Reflections on Palantir

Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.

When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.

A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed.

One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.

So it’s hygiene and structure

That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.

I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.