From my vantage point, Palantir appears to be an amusing house of cards.<p>The gossip on this coast, where most of their government and corporate overlords live, is much less rosy.<p>Basically, any civilian agency that gets told it needs a &quot;data science&quot; or &quot;predictive analytics&quot; capability from the executive Cyber initiatives just buys what the law enforcement and intelligence guys bought. Silicon Valley is also widely believed to be superior to the local scene.<p>These factors drive a cycle of government purchase leading to sweetheart maintenance deals leading to product validation leading to more government purchases.<p>Their &quot;forward deployed engineers&quot; are what the rest of us call &quot;software development consultants.&quot; Their tool stack is a series of pretty visualizations over a typical data lake setup.<p>It is designed to be accessed by techs (analysts) and not devs. The essential algos were forked from Paypal&#x27;s fraud detection code. Their products (Gotham, Metropolis, etc.) are all derivatives of that initial decade-old effort.<p>Palantir is still just a $250 mil revenue, zero profit startup. It runs on private investment cash that it will never be able to afford to repay, absent continued infusions of revenue from a confused government patron.<p>Their CEO announced in 2013 they won&#x27;t IPO because disclosure rules for public company reporting requirements would make &quot;running a company like [Palantir] very difficult&quot;.<p>My sense is that they&#x27;ll never IPO because it would collapse the company.