Reflections on Palantir
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Reflections on Palantir
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Re: Reflections on Palantir
#2Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ?
I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies).
I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#3Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…
They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models.
One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.
The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".
The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
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Re: Reflections on Palantir
#5Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.
A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed.
One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#6Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 10…
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agenc…
So it’s hygiene and structure
Re: Reflections on Palantir
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Re: Reflections on Palantir
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Re: Reflections on Palantir
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agenc…
So it’s hygiene and structure
That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation. A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agenc…
So it’s hygiene and structure
IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make connections between separate data sets. You're not just ingesting data about purchasing information and drug convictions and so on, you're getting automatic relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that those fields are the "SSN" field from a third dataset, and being able to automatically give you a view where those three datasets are correlated. This saves people having to go through every data set and manually map each field to each other equivalent field in each other related dataset.
I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was explained to me originally.