Chris Haroun explains Palantir, the data analytics firm whose Gotham platform serves the CIA, FBI, and financial institutions. The company's tools detect security threats and human trafficking, but require constant data feeding to work. Haroun warns investors to read the S-1 filing before buying stock.
Mr. Lee is saying. Have you heard about Palantir? If yes, any thoughts on this data analytics company? Thanks, Kris. I have. In fact, I invested in them when it was a private company when I worked in venture capital and then I sold my position when it was a private company. Yeah, so. And I did it because I cashed out of almost all my venture capital investments. So Palantir, for those of you not familiar, it's a software company and it's an a software company based here in Palo Alto. And the Obama administration without Palantir would not have found Osama bin Laden. That's right. So Palantir is a software product that will predict future events or at least look at a lot of data and be able to find patterns. And governments use it for security reasons, especially the CIA that's publicly disclosed. CIA was actually the first investor in Palantir and the CIA does actually very good venture capital investments. A lot of technology we use today was actually invested in by governments for military reasons like gps. That was from guided missiles. Oracle, the database company, Oracle's first customer was the CIA, which. And they did a top secret database project called Project Oracle. And so Palantir is not just for government, it's also for many other sectors. So many of the big financial services companies in the world, they use Palantir software called Gotham. I think one of them, you know where they got that from and what the software does is it helps big banks and financial services to undercover potential, potential vulnerabilities from a security perspective in their network, so to speak. Governments also use Palantir to help find human trafficking operations, etc. So it's a data analytics company. Now in order to be intellectually honest, I'm not an investor in the company and I don't have any information on the company at all. But one thing I will say one of the critiques is from there was a cover. Here we go. I'll refer to a Forbes cover story from 2013 or so on. It. There was one point where the customers of Palantir, not Palantir itself, it was the police department, I think in Oakland. They took pictures of tons of license plates all over the place and they fed it into a Palantir, the Palantir software product. And that was kind of a violation of privacy. It wasn't Palantir's fault, it was the customer at that point in time that's publicly disclosed. Another negative thing I've heard about Palantir is I'm just trying to be intellectually honest, as always with you is that when you use the product as a customer, it's very people intensive. You have to have people continuing to feed data into the Palantir machine before it can find patterns, et cetera. But it's, you know, I love the company, which is why I invested in it when I worked in venture capital. I'm no longer investor in the company right now. If you're going to invest in that company or any company that goes public or is going public, always read the S1 document first. You can go to sec.gov and read the S1, which is basically a big document created by investment bankers and lawyers to tell you what all the risks are. Never invest in a stock or any investment class without reading the offering memorandum first.
