What is Palantir? How Palantir Became Indispensable To Governments And Companies.

in this day and age our data is everywhere as we leave our digital footprint behind on every website we view we often consider that personal data to be private and like to think that nobody ever sees it but one company has built itself around our data tracking anyone and everyone in order to stop terrorist attacks spot tax evasion and so much more you might have heard of palantir thanks to their recent stock market listing which has seen the share price rise by almost 200 percent just two months after ipo but few people know the intricate details around the company and that's on purpose i had a surveillance software company gain clients like the cia bp and airbus seeing rise to a valuation of almost 50 billion dollars here's how it happened palantir is essentially a firm that builds software allowing organizations to integrate data decisions and operations into one platform enabling organizations to answer complex questions quickly using that data but before we dive into that it's important to dissect the two men at the heart of the organization peter thiel who's probably best known in the involvement with paypal and facebook and alex carp one of teal's longtime friends the pair met at stanford law school back in the day both living in the same building attending the same classes and in their own words constantly sparring each other partially thanks to their opposite political views the pair now own roughly 20 of the firm making carp a billionaire along with teal but why palantir well it's a nod to j.r.r tolkien who's talented in lord of the rings is an indestructible ball of crystal used for communication and to see events in the past or future that allow the holder to gaze across vast distances to track friends or foes teal the chairman and carp the ceo launched the business after 9 11 using fraud recognition software that teal had designed for paypal thanks to the virtual wallet company losing around 10 million dollars a month in credit card fraud using human analysts who could analyze suspicious data thiel swaps it out to stop terrorist attacks instead by finding them through their financial transactions in 2004 teaming up with old paypal engineers and stanford graduates like joe lonsdale and stephen cohen teal bank rolled the firm to begin with they struggled to attract investors suggesting that they might need some grey hair to win over investors in the long term stories of sequoia capital's chairman michael moritz drawing and doodling through a funding meeting says all you need to know with the firm seemingly allergic to serious investors that's where inquitel comes in another thing that might surprise you and you probably haven't heard of it but inkitel is the cia's venture capital business who threw palantir a two million dollar lifeline but that wasn't inkital's only role as they developed programs around which palantir could build its own intelligence technology software in order to fulfill its vision of intelligence augmentation where human analysts could examine data from a wide array of sources getting into the cia's good books then saw palantir attract other suitors within secret organizations but were keen to follow a method they used to help lift paypal off the ground by paying people to use the product the problem with that is that it was illegal to bribe government officials so they took a different route palante provided software training to members of the army in iraq and afghanistan which not only taught them how to use it but created demand from other soldiers who wanted in on the action and made the technology indispensable but what exactly was the software that these guys were being trained on well palantir is able to ingest mountains of data and find hidden relationships which could uncover terrorist cells and anticipate future attacks translating mountains of data into simple and usable information and as it creates customizable solutions for its clients they have coders who will make a tailored piece of software for your needs sending forward deployed engineers to work with organizations themselves to turn messy information into a map for future success using a slick interface and human-driven machine-assisted analysis palantir now works for government's aiding in disaster response or as they've turned to in recent times private clients who need to solve financial crime or figure out what to do with all the data they have on their customers and how to protect it by 2011 bloomberg called the company an indispensable tool employed by the us intelligence community in the war on terrorism by 2015 it was valued at about 20 billion dollars but rewinding to 2010 and palantir received their first corporate customer with jp morgan being referred by the nypd to help with the bank's fraud problems unwinding its distressed mortgage portfolios and addressing cyber fraud which has helped save the firm hundreds of millions of dollars as you would expect a company that harvests data is considered controversial and unethical by nature not only do they monitor the activities of innocent people around the world they often target undocumented illegal immigrants rather than focusing on the fight against terrorism they've had issues with private clients who complain about the opaque terms of service and failing to deliver products and have been known to be sat in the same room as government officials discussing contracts and their dollar amounts giving the firm a strong advantage in the bidding process they've also been embroiled in a wikileaks scandal as one of their former members of staff agreed to work with wikileaks to reveal sensitive documents from bank of america but by using palantir all engineers leave an immutable log a trail that can be followed meaning that nobody can be a ghost on the system these are just a handful of problems that have seen many critics call for more accountability from the firm that controversy didn't stop the firm going public in september 2020 which saw the share price grow by almost 200 percent in just two months and now the business is valued at around 40 billion dollars the thinking is that despite the firm making a loss every year with ever increased spending the data integration with three letter government agencies is so complex that they almost can't afford to drop palantir as a client others think this might make the firm more transparent as they'll have to cooperate with regulators but some people think that due to the sensitive nature of government data and information it will never truly be transparent through its gotham and foundry products one for governments and the other for corporates they've been able to develop products which can automatically detect objects in videos and heat maps for the us troops on the ground they've also been credited with detecting spyware on the dalai lama's computer unravelling the bernie madoff ponzi scheme and even helping to hunt down osama bin laden but carp has come out saying that that's one of those stories we're not allowed to comment about with palantir receiving credit for work they may or may not have done despite palantir coming across as a revolutionary bit of software it still requires rooms full of people working behind the scenes to clean and interpret data and is one contracts purely by looking prettier than the other software with a slicker interface it raises the question of whether the business is a software company or is it a consulting firm or is it both it's worth remembering that the palantiri seeing stones from lord of the rings were often unreliable especially for those without great strength of mind as it was unclear whether the events shown were past or future and some users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to hide thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: How It Happened

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Id: h0TrjWXM-9s

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020