Reflections on Palantir

 [[{“value”:”Here is a new essay by Nabeel Qureshi, excerpt: The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact – many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense
The post Reflections on Palantir appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

Here is a new essay by Nabeel Qureshi, excerpt:

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact – many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP – your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. The main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s no surprise they’re talent magnets.

And this:

Eventually, you had a damn good set of tools clustered around the loose theme of ‘integrate data and make it useful somehow’.

At the time, it was seen as a radical step to give customers access to these tools — they weren’t in a state for that — but now this drives 50%+ of the company’s revenue, and it’s called Foundry. Viewed this way, Palantir pulled off a rare services company → product company pivot: in 2016, descriptions of it as a Silicon Valley services company were not totally off the mark, but in 2024 they are deeply off the mark, because the company successfully built an enterprise data platform using the lessons from those early years, and it shows in the gross margins – 80% gross margins in 2023. These are software margins. Compare to Accenture: 32%.

The rest is interesting throughout.  As Nabeel and a few others have noted, there should be many more pieces trying to communicate what various businesses and institutions really are like.

The post Reflections on Palantir appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

 Web/Tech