I'm curious about how Palantir works as a public company. It has always looked like a data-centric McKinsey clone to me, and those kinds of consulting companies are usually partnerships.
Granted, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks that were once partnerships are now public. But that move hasn't necessarily been a good thing for the companies in question, and some argue it has been damaging.
Basically, Palantir looks to me like a law firm/consultancy, those firms typically find it advantageous to stay private, what is the advantage for Palantir to go public except to provide a cash out to investors?
Or for certain classes of their customers (maybe governments?) to develop in-house solutions that become "good enough" that they expect to lose those customers in the future.
I'm not sure I see the "good getting" changing any time soon. If anything I believe surveillance capitalism is here to stay and unfortunately increase.
I believe that Palantir thinks they can scale their business in a way traditional consulting firms cannot. Since they have pretty powerful data and software tools, they can actually reduce the cost per client as their client base grows. Going public could give them more access to capital to keep growing, which they should do if their economic model scales.
Well no one would buy in at IPO time if they thought it was some kind of pump and dump scheme (of course this does happen, but is hopefully rare). An IPO is generally designed to raise cash that will be invested back into the business, and as a side effect give the investors a return.
I'm curious if going public would lead to more transparency about what they do and for whom. Enron was famously opaque to its own investors until it was too late, but I would hope that public companies have greater requirements for transparency nowadays.
I don't think that Palantir being a public company would necessarily give the kind of insight into what they do to satisfy our curiosity. As far as I understand, Palantir could be very financially transparent while still keeping mum about who their clients are and what they are doing for them.
I think it's worth remembering that Enron was public.
I agree with you on the whole, but Enron was pre Sarbanes-Oxley which initiated a raft of reporting requirements on companies, so Enron is often a poor comparison to the present day.
If you mean anything more specific than "we do stuff for the government we can't tell you about", probably not. Look at Boeing, Northop-Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc.
Hell, for that matter, look at AT&T, Verizon, and Level3 -- the companies that we didn't really expect to be doing the kinds of things they were doing.
That was my response as well. Going public means filing 10K statements which will lay all their business dealings out. Something I wouldn't think they or their clients would be interested in.
He's not your usual corporate leader, but there's an unmistakable intellect in the way he articulates himself which must work for both leading this particular workforce as well as selling to this particular customer base.
Palantir doesn't own any data whatsoever. It is in no way a data mining company, which makes it strange that it's constantly referred to as such. It makes software to allow organizations to do analysis on their own data, which Palantir has varying degrees of access to.
Another crucial difference is that marketing is a tertiary use case for Palantir, at best.
You could define Palantir more easily by which customers buy its products (Nat sec/law enforcement/military intelligence), and who specifically in those organisations use their software (mostly intelligence analysts.)
By saying they are a "Data-Mining Company" is an obvious (to me) sign that they want to be able to position themselves in the public sector (e.g. banking, retail) with counter-fraud services/solutions, and perhaps more generic cyber security solutions for large organisations.
If a company trying to go public is being sued by one of its largest customers (i.e. the US federal government), that's pretty material. The USDOJ is (IIRC) trying to ban contracts while the matter is under investigation.
They're famous for underpaying and overworking, which I supposed could affect hiring, but yeah, maybe the subtlety is that employees were carrot-and-stick'ed with promises of IPO and now word has got around about work conditions there. Still, it's usually because VCs want their payday.
Granted, Goldman Sachs and other investment banks that were once partnerships are now public. But that move hasn't necessarily been a good thing for the companies in question, and some argue it has been damaging.
Basically, Palantir looks to me like a law firm/consultancy, those firms typically find it advantageous to stay private, what is the advantage for Palantir to go public except to provide a cash out to investors?