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Reflections on Palantir

(nabeelqu.substack.com)
479 points freditup | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 02:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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master_crab ◴[16 Oct 24 18:43 UTC] No.41862335[source]▶
For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it.

Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both).

The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.

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Taikonerd ◴[16 Oct 24 19:00 UTC] No.41862570[source]▶
But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
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JumpCrisscross ◴[16 Oct 24 19:09 UTC] No.41862670[source]▶
> they have 80% margin, according to the article

I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)

Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.

More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...

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1. g_sch ◴[16 Oct 24 23:16 UTC] No.41864868[source]▶
Matt Levine had a funny similar take recently:

"You could have a model of Harvard Business School that is like:

    1. Harvard Business School teaches you skills that would make you good at running a company.
    2. There are lots of companies that could use those skills.
    3. But you don’t want to run those companies, because they make, like, ball bearings.
    4. You want to run a fancy company; you want to run a hedge fund or a tech startup or something.
    5. Meanwhile, the people currently running the ball bearings company would not be all that excited about you, a fresh-faced business school graduate who has never run anything, coming in to run their company, even if you did learn a lot of useful skills at Harvard.
    6. Therefore various industries exist whose principal business is laundering ball bearings companies into opportunities that appeal to Harvard Business School graduates. You wrap the ball bearings company in a name like “private equity” and suddenly it is legible to the Harvard students, so they flock to it.
    7. Those industries are also in the business of getting the ball bearings companies to accept the Harvard Business School graduates, which in practice means not so much “make the ball bearings company excited about its new Harvard CEO” but rather “buy the ball bearings company and install new management.”
Source: https://archive.is/8IUCA#selection-1795.0-1869.303