The secret reason as to why Palantir is so secretive.

“Why would you logically want everyone to know what the f*#! you're doing?”

I did a podcast this week with someone named Grogu, I'll put the link at the bottom of the article. We're talking about why is Palantir so secretive? Why aren't they so public-facing? Why did they allow this Narrative of being a secret company to exist for so long without any kind of clarification? The point he makes is so simple, and it made me even more bullish on Palantir.

There's two things that I want to talk about that I thought were incredibly important here:

The idea that Palantir is secretive because they don't want the rest of the world to know how good their products are.

Tik Tok wasn't outwardly saying “Hey, we are changing the whole algorithmic nature of content from friends to interests”. If they were saying that, and it got on Facebook's radar, then four years ago Facebook might have fundamentally changed.

Palantir is a 16 billion dollar company that has il-6 certification from the DOD. Microsoft and Amazon are trillion dollar companies and they have IL level 6 certification. The idea that they have been secretive and they've been creating a product that is so fundamentally better than everybody else and the rest of the world doesn't really believe or understand

That is a competitive advantage.

It makes sense why Palantir leans into the narrative. I mean Alex Carp absolutely leans into the notion of product over sales. Over the past couple months we've analyzed that they kind of suck at sales and that was the point of the podcast with Grogu. I was challenging the claim a little bit and he bluntly said “Yeah the product speaks for itself though so it's okay if they suck at sales because if the product actually is that good eventually it [sales] catches up.”

They could be more outwardly public, or they could have been over the past couple years, but why would you want to do that. If you know you have the best product on the market, you’ve created a technology platform that per Tyson's food CTO has saved them 200 million dollars when they spent 6 million.

A 3,000% ROI on Palantir’s software.

Why would you want the rest of the competitors in the tech Arena to know that you've developed such a big potential product?

If the product is so good it won't be a secret forever.

This goes to the Tik Tok analogy. Facebook had a lot more users than Tik Tok for a long time but that is slowly changing. If you look at Alex Zoo, who is the founder of Tik Tok, back in 2016 he explained that he was not forming the algorithms towards the social graph. What your friends are doing over the weekend. He was forming the interest graph. Rather than show you what your highschool friends are doing this weekend, we think you care about this random dude from Minnesota who's actually really good at backflips and I'm going to show you that content. Now Facebook has started playing catch up.

If Google knew that AWS was going to be the next major cloud computing platform maybe they wouldn't have put all their eggs in one basket when it came to search. Perhaps they would have started focusing on the cloud about five years earlier and wouldnt currently be in third place in this cloud race, behind AWS and Azure.

If Google, Microsoft, or Amazon knew that a single source of truth ontology layer, which is one of many things that Palantir is good at. If they knew Palantir was developing A fundamentally new way of being able to analyze data, enabling the creation of predictive simulations based on data. Then maybe they would have stepped up their resources 19 years ago.

The secret reason why Palantir is so secretive

it’s about having a competitive advantage in a highly competitive technology sector.

Differentiating yourself in such a way that the product is so advanced that no one CAN replicate it. No one understands HOW TO replicate it.

That actually is part of a moat.

Part of a competitive Advantage.

They have to get sales right, yes. They have to get distribution right, correct. However, I think there is a secret reason Palantir is so secretive and that secret reason is not so secret actually. They just want to be better than everybody else and they don't want the rest of the world to know how good they are until it is too late.

The short-term argument is that they miss Wall Street numbers, or they don't grow as fast. However the long-term argument is that you catch these multi-trillion dollar tech companies off guard.

You should definitely check out this podcast, it's a really good one!

Grogu has some really good arguments, just makes a lot of sense to me around the secretive nature of Palantir.

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