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Reflections on Palantir

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Re: Reflections on Palantir

#171

Post by alexpetralia »

swordsmith wrote: post #149
newprint wrote: post #2

Can 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…

I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy. Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.

"End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold claim from a single service provider.

Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ

Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#172

Post by huqedato »

I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I'll give it a pass.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#173

Post by ak_111 »

Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance.

from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f...

""" Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza.

It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel".

Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”.

These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#174

Post by jeltz »

sroerick wrote: post #143
Manuel_D wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my experience this is the actual hard work of producing something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS resellers will never be able to deliver on.

Yes, it is very hard. But does Palantir succeed? Or do they like some other companies just trick customers with big wallets to buy?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#175

Post by sien »

aduffy wrote: post #156
thimkerbell wrote: post #109

I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying too. Recommended.

This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine, and I mean this in the best way possible.

But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#176

Post by xrd »

As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them.

But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#177

Post by mandevil »

hermitcrab wrote: post #169
swordsmith wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy. Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.

RAG?

Retrieval Augmented Generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation

Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your specific use case.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#178

Post by sakopov »

melling wrote: post #130
newprint wrote: post #2

Can 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…

The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled. It’s quite expensive now. I would encourage you to do your own research. For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100. I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.

If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#179

Post by swells34 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #9
hammock wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.

Re: Reflections on Palantir

#180

Post by airstrike »

cgh wrote: post #167
airstrike wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12 months). Don't just take the average provided by something like Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write down all their…

Fantastic response, thank you for taking the time.

My pleasure! Wall Street likes to gatekeep this info (it's very simple math but banks charge millions for it) and there's a disheartening shortage of publicly available repositories with this knowledge (most of it can be automated, except for one-off adjustments you need to make for each company here and there for accounting reasons or out of the ordinary occurrences)

The bit I forgot to add is that you kinda have to do the reverse too, if you're valuing the company based on comparables: take their mean multiple, then apply that PLTR's forward revenue to get to some enterprise value, then subtract net debt (i.e. minus debt _plus_ cash now!) and get to equity value. Then divide by the diluted shares (you have to imply the Treasury Stock Method dilution in some somewhat circular Excel math) to get to a final dollar value per share

You can take this one step further and draw line charts over time with these multiples vs. comparables to see how the sentiment has changed for this stock (or for comparables) over time. And many other similar analyses...

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