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I just... how did that culture coexist with the buttoned-down ex-defense and law enforcement types?
Reflections on Palantir
71–80 of 658 posts
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded. Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
> they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded. Are you saying Palantir's previous 10-Ks and 10-Qs have material misstatements of fact?
No, it's just the trading multiples derived from them that are totally wrong for the purposes of valuing the company today, because the Ks and Qs pertain to the past, which we cannot visit.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#73For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual la…
But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling. Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir'…
> Now is the perfect time The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up. Palantir... Not so much
The stock is up 152% YTD. I think they went up?
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#75Re: Reflections on Palantir
#76For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual la…
> needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.
Do they dig latrines too?
“Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would…
>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to…
> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems?
Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#78For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it. Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both). The amount of manual la…
But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
> they have 80% margin, according to the article
I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)
Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.
More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza.
> The deliberate killing or displacement of a significant part of a population, typically on ethnic or religious grounds. As some examples, Nazi Germany's slaughter of Jewish, Romani, Armenian, gay and other minority people. Serbian slaughter of Muslim people in Kosovo, most notably at Srebenica. All of these conflicts saw large (upwards of 30% of the population) killed. > Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in…
> Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population.
In one year, and only counting direct deaths. By your logic, Hitler wasn't a monster in the first year or two since the beginning of the Holocaust, since not that many people had died yet, right? We should have kept selling arms to Germany, since it wasn't yet a genocide, only 2% of the population had been killed.
The government of Israel is telling everyone exactly what they are planning to do - rid Gaza of Hamas and anyone supporting them, including people "supporting Hamas" by, say, using and paying for hospitals sponsored by Hamas (as in, the government of Gaza). They are telling everyone that they believe Palestinians are collectively responsible for October 7th, not just those who did the killing, not just those who provided logistics, but all those who stood by and did nothing to stop it. They are leveling virtually every piece of infrastructure in Gaza: every single hospital in Gaza has been bombed and destroyed, every university, every high-school, most schools and kindergartens, vast swaths of apartment blocks. American doctors have spoken about how many toddlers they have seen shot in the head or chest by IDF soldiers.
Sure, it's taking a while to kill 1.5 million people. But all indications, of all kinds, from actions, to words, to assassinating peace negotiatiors, UN forces, Red Cross forces, journalists, aid workers of all kinds: Israel is making its intentions for Gaza extremely clear, and the genocide is mounting every single day.
You truly have to not want to see it to say all of these things.
And your other examples are misguided. Civil wars completely blur the line between combatants and non-combatants, so it gets much harder to distinguish bloody battles from one-sided slaughter that can amount to genocide. Even so, Syria's president has definitely been accused of war crimes, even though his actions were never so systematic to amount to genocide. In the Iran-Iraq conflict, we were on the side carrying out the aggression, and access to information about how the war was going was not that easy; even so, nothing like the systematic wide scale wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure happened, though there were clear war crimes committed during that conflict, and many who cried out against them. Germany was the aggressor in WWII; but the (mutual) carpet bombing that leveled large parts of cities and killed civilians intentionally and indiscriminately could be called genocide by today's standards, and many look back with a critical eye at Allied actions towards the end of the war (even more so in Japan, with the fire bombing of Tokyo often being called an atrocity).
And except for WWII, none of these resulted in this many casualties in so short a time frame, not even close. Especially when you consider how one-sided the slaughter in Gaza is, with Israel having almost no losses whatsoever since their invasion started, at least not from Gaza.
Re: Reflections on Palantir
#80[flagged]