This will be the one to buy and hold. If it drops, buy more. __________________________________________________________ How Palantir Could Become the Breakout IPO Star of 2019 While Wall Street focuses on the initial public offerings of companies like Uber Technologies, Lyft and Slack, one less-hyped public debut may emerge as a star of the IPO world. Palantir, a Silicon Valley data analytics startup co-founded by venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Peter Thiel, is valued at $20 billion and may be positioned for massive growth as it builds momentum in its niche market. The sixteen-year-old company, which provides tools for visualizing and making use of massive data sets with its proprietary software, is considering an IPO this year, according to several publications. Palantir could be looking at a valuation north of $41 billion as early as this year, per Business Insider. Now, Palantir's value and outlook is set to soar on news that the company just won a U.S. military contract for worth up to $800 million, the first time the venture-backed firm has been named a "defense program of record," as detailed by CNBC. Programs of record are a title for the largest, most sought-after multi-year projects awarded by the Pentagon. Palantir: What You Need to Know Co-founded by Thiel in 2003 Provides tools for visualizing and making use of massive data sets with proprietary software Services governmental, financial, healthcare, automotive, aerospace companies, etc. Beat Raytheon for a $800 million defense program of record Source: CNBC, Business Insider Unique Management Palantir’s co-founder, Thiel, has been an icon in the tech world for decades, as well as a controversial figure due to his outspoken views and political involvement as a supporter of Trump and an advisor to the current administration. The entrepreneur co-founded Palantir in 2003, and was the firm’s largest shareholder at its last round of funding in 2015, which valued the company at $20 billion. He was an early member of the “PayPal Mafia,” including big names like Tesla Inc. (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, leading PayPal Holdings Co. (PYPL), a pioneer in the booming disruptive digital payments space. Thiel also sits on the board of directors at Facebook Inc. (FB), in which he was one of the earlier investors. Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp, on the other hand, says the company almost went out of business a few times in its early days, largely due to his inexperience with Silicon Valley and inability to properly deal with venture capitalists. The once cash-strapped company had to pull the plug on its early products, taking a pivot to data security. When that product failed to generate excitement and funding, Palantir tried at a commercial product called Metropolis. Another failed attempt led Palantir to its first profit-making product, in which it has helped government’s around the world with operations including the investigation of terrorist attacks. Silicon Valley Wins Against Legacy Defense Player Palantir’s new "defense program of record" contract requires the company to develop an intelligence system to help soldiers in remote environments, called an Army Distributed Common Ground System, or a DCGS-A. The Palo Alto analytics company beat out rival Raytheon Company (RTN), an old guard defense contractor, marking a milestone for the Army in terms of who it chooses for its important contracts. The latest contract is significant for Palantir as it is a whopping four times larger than its $222 million contract with the Department of Defense's Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Palantir's other customers have included major banks, government agencies, healthcare organizations, and manufacturers in the automotive and aerospace industries. Despite positive tailwinds for Palantir, headwinds remain. For one, the software company is still losing money. The firm missed sales targets in 2018 after many contracts fell through, per the Wall Street Journal. What’s Next Ultimately, the big data startup, which has been called “secretive,” may serve as more of an attractive bet than the frenzy-causing LUPA companies, comprised of unicorns Lyft, Uber, Pinterest and Airbnb. Ride-hailing company Lyft is the first of the group to hit the public market, slated to price its shares after market close on Thursday. Some skeptics have warned against buying into these big names, given their lofty valuations, with Uber at an estimated $120 million, alongside mounting losses. Palantir, which differs from these players with its government and corporate clients, may face less risks in the realm of competition, consumer trends, and regulation. Meanwhile, as the company continues to win huge government contracts, the benefits of possessing the know-how that CIA and others want and need should outweigh downside drivers.
Surprised to hear they're losing money. They have a rep for having among the most difficult interview routines for software engineers, and have been a major defense/intel contractor for years. Maybe not as major as I thought. If they couldn't make money in the last 16 years, what's going to change to make them profitable for the next 16?
PALO ALTO, CALIF.—Palantir Technologies Inc. appears to be a prosperous Silicon Valley spy-software machine. It crunches masses of data to find insights. Its analytics have been credited with helping track down Osama bin Laden. Its value by one measure is $20 billion (U.S.), one of the highest among private tech companies, and its founders include famed investor Peter Thiel. Behind this hot startup image, Palantir has struggled to live up to its reputation. Peter Thiel, founder and chairman of the data analytics firm Palantir, speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016. (Olivier Douliery / TNS) The company has begun planning an initial public offering but hasn’t turned an annual profit in its 14-year history. It is trying to win more corporate customers, after years of flailing attempts, although some potential clients view Palantir as flippant toward business and are wary of its work for governments and intelligence agencies. It missed sales targets last year after hoped-for contracts fell through. Its engineers were accustomed to spending profligately—the company sponsored 13-course tasting-menu lunches with lobster tail and sashimi at headquarters—calling such extravagance “Palantir Entitlement Syndrome.” Alex Karp, the company’s chief executive, has added to the unconventional atmosphere. When he grows excited about an idea, say current and former employees, he balls his fists and taps employees rapid-fire in the solar plexus. This all leaves Palantir, and Mr. Karp, at a familiar juncture in Silicon Valley. It has run like a scrappy startup even though it has become a global company. Facing appeals from investors and employees to go public, so they can more easily sell shares, Mr. Karp must now make Palantir into a more traditional operation. “We’re a company that’s going into adolescence,” Mr. Karp, 51 years old, says. “The rules for being a child and the rules for being an adult are different.” Palantir is among a host of “unicorns”—startups valued over $1 billion—that are losing money years after inception. Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Cos. have burned through more than $8 billion and $2 billion, respectively, and still lose money. That’s in contrast to an earlier generation. Facebook Inc. turned an annual profit after five years. Some investors are complaining to Palantir executives about long-delayed IPO plans, say people familiar with their complaints. Its principal patron, Mr. Thiel, pared his ownership in private sales at well below Palantir’s $20 billion valuation, which came from its latest funding round, in 2015. Investors say Mr. Karp and others at Palantir have told them the firm will turn profitable in 2019. Mr. Karp made that promise in some past years, too. And he still sends mixed messages on whether making money matters, often saying his primary focus is building the most important company in the world. “The unintended consequence of the numbers we are likely to post,” he says, “is profitability.” Palantir is interviewing investment banks about plans to go public as soon as next year. Behind the scenes, Mr. Karp is on a sort of apology tour. Meeting this year with clients in Washington, D.C., he pledged to change the impression of the firm’s staff as overconfident, condescending and even sloppy. “We were young kids rocking up in shorts and T-shirts,” said Mr. Karp, according to people present, “and we realized that was hurting our credibility.” To cut costs, Palantir has been unloading office properties and has slowed expensive engineering hires. It is scrutinizing employee perks such as last-minute international business-class travel, a shock to a firm that once entertained a companywide debate over whether to restore artisanal bacon to the breakfast menu—“Bacongate,” employees called it. Palantir fired two employees who expensed lingerie and suits, people familiar with the episode say. Palantir is pushing to make its analytics software more attractive to corporations and has won over companies including Credit Suisse Group AG, Merck & Co., Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, United Continental Holdings Inc. and Airbus SE. Mr. Thiel, still Palantir’s largest shareholder, says he has faith in the company. “You go underwater,” Mr. Thiel says, “and the important thing is to come up for air at some point.” Crystal ball Interviews with current and former employees, investors and clients give an inside look at how Palantir is trying to turn around its business. Named after a crystal ball in “The Lord of the Rings” series, Palantir was started in 2004 by recent Stanford University graduates and bankrolled with $30 million mostly from Mr. Thiel, a PayPal co-founder. The Central Intelligence Agency’s venture-capital arm later chipped in. It has raised around $2.5 billion in 12 rounds over 11 years. Investors include former Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz, Home Depot Inc. co-founder Ken Langone and Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, The Wall Street Journal’s parent. Palantir’s initial idea focused on selling a fraud-detection tool, similar to what PayPal uses. Customers would be government agencies looking to spot connections across far-flung data sets such as vehicle registrations or the locations of terrorist camps. Palantir soon counted clients including the U.S. Special Forces, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and international intelligence agencies. Mr. Karp joined as CEO a few months in. While not a trained programmer, the multilingual Mr. Karp, with a philosophy Ph.D., took enthusiastically to running a global organization, spending around 250 days a year traveling. He sometimes answers his office phone loudly in German, nurturing gossip he is talking to one of his girlfriends in Europe. “We have a large business in Germany,” Mr. Karp says about those accounts. “Most of my German is being used to grow the business.” A self-described socialist whose preferred work uniform is athletic wear and bright beanies, he is a fitness nut who lives in a one-room Bavarian-style farmhouse. He occasionally shoves clients in the chest to demonstrate a Chinese martial-arts move to redirect force. He has three Tai Chi swords visible in his New York office and one in Palo Alto. From the start, Palantir’s work was furtive—many employees had to apply for security clearances. Employees received five-figure bonus checks if they lived close to company offices. The company early on focused mainly on government business. Its software has been credited by investors and its staff with helping the U.S. chase bin Laden, disrupt broader terrorist networks and chase swindlers including Bernard Madoff. Outright talk of commerce was for years considered verboten. Mr. Karp would tell staff, in a nod to Palantir’s engineering roots: “We are not going to have any f—ing salespeople.” Mr. Karp says: “If it began or ended with some vulgarity, I’m sure I said it.” As Palantir sought to expand from government into private industry, its business plan involved losing money early in hopes of lucrative assignments later. Jobs were labor-intensive, with software written in a bespoke programming language and taught one-on-one. Instead of salespeople, Palantir sent so-called forward-deployed engineers to meet potential clients. Some engineers answered skeptical questions from business prospects by suggesting companies simply plug their data into Palantir’s software and wait for it to spit out results—a suggestion some took as aggressive and presumptuous. Mr. Karp says clients have always controlled their own data. Dropped contracts Palantir’s strategy with corporations reached a nadir around three years ago, when companies including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Hershey Co. dropped multimillion-dollar contracts with it. JPMorgan declined to comment. A Hershey spokesman said “Our project with Palantir was part of a learning journey in building these capabilities to garner insights.” Mr. Karp characterizes those struggles as part of a creative process now yielding results. “This is not a science,” he says. “We are a colony of artists. You cannot go to Basquiat or Monet and say, ‘Well, that painting didn’t capture the time.’ ” To better appeal to corporations, Palantir about two years ago began rolling out a new product, Foundry, that amounts to off-the-rack software that amalgamates and crunches data across an organization. Unlike prior efforts, in which engineers would tailor software client-by-client, Palantir designed Foundry to be more generic and folded into customers’ existing computer networks. The software is typically used by dozens or hundreds of workers, not just software engineers who need special training. Palantir says it can potentially assign smaller teams to each client and reap bigger profits. Foundry is helping Credit Suisse stitch together accounts across the world for a single client and spot potential money laundering, says the bank’s chief compliance officer, Lara Warner. Merck uses it to manage sales data of fertility drugs in China and better forecast demand and inventory, a problem for which Merck early dispatched its own data-science team without success, Chief Digital Officer James Kugler says. Fiat Chrysler uses the system to pinpoint part recalls. United says it began using Foundry this year to crunch customer surveys on when, for instance, an aircraft seat won’t recline, and shoot the information to the appropriate mechanic where the plane has spare time on the ground and to a gate agent who can placate the flier. “Our data problems are not a small number of big-data problems; they are a collection of thousands upon thousands of really small but interconnected problems,” says Marc Fontaine, the digital transformation officer at Palantir client Airbus. Foundry’s breakthrough, he says, is to “keep building and reusing the edifice that we use.” Palantir has lost its aversion to salespeople. It says it hired 35 of them this year. The company ended last year with around $600 million of revenue and expects them to reach more than $750 million in 2018 and $1 billion in 2019, people briefed on the figures say. It has told investors it hopes to earn 70% of its revenue from corporations in the near future, from around half at present and around none in its early days. Palantir still faces a public-perception problem. It has long drawn criticism for government work including software to help law enforcement expand surveillance of suspects. It has earned billions from U.S. government contracts across administrations of both parties, but immigration and privacy advocates have recently criticized its contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, suggesting the company is helping the Trump administration’s separation of migrant families. In meetings this year, some employees begged executives to end ICE contracts. Mr. Karp told them that Palantir helps stem the cross-border flow of drugs, not separate families, and that he wouldn’t make business decisions to comport with short-term politics. “They can’t run their business on the basis of the latest political thing,” says Palantir investor Mr. Langone, “or they wouldn’t have a business.” Mr. Karp says his family has distaste for Palantir’s work and that the Trump era has made it harder to make sales pitches. “There are lots of customers globally and some domestically who feel they do not want to be affiliated with a company that powers the clandestine agencies of the world,” he says. “We want a public perception that reflects who we are, and not everyone will like it.” Some investors say they are putting increasing pressure on Palantir, which has consistently pushed back IPO plans, to go public. “It’s probably time to do something public,” says Tim Sullivan, chief executive of Palantir investor Oceanic Partners. On the private markets, he says, “there’s not very much demand” for shares. Palantir reports financials in an annual staff gathering and this year the meeting was held late. That alarmed employees, whom Palantir has paid partly in hard-to-sell stock tied to company performance. Engineering head Shyam Sankar later stood before staff and warned that competition was stiffening. “The Uruk-hai are coming!” he said, referring to a villainous “Lord of the Rings” army. Palantir offered additional pay in equity to staff who stick around long-term and slashed the per-share price of such options. Mr. Karp says new cost-cutting efforts, like a pared-back travel policy, are about avoiding waste. Morgan Stanley investment bankers have told Palantir that if it is to go public near the high end of a $36 billion to $41 billion valuation, it must convince the market there are years of growth ahead, say people familiar with the discussions. Morgan Stanley’s mutual funds, which own Palantir shares, in filings estimate Palantir’s value at under $5 billion as of June. Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Other funds peg the value higher. Mr. Karp says Palantir’s attitude toward an IPO is “completely schizophrenic.” He told the Journal two years ago that an offering would allow employees “liquidity at a fair price.” He now professes to have “no fixed opinion” on one.
Never seen a Palantir project succeed in the long run. It's always over complicated and unnecessary. I'd next this one, even though the story is good enough to draw in some.
The problem why this company is still not making money is two things: 1. Their products is not flexible enough. It can only be used in the most elite of companies and segments of the economy like the government and intelligence agencies. Well that's not where the money is. If you want to make money, your products has to be able to used by the masses, the majority of the companies and individuals that make up the entire economy. You know you are in trouble when one of the largest brokerage company like J.P. Morgan that basically relies on data analysis as part of its business finds your product unusable and won't sign business deals with you. Bottom line: Either you appeal to the masses and make your products usable by at least majority of the companies in S&P 500 or become a government agency itself if your products' uses is confined still to government needs. 2. Employ some f***ing sales people! You need f***ing sales people no matter how much you hate them. Instead of having expensive lobster tails and sashimi gourmet to woo potential clients, those money would be much more effectively spent on experienced and skilled salespeople to better explain and promote your products to attract potential clients. Those engineers are I am sure extremely intelligent and talented people and all walking geniuses but they suck at promoting your products obviously as they answered businesses' questions by telling them to just plug their data to their software and see the results for themselves. Overall this business needs major business consulting before they go for IPO. They might have an awe-inspiring product that will change the way we live but a lot of things in the business need to change for them to run a profit. Nobody is going to be willing to spend money in a business who can't even make money no matter how brilliant their products may be. Even government corporations are required to make a profit these days left alone private ones.
Yeah thats just what we need... Palantir's products in the hands of the majority of companies in the S&P. I don't mean this to sound condescending, but you do understand what the products they offer do right? https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ I have no opinion on the valuation, but wherever it comes out of the gate at... its going to move. And its my guess it will become the most controversial publicly traded company ever. FB loses 90 billion in market-cap when Zuckerberg has to testify in front of Congress that he knows what extras I like on my burrito at Chipoltes. Imagine what this company is going to face. This stock will be volatile AF. The ACLU has probably already hired 50 new lawyers for all the impending actions. Tbh... I wouldn't be surprised if they shelve the ipo completely. Not for revenue reasons, but because the company will be mired in controversy from the start. They have to provide transparency, they'll be living in the House of Representatives. They'll need a long term lease on at least 3 floors of Trump's post office hotel in DC. I wouldn't think Theil would want that but who knows, I'm sure he's aware of all this and has a plan. Smart cookie that one. We'll see I guess, but if they do IPO, it will be some crazy crazy action. You can bank on that.
Yeah like the companies, NSA and etc. do not collect our data and analyze it now. All of our internet traffic data, our shopping habits, our food preferences, our driving habits, our banking transaction patterns are never looked at and analyzed to creating targetted marketing and products directly to our behaviour patterns. Policies are never made based on analysis of our behaviour. Wake up buddy! Companies are already doing this and have been doing this for years. Palantir is just data analysis on steroids. And honestly this is not surprising considering Google already came out with machine learning that's basically data analysis and learning and adapting by AI, not even human intelligence. If you are scared of what Palantir can do, you should be more scared with what AlphaGo can do if it's deployed by the NSA or the FBI. But anyhow agree with you, Palantir is not ready for IPO, not any time soon, not before they get their s*** together and manage their business together. Building something powerful is one thing, but being able to sell it profitably is another.
Dude... you are so missing the point of this thread... so I'm going to help you here. If and when they IPO.... the stock is going to run and its going to be very volatile. Thats the point. Period. All else is useless narrative. Now... that being said... you drew me into a discussion and I responded. Everybody already knows what goes on. If they don't, they're stupid. There is no "privacy". There is however a difference. You live in fucking England. In the United States we have something called the Fourth Amendment. Its cherished over here. That's why we have organizations like the ACLU and EFF. I write whats real... there is no "fear" of anything; I state the facts. And if you don't think that if this company goes public there won't be any controversy and they won't be testifying before our Congress about their operations along with a dozen or more 4rth Amendment challenges to shut them down.... then you need to get out of the trading stock business unless you're pure T/A and glued to a monitor in a dark room scalping a few points based on a f'ing candlestick... because you don't have the street moxy to understand what drives herd mentality and its corresponding effect on the price and movement of a stock in one direction or the other. You talk about profit. If profit mattered... the f'ng Naz would be at 3000. How much profit did LYFT log last year? What's Uber's EBIDTA? Look at TEAM lately? 25X sales and they haven't made one red cent in 3 years. Obviously profit out of the gate means absolutely zilch. So lets stick to the original point of this thread. You stick to the candlesticks. And don't call me "buddy". Buddy's half a word where I come from. No disrespect.
You are all over the place. This thread is about whether this company is ready for IPO or not. Controversy, 4th Amendment, T/A, that is all irrelevant to this topic. I am going to leave it at that.