 5000 employees. Financially not bad but they are big, I kind of expect a lot more federal money than that to keep them in a good place.
I'm not sure what the future of Palantir looks like.
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#8Is a million a lot to spend on lobbying?
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#9I recently read how Palantir is currently suing the government because they got pissed the Army is considering dumping them and is trying to bid out the work to others. They're coming across as a bit desperate in this whole thing and to be fair they probably are since if Uncle Sam pulls out they're probably toast.
There was a lot of press a few months back about how they've been dumped by a lot of their private sector customers for costing too much and delivering too little. If the government catches on and and does the same thing that sort of destroys their business model.
Re: How Silicon Valley's Palantir Wired Washington
#10This article makes Palantir sound really weak to me. Palantir makes money selling their product. They are not a real competitor or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. The big primes are massive and organized to win lots of different big contracts over a long time period. If they wanted to compete with the big primes they would be at a massive disadvantage paying expensive SV engineers who are hard to clear versus cheap DC…
They have had a DC office for almost 10 years, and they hire plenty of engineers for it. Still lots of disadvantages, but hiring isn't one of them.