Reflections on Palantir

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.

Grafana is a better approximation. I used to say back in the day that Peter Thiel complains about no flying cars but is making a data ingesting platform with a Chart Js frontend.