Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt
Generally speaking you are correct, but practically speaking I think Palantir is absolutely correct in claiming they are a new kind of company. Their hiring focus from early on has been on top notch engineering talent and even though they have people in forward deployment, they focus their hiring on people who have engineering/comp-sci degrees.Even though in a certain sense there is really little difference between a salesperson and a "sales engineer" as far as their tasking, the difference in mentality is quite different. A sales engineer actually understands the underlying technology and probably has contributed to it in some way, whereas a salesperson relies on distributing hype.I've spent a fair amount of time in major silicon valley firms (including Palantir) and I can say the mentality seems quite different. It is a bunch of brilliant people solving difficult problems. I think in a certain sense their marketing actually isn't that good, since it appeals largely to a technical audience but I couldn't figure out if their core product actually made that much of a difference.How do you measure, for instance, if you catch more terrorists with a certain terrorist-catching tool than another? There wasn't much presented here except cool visual displays that claimed that they were connecting data from across previously distinct data silos. Is that amazing? Not really -- although certainly it is more than the government can probably do effectively internally, so I have some reasonable degree of optimism that they are delivering far over governmental norm and are worth whatever large cheques the government gives them.Full disclosure: I briefly considered working for the company.