CURRICULUM VITAE
Candidate: Palantir Technologies Inc. Sector: Enterprise data integration and decision support Incorporated: 2003, United States Listed: New York Stock Exchange, direct listing, September 2020, ticker PLTR Principal location: Denver, Colorado [UNVERIFIED: headquarters relocation date and current principal office not independently confirmed for this document] Availability: Immediate, worldwide, security-cleared engagements preferred
PROFILE
Twenty-three years of continuous engagement in the integration of dissimilar data holdings into a single queryable model, for institutions whose data was previously held in systems that could not address one another. Comfortable in environments where the client cannot describe its own data estate at the point of hiring. Specialises in the interval between a pilot deployment and the moment the client’s operating procedures are written against the platform rather than against the underlying records.
Founded in the period following the September 2001 attacks, with early institutional backing that included the venture arm of the United States intelligence community. [UNVERIFIED: the In-Q-Tel investment is widely reported; amount and terms not confirmed for this document.] Co-founders include Peter Thiel. Chief executive throughout the listed period: Alexander Karp.
Has never presented itself as a software vendor. Presents itself as an operating partner that arrives with engineers.
CORE COMPETENCIES
- Ontology design: modelling a client’s entities, relationships, and permissions once, centrally, and thereafter as the client’s authoritative description of itself
- Forward-deployed engineering: placing named engineers inside the client organisation for the duration
- Integration of legacy systems whose owners have left
- Access control and audit at record level, allowing deployment into environments where a general-purpose analytics tool cannot be procured
- Conversion of a discretionary analytics budget line into a non-discretionary operational dependency
- Retention of institutional knowledge about a client’s data that the client no longer holds internally
PRODUCT PORTFOLIO
| Line | Positioning | Primary buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Gotham | Investigative and operational analysis over linked records | Defence, intelligence, law enforcement |
| Foundry | Enterprise operational modelling and decision support | Commercial and civil government |
| Apollo | Continuous deployment across classified and disconnected environments | Both |
| AIP | Application of large language models against the client ontology | Both |
ENGAGEMENT HISTORY
United States defence and intelligence community. Continuous engagement from the earliest period of trading. Publicly reported relationships across multiple departments and service branches. [UNVERIFIED: individual programme names, values, and durations not confirmed for this document.]
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Publicly reported contracting relationship covering case management and investigative data systems. [UNVERIFIED: contract scope, values, and current status not confirmed for this document.]
United Kingdom, national health data platform. Publicly reported work on a pandemic-period data platform for the health service, subsequently the subject of public transparency proceedings brought by civil society organisations. [UNVERIFIED: contract values, scope, and the disposition of those proceedings not confirmed for this document.]
Commercial sector. Publicly described deployments in aerospace, automotive manufacturing, energy, financial services and healthcare, generally on a land-and-expand basis beginning with a bounded operational problem.
Character of the work across all placements. The candidate does not replace the client’s systems. It sits above them, reads from all of them, and becomes the surface at which decisions are taken. Underlying systems remain in place and remain the client’s responsibility. This is offered as a selling point and is also the structural reason the placements do not end.
ENGAGEMENT ECONOMICS
The following sets out the standard commercial shape of a major placement in this sector. All parameters are illustrative and stated so that the arithmetic can be re-run against other values.
Land and expand. Assume a six-month pilot at 1.2 M USD, a first production year at 7.5 M USD, and a steady state of 11.0 M USD per year thereafter.
Five-year contract value: 1.2 + 7.5 + (11.0 x 3) = 41.7 M USD Multiple of the pilot that opened it: 41.7 / 1.2 = 34.8 times
The pilot is not priced to be profitable. It is priced to be approvable at a level of signature authority that does not require a board.
Forward-deployed engineering margin. Assume eight engineers embedded on a major account at a fully loaded cost of 320,000 USD each per year.
Annual delivery cost: 8 x 320,000 = 2.56 M USD Gross margin at steady state: (11.0 - 2.56) / 11.0 = 76.7%
The engineers are described commercially as a service cost. They are more accurately a distribution cost, because their function includes discovering the next department to expand into.
Exit position at year five. Assume that rebuilding the ontology, the integrations and the retrained operating procedures on an alternative platform costs 3.4 times the annual fee.
Switching cost: 3.4 x 11.0 = 37.4 M USD Tolerable annual premium over an alternative, on a five-year horizon: 37.4 / 5 = 7.48 M USD, or 7.48 / 11.0 = 68% above the best competing price
| Position | Year 0 | Year 1 | Years 2 to 5 | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fees | 1.2 M | 7.5 M | 11.0 M per year | 41.7 M |
| Departments covered | 1 | 3 | 9 | - |
| Client staff trained on platform | 40 | 260 | 1,400 | - |
| Documented procedures written against platform | 0 | 30 | 210 | - |
The final row is the asset. Fees can be renegotiated. Two hundred and ten written procedures cannot, because rewriting them is a programme in its own right and no departmental head owns it.
OPERATING PRINCIPLES
- Deploy where the client’s decision authority sits, not where its data sits
- Price the entry below the threshold that triggers competitive procurement
- Deliver against the problem the client named, and instrument the adjacent problems
- Never hold the client’s records; hold the model of them
- Treat renewal as the product and the pilot as the marketing
EDUCATION AND FORMATION
Formed in the contracting environment that followed 2001, in which the stated public failure was described as an inability to connect information already held across separate agencies. The candidate’s entire competency set is a direct response to that description, and its commercial durability rests on the fact that the description remains accurate in most large institutions, public and private, twenty-three years later.
REFERENCES
Available from prime contracting officers, departmental sponsors, and commercial transformation leads across the engagements listed above, subject to classification and to the confidentiality provisions standard in this sector.
Written references are not generally releasable. Verbal references may be arranged through the candidate’s government affairs function.