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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Palantir closed at $9.50 following its direct listing on the NYSE, after opening at $10, giving it a market cap of roughly $20.9B

Big Data's scariest, most secretive unicorn — got its start, and whether its proprietary surveillance technology is more smoke and mirrors than crystal ball. @weinbergersa reports https://nymag.com/... Sharon Weinberger / @weinbergersa : First, everyone agreed they have a good user interface. That's not a small thing. They also agreed it took a lot of manpower to make Palantir software work. That is, in fact, what some people praised: the military loved Palantir's engineers who worked with them in Afghanistan.

CNBC Ari Levy

Discussion

  • @stefsimanowitz Stefan Simanowitz on x
    “#Palantir, a company that helps govt agencies analyze vast amounts of digital data, saw its shares jump in its Wall Street debut in a sign of continued investor excitement for money-losing software companies” Trading at $10 Are the NY missing something? https://www.nytimes.com/.…
  • @dscheinm Dan Scheinman on x
    This is actually super interesting and perhaps shows the private market, with all its imperfections, is not out of whack. In my time, this has been the most traded private company I have seen. https://twitter.com/...
  • @eringriffith Erin Griffith on x
    So after 17 years Palantir employees finally got the chance to sell some (not all) shares in today's direct listing. Except... just kidding, Morgan Stanley's software crashed and they couldn't https://www.cnbc.com/...
  • @marceloplima Marcelo P. Lima on x
    I've heard that Palantir's tech stack is outdated (even though they talk about using AWS and Azure in their S-1). This article also claims that the software is clunky, needs to be heavily customized, and relies on a lot of manual labor behind the scenes: https://nymag.com/...
  • @awinston Ali Winston on x
    The answer is ‘yes.’ Unproven outcomes, analytic capabilities that are now widely available from competitors - Palantir's main advantage is the firm's political connections and ability to avoid competitive bidding procedures https://twitter.com/...
  • @zachfb Zachary Fryer-Biggs on x
    “Thiel and Karp have effectively positioned Palantir as a pro-military arm of Silicon Valley, a culture dominated by tech gurus who view their work as paving the way for a global utopia.” - One or two other companies doing this but Palantir is definitely an OG. Great piece. https…
  • @nymag @nymag on x
    An inside look at how Palantir — Big Data's scariest, most secretive unicorn — got its start, and whether its proprietary surveillance technology is more smoke and mirrors than crystal ball. @weinbergersa reports https://nymag.com/...
  • @weinbergersa Sharon Weinberger on x
    First, everyone agreed they have a good user interface. That's not a small thing. They also agreed it took a lot of manpower to make Palantir software work. That is, in fact, what some people praised: the military loved Palantir's engineers who worked with them in Afghanistan.
  • @rikefranke Ulrike Franke on x
    “Palantir, it turns out, has run headlong into the problem plaguing many tech firms engaged in the quest for total information awareness: Real-world data is often too messy and complex for computers to translate without lots of help from humans.” https://nymag.com/...
  • @weinbergersa Sharon Weinberger on x
    I started off just interviewing people. Anyone I could find who had worked for Palantir, with Palantir, or in some cases, against Palantir. People have really strong opinions on the company - for and against - so I looked for the things everyone agreed on.
  • @weinbergersa Sharon Weinberger on x
    The question financial analysts often asked about Palantir: Is it selling software, or is it some hybrid of software and consulting? The latter, according to financial experts, is probably going to be a low margin business. Not something worth 20 times revenue.
  • @weinbergersa Sharon Weinberger on x
    So what's the problem? Nothing, unless you want to be valued at more than $20B with less than $1B in revenue, Those “forward deployed engineers” are really expensive.
  • @weinbergersa Sharon Weinberger on x
    Palantir goes public today, so I want to talk about my deep-dive for @NYMag on the company. In 20 years writing on military tech, I've found the most useful question to ask first is not if something is scary, but if it works as advertised. https://nymag.com/...