What is it that Palantir does?

What is it that Palantir does? at a foundational level. Let's start just at a foundational level. We're a software company, and we build software that allows you to manage your data to make better decisions. And I think that's best understood through an example. So I spent a lot of my time, helping companies manufacture things, really the reindustrialization of America. So if you're a manufacturer, you have a system called a "PLM system", "Product Lifecycle Management" System that you use to design your product. You have another system, a "Manufacturing Execution System" that you use to manage the manufacturing, the actual production of it on the assembly line. You have an "ERP system" for inventory management, supply chain management. And yet another system for managing sales orders. A Customer Relationship Management System. What we do is we build software that allows you to bring the data from those systems together so that you can manage the process holistically. Now, half of what Palantir does is commercial. We work in 50 different industries, from energy and mining to pharmaceuticals and insurance. In the commercial world, you're optimizing the value chain. Of decisions that you're making from the hand to the hand of your customer. And of course, to the military, which we're very well known for what we do there. You can think about that as you're optimizing the "K*** Chain" "from sensor to shooter" they call it doctrinally. But it's the same thing which is, "How do I find the enemy targets?" "How do I decide which targets I want to prosecute, based on maybe the inventory I have on hand" "The effect it might have to the enemy." "How do I manage my personnel readiness?" "How do I manage my equipment readiness?" All of these things need to work, or it doesn't work. So your CEO, Alex Karp, did an interview with my colleague Maureen Dowd a little while ago, and he had this extremely resonant phrase. He described what his company does as "the finding of hidden things" - sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior. "Palantir is in the business of" "The finding of hidden things." But a lot of the narrative about Palantir sort of assumes that that means, you go to work for a government or a corporation, and you go out and find those things in the external world. But in your description, it is you're finding things that institutions already have access to but don't know or don't understand. The cynical way to think about Palantir is it took something as sexy as James Bond to motivate engineers to work on a problem as boring as data integration, but that's actually the core of what generates the value that if you look at any of these institutions, they have so many silos of data. They all have a specific purpose, but the greater truth is lost in the seams between these systems. And historically, we've just relied on humans connecting the dots in their heads. So we build Ironman suits for those humans to be able to ask questions of the data, usually with a normative view of getting to a decision. So it's not insights for insights sake, "What am I trying to do?" "How do I optimize the operation of the business?"