
Palantir Announces Confidential Submission of Draft S-1 - xoxoy
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200706005622/en/Palantir-Announces-Confidential-Submission-Draft-Registration-Statement
======
exogeny
As someone who worked in defense consulting/IT contracting many moons ago, let
me clue you in on a simple fact: there is an INSANE amount of money wasted on
these contracts.

The project that we were working on was projected to _maybe_ go live in ten
years (when the tech would be laughably outdated), and we were the sub-sub-
sub-contractor of the massive company at the top. It was nothing more than a
vaporware webapp built by 22 year olds right out of college who were
white/American enough to get clearance immediately, and our team got $100
million for it.

The money in these DoD contracts is truly nuts. And it never gets slashed
because how politically terrible slashing defense is, and it never gets
audited because too many people are making money.

So as it relates to Palantir, sure, they're scammy and unethical as all hell,
but they certainly know where the bread is buttered in America. Even in a
(likely) Democratic adminstration.

~~~
runawaybottle
What’s the best path to get on this gravy train?

~~~
anonu
[https://beta.sam.gov/](https://beta.sam.gov/)

------
aresant
Lemonade and Agora's IPOs in the last two weeks both doubled right out of gate
and have kept going (1)

Bankrupt HERTZ pumped 500%+ over a couple of weeks in June, to such a degree
that their board nearly got a $500m unprecedented "worthless" equity offering
out into the public market before the SEC shut them down. (2)

Tesla is trading at $1,400. Their latest competitor Nikola - who has no sales
and no actual consumer product - was briefly worth more than ford (3)

I would assume that board rooms & investment bankers are SCRAMBLING to get
their IPOs pushed out in Q3 or early Q4 2020.

In the meantime hold onto your hats, don't risk what you can't afford to lose
:)

(1) [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates-
co...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/bankrupt-hertz-terminates-
controversial-stock-sale.html)

(2) [https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-
hertz-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/17/all-bets-are-off-as-hertz-pulls-
plan-to-issue-500-million-in-new-stock/)

(3) *Was for a minute - off to an $18b valuation vs $25b for ford today haha -
[https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-
mor...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/09/as-stock-price-more-than-
doubles-nikola-founder-bo.aspx)

~~~
ceocoder
As my financial advisor from firm of WSB likes to say, “J Pow make money
printer go brrrrrr”.

Honestly none of this makes any sense, record unemployment, skyrocketing covid
cases, people trapped at home shopping groceries online. Yet $TSLA is at 1400,
and to quote my advisor “is going to the moooon”.

Sigh.

~~~
asdff
Or maybe bitcoin was never worth $17,000. Speculation is speculation. Stocks
like tesla have such a retail following that they are no longer grounded in
any fiscal reality. To properly invest in these stocks, one needs to find a
financial advisor specializing in reading tea leaves.

~~~
andirk
Since it was 1,000 USD or so and was raising quickly in early 2017, I thought
a good price for 1 BTC was a solid 10k USD. Happy with more, but w/ its
current usage and interest, it seems to be the #

------
bane
From the long line of rounds of raises (what are they on now, their L round?)
my guess is that Palantir is a money fire and is vastly overinflated in
valuation.

It'll be good to actually see their numbers now in Q statements.

------
0xTJ
Without knowing what they actually do, Palantir is a terrifying name.

~~~
manfredo
Thiel actually explained this in a talk when I worked there. It comes from
Lord of the Rings which Peter Thiel is very fond of. Apparently the Palantiri
aren't inherently good or bad, it's just that power's impact reflects the
people who use it. The ancient elves or wizards or whatever used them for
good. But Sauron got his hands on one and used it for bad. The sinister
potential was a deliberate choice, to remind people to be sure that power
isn't abused. Actually kind of a good message for the tool Palantir builds,
but probably not good for PR.

Also Thiel is _very_ consistent on using Tolkien's pronunciation. It's not PA-
lan-tir. Or Pa-LAN-tir. It's pa-lan-TIR with emphasis on the last syllable.
There's actually a written accent in the books:
[http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri](http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri)

Regardless everybody at the company sad PA-lan-tir.

~~~
st1ck
I find it hilarious that Thiel is a fan of Tolkien, yet he seems to embody
Saruman's ideology (if not worse), while Tolkien's philosophy is more of
Gandalf's. Tolkien was generally against technology, but especially against
something so easily abusable (if not abused already) by malevolent power.

~~~
manfredo
Is Thiel seeking to build an army of ressurected elves to destroy all life in
the planet? And what did you have in mind for "if not worse"?

~~~
st1ck
Note that I meant Saruman, not Sauron. Unlike most of LOTR characters, Saruman
is a very modern and enlightened kind of person striving for "Knowledge, Rule,
Order", but using Machiavellian means to achieve this purpose. Maybe Sauron
was also initially led by good intentions, one would have to look it up in
Silmarillion.

------
iandanforth
If there were any good in markets this IPO would fail. We are without
conscience and this despicable enterprise will continue.

~~~
taywrobel
Ex-Palantir engineer here. What exactly do you think makes the company
despicable, apart from them working with some entities you don’t like?

They don’t even source or store data themselves... they just provide a
glorified federated search engine on top of data organizations already have,
with fancy visuals and user interface on top.

~~~
whymauri
>What exactly do you think makes the company despicable, apart from them
working with some entities you don’t like?

I mean, this is certainly enough for me.

The Gotham system and who Palantir decides to provide it to borders on
dystopian. [0]

>The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to
identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap
sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the
system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic
offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security
Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to
patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as
possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact,
officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles,
physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and
the officer’s own observations on the subject.

This is terrifying.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-
thiel...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/)

~~~
taywrobel
It’s just a search engine... and don’t get me wrong, it’s a really robust and
expressive search engine, but all it’s doing is data analysis. As scary as
that is (and it is absolutely scary), it’s not anything that someone couldn’t
do with tableau, or with a whole lot more patience and data manipulation,
straight elasticsearch.

Palantir makes that easier, sure, but at what point is a tool sufficiently
generic so as to not be held accountable for what it’s used for? And if there
is no amount of generalizability that absolves the author of software from
what its used for, how do you square that against open source software?

Should the elasticsearch authors feel guilty if their software is used for
something unethical as described here? No money is changing hands is one
difference, but for a decision of morality does the payment matter?

To be clear, I don’t think there’s one right answer here. Different people
will absolutely have different opinions, and that’s not the type of
disagreement that’s likely to be swayed on a forum, I just wanted to provide
you a different way to think about it, if you’re open to doing so.

~~~
Barrin92
>It’s just a search engine

do you have any comment on this?

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-
predict...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-
policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd)

How do you square using 'predictive policing' technologies on predominantly
minority populations to _forecast_ who will commit crime, which sounds
somewhat like Minority Report, with "just a search engine"?

~~~
fargo
complete bs

------
manfredo
A lot of people in this thread are raising questions about what Palantir
actually does. I worked as a software developer at Palantir in 2014, so maybe
I can shed some light on this though this info may not be up to date. Back
then they had two main products: Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis.
Accompanying this was a big infrastructure to ingest data from various
sources. First the two frontends:

Gotham is focused on displaying entity based data. Entity based data was often
things like people, reports of events, invoices, etc. Gotham let you do things
like click on a person, and see all criminal records associated with them. Or
their relatives and known associates. This was called "search around" and was
apparently a very big deal. One sample use case for Palantir Gotham was to
search for people that made more than one purchase of the same Schedule 2
drug, and plot those purchases on a map. A common method of finding pill mills
was to plot these drug purchases on a map and see when there's a bunch of
purchases along a highway route. Big indicator that someone is buying in bulk,
but splitting up their purchases to fall under thresholds which traditional
alerting mechanisms relied upon. Palantir Gotham is the product that people
usually associate with Palantir - it's the one used by a lot of three letter
agencies.

I don't know too much about Metropolis. It was more about quantitative
analysis. I think it was popular for insurance companies. IIRC it could do
things like plot the frequency of adverse weather events on a map, and then
insurance adjusters to fine tune premiums. I think there was also a Palantir
Metropolis product aimed at small businesses.

Now, the above covers the frontend. A huge part of Palantir's operations is
data ingestion. Basically, this consisted of moving data out of government or
enterprise databases and moving them into Palantir's format. This usually
involved forward deployed engineers that would work with the government or
business and work out a way to ingest the data. An un-glamorous job but one of
the really important ones.

Another huge component of the business was customer specific customization.
When I worked there something like 40-50% of software engineers worked on
business development. They rest worked either on infrastructure of UI platform
(basically building the components of the UI that aren't customer specific).
Business development at Palantir when I worked meant "software development for
a given business (or agency)" not sales. If you worked in business development
you were a developer for a given business or agency. This was also a lot of
grunt work. One customer wanted to bucket items based on the phase of the
moon. I distinctly remember this ask - maybe the FBI was investigating a
werewolf. Implementing features and customizations like that was the role of
business development.

Is it a powerful tool or is it snakeoil? Well, given that the workflows it's
replacing are often whiteboards and excel spreadsheets it may actually be a
very significant gain. Ultimately what Palantir has is a flexible way of
displaying and finding relationships between data. Flexible enough to ingest
very different types of data. Perhaps more importantly they have a technical
workforce capable of rapidly extending the product to meet new customer needs.
And if customers are happy with the product I guess it's worth it.

I just hope they've moved off of god-damn java swing for the UI.

~~~
stanfordkid
So basically it's an Orwellian surveillance tool that justifies it's own
existence based upon remnants of an unjust war on drugs created by Nixon? I'm
so sick and tired of Palantir's advertising tactics of doing good.

We should enable the government to create massive databases of peoples lives
and communication, then link those ... so that we can stop kids from doing
ecstacy or "catch terrorists".

Give me a break. Palantir is basically like PRISM ... except it came out of
the minds of Silicon Valley (from whom I would expect much more) ... than the
NSA/CIA

~~~
manfredo
The main use case or illicit drug detection that I as aware of was detecting
fraudulent pharmacies selling shitloads of legal opiods. Which primarily
affects rural white people - I don't think that's part of Nixon's drug war
which primarily targeted inner city people. And the drug detection use case is
only one example. IIRC anti-terror work was the first big use case for
Palantir Gotham.

As far as whether or not it's an Orwellian tool, one thing to be aware of is
that Palantir doesn't collect any data or have access to government data. The
ingested data is still administered by the agency. I don't think they can even
legally transfer it to 3rd parties.

Palantir builds tools to browse and make correlations with the data that
government agencies already have. It's more of an investigation tool, not a
surveillance tool. There's a substantial latency between something happening
and being able to actually see it in Palantir - it needs to first be logged
and recorded, and then go through the ingestion pipeline.

Sure, it's a valid position to be against government collection of things like
pharmacy purchases and financial transactions. But that strikes me more of a
moral position against government data collection rather than something
specific to Palantir.

------
aritraghosh007
This was long overdue. Palantir has always been a darling of the valley. I
often wonder how much of Palantir is actually owned by DoD and if that
information would be made public after they IPO.

Edit: Looks like In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence
Agency, already owns some stake in the company. [1]
[[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-
techn...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/technology/palantir-technologies-
ipo.html)]

------
predictmktegirl
It’s hard to watch the stock market right now as an underpaid employee at a
pre-IPO unicorn. Who else here is desperately hoping the next S-1 post is
about their company?

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
From the other thread: Forgive my ignorance: For most other companies, I've
seen a direct link to an S-1. Is sending in a confidential draft first normal
and we just don't hear about it, or is the confidential draft sent but not
announced usually, or is this unusual?

~~~
vechagup
It's pretty common to submit a confidential draft. This started with the JOBS
Act [1], which loosened disclosure requirements generally for "Emerging Growth
Companies" [2] when they are going public and introduced the notion of a
confidential draft registration statement. You originally had to meet certain
requirements to qualify for confidential filing, but that privilege was
subsequently expanded to all companies [3].

Exactly how common it is to announce your confidential filing is harder to
assess, but it's not _that_ unusual. They likely decided their filing would
leak and thus it was better to get ahead of it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startup...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups_Act)

[2]
[https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC](https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC)

[3] [https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2017/07/sec-
pe...](https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2017/07/sec-permit-
issuers-submit-confidential)

------
chdaniel
Very bold to do it in the current landscape but I'm sure they've got their
reasons to do so

~~~
icey
If I were Palantir I'd be worried about the funding from my primary customers
(defense, law enforcement, ICE) in the likely coming very Democratic federal
government. There's been a lot of noise made about changing how much money is
being spent on law enforcement, which would directly impact Palantir's bottom
line. If they can IPO and gracefully transition to private sector work, then
they'll be golden; but afaict private sector hasn't gone as well as they'd
hoped yet.

~~~
deleuze
I'm expecting they'll have a pretty good IPO, but I'm considering going short
for that very reason. They're almost a caricature of "evil" startup companies.
Peter Thiel's association only makes it worse. Not committed to this thesis
though, since it's possible they could be swept up in TINA mania for the next
?? months/years.

~~~
andreilys
What issue do you take with Thiel? I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call him
evil.

~~~
randycupertino
He secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him.

~~~
emilfihlman
>He secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him.

You can't be serious. In a court of law, Gawker was found to be (extremely)
wrong, and outing people ain't cool.

It was anything but shady.

~~~
lalos
The shady part was strategically structuring the damages for Gawker's
insurance to not be eligible and ensure bankruptcy. If I remember correctly
(don't quote me on this), they lowered it enough for it not to kick in.

------
mtgp1000
I don't know anything about the legitimacy of this IPO, but if they have a
competent ML team, then what terrible things they can do with their data are
[unfortunately] worth killing for if you're an authoritarian government.

------
voz_
Congrats to a wonderful company.

~~~
AtHeartEngineer
Is this sarcasm?

~~~
voz_
No. Most of the deriders here have no idea of the amount of good they do.

~~~
jesterson
Perhaps you can enlighten us?

~~~
voz_
Its about helping organization utilize their data - nothing more, nothing
less. Palantir does not own the data. They do not fuse some secret magic data
source with other secret magic data sources. They provide tooling and
platforms to allow companies to make sense of their data.

Look at [https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/platform-
features/](https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/platform-features/) for
instance. It lets you draw connections between data, it allows you to spin up
graphs to look at relationships, or plot things on a map, or perhaps make a
nice web-based pivot table. But it is not some draconian evil thing, where
moustache twirling villains sit around, finding new ways to pry into your
personal data. Nor are they some scary shadow government-corp that seeks to
entrench itself in the military-industrial complex in order to control things
from within. It's tooling, its refinements on data, and its your typical
software as a service company. The value proposition is giant players are good
at having lots of data, but bad at using it, or finding insights, or
visualizing it, or whatever - so they offer a one-size-fits-all set of tools
and solutions.

I am very tired of the misconceptions around them because of their cool name.
Some of the most intelligent, humble, and hardworking people I know work
there. Their mission is misunderstood.

------
thesausageking
[redacted]

~~~
PakG1
For what it's worth, Thiel isn't supporting Trump like he used to so far.
[https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21312154/peter-thiel-
trump...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21312154/peter-thiel-
trump-2020-election-campaign-shying-away-distancing)

~~~
three_seagrass
I wouldn't take anything that Peter Thiel "says" he's thinking about doing too
seriously. He also said this in 2016:

>I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is
always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always
takes him literally. … I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump
seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment
or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall
like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to
enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more
sensible immigration policy.

------
runawaybottle
What does Palantir do again? Serious question.

~~~
deeblering4
Their site should have some info about that, let’s see...

“At Palantir, we build software that lets organizations integrate their data,
their decisions, and their operations into one platform. Our software empowers
entire organizations to answer complex questions quickly by bringing the right
data to the people who need it.”

Whoops! Never mind, I have no idea what this is describing.

~~~
memexy
It's vague on purpose. Their target demographic is CIOs and CTOs at large
corporations and bureaucrats in governments. That language actually makes
sense to them.

~~~
gameswithgo
>That language actually makes sense to them.

Maybe they _think_ it does, but it can't actually.

~~~
Mobius01
But it does. You see, these high level executives often have a goal in mind,
but the best way to go about it is with this sort of ambiguity because it
gives them room to inflate the expectations and plausible deniability when it
goes wrong. If you look at the PowerPoint therapy know as consultant-driven
product development, you will see the same language. Vague, ambiguous when
documented.

