It’s not. They don’t have any data of their own. They offer a data integration platform and then a slate of apps on top of that platform for institutions to perform analysis on their own data. They do make a few plugins that mine social media and other “open” sources but have to do a funny ownership dance so it’s the institution that is breaching the TOS rather than them.
Oh well ok then, they don't do any data collection or mining, they just sell the tools to empower three-letter agencies to do it more effectively. Conscience is clear then!
Genuinely curious: at what point is it "okay" to create data analysis tools that might be used by 3-letter agencies?
I imagine that before Palantir came around, the analysts at these agencies did what most other analysts anywhere do and used Excel to create sophisticated pivot tables when working on {insert defense operation}.
Where does it stop being okay? To the extent that it even matters, Palantir appears to at least own up to the fact that they are used by governments.
Their early investors were the CIA. I know the point you’re trying to make but Palantir isn’t really in the gray when they have been basically a branch of the spy agencies since the beginning
Even per their S-1, their market sizing shows "Commercial" to be a substantial proportion of their aspirations:
> Commercial. Our estimate of the TAM in the commercial sector is $56 billion.
> Government. We estimate the TAM in the government sector, including government agencies in the United States, its allies, and in other countries abroad whose values align with liberal democracies, is $63 billion.
Well sure they point to a theoretical market that’s big but it isn’t where their revenue comes from now
> The company’s top three customers — which aren’t disclosed — together represented 28% of the company’s revenue for 2019. Its top twenty customers represented 67% of total revenues, with each one of those customers averaging $24.8 million in revenue.
They admit they count every single government sub-agency as a different customer (their example is NIH and the CDC would count separately despite the same parent organization) so the top 25 is basically just governments. There is incredible revenue concentration there.
Metropolis got deprecated (read renamed) Foundry because they kept screwing up their sales and decided a rebrand would be more effective on their commercial side.
Foundry started as our attempt to create scalable process and rigor around data integration. There's a longer story to tell here, but the short version is that we started out with off-the-shelf orchestration systems for running jobs on a schedule (think Jenkins and Rundeck — things that were more robust than cron). At some level, that worked, and we had to figure out how to scale it, leading to a combination of HDFS, Rundeck/Jenkins, a git repo, and a common language for mutating data.
Where in this filing does it say that their top 25 customers are governments? And where in this filing are the current revenue numbers classified as government vs non-government?
Also, it’s important to consider their TAM projections because 1) those are the only numbers we have in this S-1 that specifically delineates government vs non-government, and 2) their aspirational valuation is predicated on this TAM. It’s who they think they will grow up to become.
Well yeah I agree it’s aspirational but just because they want to do security work for Apple doesn’t mean their current customer base isn’t governments.
Their largest project is Palantir Gotham which is exclusively for government agencies (federal, state, ICE, and by Project Maven after the tech companies abandoned it due to ethics concerns!)
You’re talking primarily about Palantir Metropolis which is used by hedge funds. Not exactly some beneficial use of technology to counterweight working with ICE to separate children from their families.
They don’t list their top customers because they are top secret government agencies but if you look at their customers then it’s clear that the ones paying them the most are secretive government agencies and it’s been that way since day 1
> Their largest project is Palantir Gotham which is exclusively for government agencies (federal, state, ICE, and by Project Maven after the tech companies abandoned it due to ethics concerns!)
Did you even read their S-1? Palantir Gotham is NOT “exclusively for government agencies”. According to their own filing, it’s used by their Commercial team too. It even says so on their website.
> You’re talking primarily about Palantir Metropolis which is used by hedge funds. Not exactly some beneficial use of technology to counterweight working with ICE to separate children from their families.
If you’re going to attack them, do it honestly by accurately representing them. Palantir isn’t used just “used by hedge funds”, if you actually read their prospectus and their website, their use cases include: auto racing, automotive parts manufacturing improvement, corporate cyber security, regulatory compliance (incl GDPR), pharma/drug development, and airline route optimization.
> but if you look at their customers then it’s clear that the ones paying them the most are secretive government agencies ande it’s been that way since day 1
Yeah this is conjecture, at best. Nobody disputes that Palantir works with the government, but you don’t have enough information to claim with certainty that they work only with the government, and how much of their revenue comes from the 3-letter agencies. Unless you can actually substantiate your claims, these are just unfalsifiable hunches.
Its not conjecture. Here are the numbers from their S-1 which apparently you did not read:
1. "We generated $742.6 million in revenue in 2019"
2. "The total remaining deal value of the contracts that we had been awarded by government agencies in the United States and allied countries around the world, including existing contractual obligations and contractual options available to those government agencies, was $1.2 billion"
3. "We do not include government contracts totaling $2.6 billion, as of June 30, 2020, that we have been awarded where the funding of such contracts — also known as indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (“IDIQ”) contracts — has not yet been determined."
So they have 1.62 years of committed revenue from governments and 5.12 years of revenue including the IDIQ contracts. Even assuming the contracts are spread over five years, which seems to be their long term contract length, it indicates their revenue is overwhelmingly from the government.
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As for Palantir Gotham being for government agencies, here is the language from their S-1:
1. "We built Gotham, our first platform, for government operatives in the defense and intelligence sectors...Gotham is now used broadly across government functions."
2. "Gotham enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants, and helps U.S. and allied military personnel find what they are looking for. We later found that the challenges faced by commercial institutions when it came to working with data were fundamentally similar. Companies routinely struggle to manage let alone make sense of the data involved in large projects. Foundry was built for them."
See how it says Foundry was built for commercial and Gotham for "government agencies"?
Your numbers don't directly answer the question at all. You're just quoting their government contract volume. That's well and good, but we're talking about the degree to which Palantir works exclusively with the government.
Let me just pull the relevant quote from the S-1 directly for you:
> In 2019, 53% of our revenue came from commercial customers and 47% came from government agencies.
It's on page 88, in case you didn't make it that far.
Saying their early investor was the CIA isn’t exactly controversial. It’s cited in almost every article about the company. When something is that widely known, it’s usually not cited.
Title: CIA-backed Palantir adds $50M to its war chest
“Palantir's backers include the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture fund and Thiel's Founders Fund. Its customers include government intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency.”
Google In-Q-Tel and Palantir and you’ll find 100 other articles about it.
The "sole" purpose (again, their website shows a ton of other use cases) appears to be to assist elected governments in violating somebody's rights/privacy. From where I sit, elected governments decide what's "socially useful".
Alex Karp's CEO letter makes a similar point:
"The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires."
Sure, but they still consult with the CIA and other 3 letter agencies to tailor their tools for them. It doesn't matter what else they do, they are already tainted.
No one and everyone decides what is socially useful. But it's fairly uncontroversial that invasion of privacy is not socially useful.
Elected governments decide what is socially useful. And for better or for worse, the polity has decided that the government ought to engage in the invasion of privacy of foreign adversaries.
“Socially useful” is well and good, right up until you disagree with the masses what constitutes “socially useful”. Silicon Valley engineers have input into that decision, but don’t get the final say.
Elected governments lose that ability when they hide what they are doing from their voters. Then they just become ordinary hierarchs.
Also, the NSA and CIA are act unconstitutionally and then hide the fact they are doing so from the voters. A fairer way to see if there is actually public support would be to allow a group of 100 people into the CIA/NSA archives and allow them full access to the entirety of the uncensored information, without anyone to justify what they have done beyond what has been recorded.
Otherwise, polling people on what unaccountable agencies do illegally in secret is (figuratively) like asking a North Korean if Kim Jong Un is doing a good job. They just don't have the information to judge.
> when they hide what they are doing from their voters
This is literally the premise of clandestine agencies, and it’s not a new concept. They’ve been around for 50 years now. This isn’t some bait-and-switch, voters have always known what a clandestine agency is.
I understand that there exists some voters who don’t believe that clandestine agencies should exists. Unfortunately, such voters are in the minority. And unfortunately the majority of Americans find clandestine agencies (and in general, a strong defense) to be “socially useful”.
Sure, but by definition clandestine agencies cannot have public approval because there is no way for voters to know whether they should approve of it or not. It is purely a question of trust. You just can't play that card.
> but by definition clandestine agencies cannot have public approval because there is no way for voters to know whether they should approve of it or not.
Again, I am directly refuting that argument. Voters can approve of clandestine agencies if they sign onto the fact that there exists some organs of the government that engage in secret activities unbeknownst to the public. What you are saying would only be correct if at first voters expected to be privy to the activities of the clandestine agencies, and then that happened to change. That has not been the case.
I have provided you an actual poll that asks users "do you approve of these secret agencies (that have always been secret)". When presented with evidence that voters do approve of that, it's a bit of a hack to say that it's literally impossible for voters to approve of it. Not every voter in America is a progressive programmer that subscribes to the EFF's world view.
That is not a good metric of democracy. If your only metric of democracy is a poll of an information that actively suppresses information, China is by far the most "democratic" developed country with Western polls showing approval ratings of the CCP at 80+%.
So no, just being polled highly is not sufficient for something being democratically sanctioned. If you want to know if the People agree with what the CIA does let 100 people read the entire archives uncensored without any further justification and see what you get.
