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.
CNBCAri Levy
Context & Ripple Effects
Five weeks after Palantir's S-1 filing disclosed a $580M net loss on $742.6M of 2019 revenue, the company reached public markets through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO — opening at $10 and closing at $9.50, a roughly $20.9B market cap. The accompanying reporting frames the debut skeptically: sources agreed Palantir has a good user interface but noted it took heavy manpower to make the software work, with the military prizing the engineers who deployed alongside troops in Afghanistan.
First-order effects
A direct listing means no new capital raised and no underwriter-set price — existing holders, including the investors behind the $2B+ Palantir had already raised, get immediate liquidity at a market-determined ~$20.9B valuation.
Public investors now own a stake in a company losing $580M a year, forcing the first open-market test of whether Palantir's secretive surveillance software justifies its private-market price.
Second-order effects
The manpower-intensive deployment model highlighted in the reporting becomes the central margin question for public shareholders, since engineer-heavy customer support sits uneasily beside the $580M loss disclosed in the S-1.
The NYSE gains a marquee direct-listing precedent for other secretive, late-stage unicorns wary of the disclosure theater of a traditional roadshow.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, direct listings become the default exit for government-adjacent data firms whose classified work makes conventional marketing impractical — with public markets, not bankers, pricing opacity.
The trend: Secretive enterprise-software unicorns are bypassing traditional IPOs with direct listings, shifting price discovery from bankers to public markets even when their core technology remains hard to independently verify.
“#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/.…
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/...
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/...
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/...
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/...
“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…
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/...
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.
“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/...
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.
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.
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.
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/...