What makes Palantir's business effective?
TLDR; product seems great but questionable. why do people think a company focusing on boomers *only* will do great as a business? I thought Palantir was a tech consulting company but quick research shows they are transitioning to a full-on SaaS company. My understanding of Palantir products is that they have Foundry that can handle analytics for any type of operations end-to-end. Palantir Gotham seems to be just specialized for governmental intelligence work So products seem great and pretty advanced, but PLTR only focuses on large clients and don't allow businesses to try it out (create an account -> free trial -> tutorials like all SaaS companies do?), which seems unnecessarily stubborn and sounds like the opposite of scaling Also kind of weird that they don't advertise use cases for tech industry. I could easily imagine ecommerce, social media, any type of tech companies leveraging Foundry to organize, analyze data without the need to dedicate a team to create lower quality internal tools (seen this too many times) Edit: No one from Palantir is gonna reply? Not a bear but just asking questions, hoping to understand the company better
I could be wrong but I thought their focus was on government contracting? Hence they wouldnât use a lot of the marketing and sales tactics you mentioned. Average people are not their target customer. They are aimed at providing governments (which tend to be archaic in how they operate) with technology.
Their focus seems to be commercial going forward from what I can tell. But regardless, I don't mean average people but rather average mid to large sized businesses since I'm sure they could benefit from more analytics and probably are already somewhat digitized with Salesforce or more services I guess if they only focus on governments, then I'll make the conclusion that they aren't trying to grow and the hype behind their stock is unjustified
Pltr is just like every other govt contractor that does consulting Builds some bullshit product to stay as a vendor to the govt Suddenly becomes a product company For example, cloudtamer io
i have bearish views on pltr but it's for sure not a consulting company. i can tell it's a SaaS just from a quick research Never heard of cloudtamer io
Pltr definitely started as a consulting company
You have like an extremely high level 2% view of what Palantir does, and you want to be on the other side of the bet of Thielâs 3rd extremely successful venture, Alex Karpâs weird genius, and the incredibly high internal ratings Palantir has?
I've spent a lot of hours watching their demos, reading their blogs/website and even the entire s-1 filings as I'm thinking about whether i should invest or not. In the post, I skipped explaining the technical side (which btw looks amazing and very innovative) and wanted to discuss their weird business focus Also I agree that the company has great talent but that doesn't mean we should blindly trust them with your hard-earned money. While i have you here, assuming you're a bull, i wanted to ask about your opinions on their focus on boomer companies. with a product as strong as Foundry, it's weird that they don't have any tech companies as clients. isn't the usual notion that whatever tech companies use become the standard (like how boomer companies are adopting slack for comms, aws for cloud, etc.)? not to mention the tech companies should be relatively easier to convince as they should better understand the benefits. seems like the opposite of growth story, and rather too philosophically stubborn, unless there is something fishy going on
Your assumption that if tech companies are not using it then it wonât grow is all wrong. Who said you canât grow with boomer money? The boomer industry is huge, imagine how much money goes into defense and military? They are the hardest to convert yet PLTR did just that. Itâs much easier for PLTR to go from gov to enterprise than for a tech-focused competitor to go the other way around. In fact itâs exactly PLTRâs plan and they are expanding in private sector heavily.
Iâm not 100% bullish on PLTR bc I think they talk their product up too much but thatâs another story. But your viewpoint that âif a company is not going after tech sector itâs doomedâ is false. I get that we are so trapped in this tech bubble that weâve become so tech centric and think itâs the only center of the world, when the universe is so much bigger and a strong economy runs on many many industries. For human race to move forward we need pioneers to find the direction, but more importantly we need those who can bring the large majority onto this path with us.
Hereâs my take on the âwhy no trialsâ thing: The product we build is always a bit rough at the edge, and it currently isnât designed with the intention of random non-Palantir users starting completely from scratch inside of it. It takes someone pretty familiar with the platform to really demonstrate the platformâs value and get things up and running. I think that the fear right now is that the full trial would be overwhelming in difficulty and underwhelming in its impact (because of suboptimal use). Long term i am very confident that we will improve the experience enough and add enough rails / guidance to make some kind of âtrialâ possible, but we arenât there yet, and that is not our focus.
Palantir is a glorified consulting company that runs on politics. Slightly above KPMG and EY
Thats what i said but op swears its a product company now
Itâs a hybrid model that is getting closer and closer to having a standalone product.
also to add onto my point on tech companies: engineers constantly reinvent the wheel by building from scratch (seen this at G) or patch together 5 different third party services (seen this at startups), which all turn out to be mediocre or shit (and obsolete in few years) So when I saw Palantir Foundry, I thought it'd be real nice if it became like this golden standard for analytics setup. And boomers should naturally follow right? Their business focus on boomer-first seems very counterintuitive. If tech companies aren't convinced on their tech, what's the point?
Because if they let tech companies use it, then tech companies will figure out how much effort they have to put into customize installing and tuning everything. They're basically a consulting company with the amount of custom installs they have to do. By hiding it from tech companies, they get tech bros to drool over their mysterious tech.
from their recent demos, it really didn't look like that was the case. i mean all SaaS apps require users to setup something, in this case im assuming connections to DB, widgets and dashboard layout, no code ETL pipelines, alerting workflows derived from their business context, ontology for data access, etc. (seen worse in other products of this infra-like nature and this could be alternatively said as "flexibility" rather than custom setup) but in the end, im just inferring all this from their demos and never actually used it so i could be completely wrong i guess and palantir could be a SAP 2.0