Killing bin Laden for America but not keeping Silicon Valley: America's most mysterious technological unicorn.

The most mysterious unicorn in Silicon Valley will be listed next week. They used to help the United States hunt down bin Laden, but they were excluded and resisted in Silicon Valley and finally had to leave.

The most low-tech unicorn in Silicon Valley

In Silicon Valley, where technology giants and upstarts gather, there is such an extremely low-key startup. Although the company's valuation has long exceeded10 billion US dollars, it was once the fourth unicorn in the world; But they rarely enter the public eye and never actively seek exposure. If it is not a well-known co-founder and chairman, the media rarely reports their news. This startup company does not need marketing and has no sales team. Has been shrouded in mystery for years.

The corporate culture of this startup is even more incompatible with other technology giants in Silicon Valley. For many years, they have kept their distance from Silicon Valley and are unwilling to integrate into it. Similarly, they are not accepted by Silicon Valley. In the past two years, their offices in Silicon Valley and the residences of two founders have met with angry protests. In the end, the company and its two founders moved away and bid farewell to Silicon Valley.

This unique unicorn is Palantir, a big data company founded in 2003 by several Stanford alumni such as Silicon Valley venture capitalists peter thiel and Alex Karp. Palantir mainly provides customized big data analysis services for American government agencies and corporate giants. In 20 15, Palantir completed financing of 880 million US dollars, with a valuation of 20 billion US dollars, becoming the fourth largest technological unicorn in the world at that time, second only to Uber, Airbnb and Xiaomi.

Thiel took out $30 million when he founded Palantir. The name comes from the crystal ball that can see everything in the movie The Lord of the Rings. He holds less than 30% of the shares and is the largest shareholder. In 2004, the CIA led Palantir's Series A financing. Their main investors include media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and Home Depot founder Langer. Over the past decade or so, Palantir has carried out more than 65,438+00 rounds of financing, raising a total of $2.5 billion. Wang Sicong's Pusi Capital also invested US$ 4 million in Palantir on 20 14.

Although the founding team once boycotted the listing, it could not stop the pressure from investors and began to prepare for the listing from 20 18. Originally planned to go public on 20 19. Palantir submitted an application to the new york Stock Exchange in July this year and plans to go public next week (September 23rd). But even if it goes public, Palantir will not take the usual path. Unlike ordinary companies going public and looking for underwriters to do roadshows and buy in circles, Palantir chose the way of direct listing.

This means that Palantir does not need financing, but the old shares are listed and traded, and the trading proceeds belong to the current shareholders. Moreover, existing shareholders are not bound by the lock-up period and can cash out and leave at any time. Generally speaking, only companies that have full confidence in their own brands and businesses will choose to go public directly, because they believe that they can maintain their share prices without the underwriting and support of investment banks. From this point of view, Palantir is obviously confident in his recognition on Wall Street. Karp said that Palantir went public in order to make shareholders and employees get returns at reasonable prices.

They helped the United States find bin Laden.

Peter teale, the godfather of PayPal, is, of course, Palantir's signature. Usually when the media reports Til, they also mention Palantir by the way. He founded PayPal on 1999 and merged with X.com founded by elon musk the following year. Thiel has been the CEO of PayPal and successfully led the company to go public in 2002. Six months after listing, it was sold to Yi Bei at a price of 654.38+0.5 billion US dollars. In the second year, Thiel, who successfully cashed out, founded Clarium, a hedge fund, and founded Palantir, a big data analysis company, together with several Stanford alumni such as Alex Karp.

Of course, it was an angel investment in 2004 that made Peter Tiller reach the peak of wealth. That summer, Thiel wrote a check for $500,000 to naive Harvard student Zuckerberg and obtained a 0.2% stake in their newly-founded website/kloc-0. Thiel also introduced Zuckerberg to many contacts in Silicon Valley, helped the young man complete subsequent rounds of financing, and led Facebook to become an Internet giant step by step. Although Tilly was later excluded from Silicon Valley for supporting Trump, Zuckerberg has always supported Tilly to stay on the Facebook board.

Til's original intention of founding Palantir was to find fraudulent transactions for the financial industry through big data analysis, which was his entrepreneurial idea during PayPal. However, at that time, after the 9 1 1 incident, the US government sought help from Silicon Valley in big data analysis for the needs of the war on terrorism. They found peter teale, so Palantier changed his business direction and began to analyze data for the FBI, CIA and Pentagon, with counter-terrorism as his main business. The CIA therefore invested $2 million in Palantir to lead the A round of financing.

George tenet, former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, even felt that if Palantir's data analysis service had existed before the 9 1 1 incident, perhaps the tragedy would not have happened. Before 9 1 1 incident, American intelligence agencies actually had a lot of intelligence information about possible terrorist attacks, but it was not effectively summarized and analyzed. Palantir is best at finding the internal relationship between these chaotic data from seemingly irrelevant trivial information through their analysis and algorithms, and providing government agencies with the core information they want to solve problems.

In 20 1 1 year, the Obama administration of the United States benefited from the information obtained by Palantir through big data, successfully discovered bin Laden's hiding place, and sent commandos to kill the most famous terrorists in the world in Pakistan. Hunting bin Laden made Palantir famous, but Gentil and Karp also lost their "freedom": for fear of retaliation from terrorist organizations, they had to start hiring professional security personnel to accompany them around the clock. This is the price Karp, who likes to travel around the world, has to accept for fame.

In addition to helping the U.S. government find bin Laden, Palantir also helped the U.S. military analyze the terrorist activities and attack methods in the Afghan war and carry out early strikes. Help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to crack down on drug trafficking in Mexico's drug trafficking network and capture drug dealers running rampant on the U.S.-Mexico border; Help the FBI discover economic crimes, including the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, the American "liar of the century" in 2008.

Bet on the election to become the president's confidant

As the main service target is the U.S. government, many key employees of Palantir must pass the background check of the U.S. government and apply for national security clearance. For fear of being rebelled by foreign intelligence agencies, the US government will give these key employees extra allowances to live near Palantir Company. Palantir's headquarters in Pato Alto, Silicon Valley, has installed anti-eavesdropping devices in its windows. In addition to the US government, Palantir also provides services to American allies such as Britain and Germany. Of course, it is impossible for them to provide services to competitors in the eyes of the United States, and they have never considered China business.

From 20 10, Palantir began to expand the enterprise user market. Their first customer was JPMorgan Chase, who was recommended by the new york Police Department. Palantir now serves commercial organizations, including financial giant Credit Suisse, pharmaceutical giant Merck, Airbus, Fiat Chrysler and so on. Compared with consulting giants, Palantir has more advanced big data analysis technology, but the charging price is only a fraction of that of consulting companies. Their single charge for the enterprise market is less than $6.5438+0 million. Palantir's corporate income increased by 27% in the first half of this year.

Since its establishment in 2003, Palantir has never made a profit, with a loss of $580 million in 20 19. Although it is not surprising that unicorns have suffered long-term losses, Uber and Tesla are both mass-market enterprises, while Palantir is a company for government and corporate customers. However, in the first half of this year, Palantir's loss narrowed to $654.38+$65 million, and its revenue soared 49% year-on-year to $48.65438+$0 billion.

It was not until this listing that the outside world learned about Palantir's operation. By the first half of this year, they had 65,438+025 customers, and government customers contributed 54% of the revenue. A government agency brought 65,438+065,438+0% income to Palantir. Although specific customer information has not been released, it is well known that Palantir's main clients are the US government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security and many other government agencies.

The end of 20 15 may be the trough that Palantir has encountered since its establishment. That year, their government business was saturated, their business expansion was weak, and they lost corporate giant customers including Coca-Cola. However, in 20 16, Thiel publicly supported Trump. In 20 16, he donated $3 million to the latter, making him the most trusted technology tycoon of the new president and a bridge between Trump and Silicon Valley.

Trump's meeting of technology industry giants was also organized by Thiel, and Palantir participated in the summit between the president and the technology industry together with technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook. This may be the most beautiful moment of Palantir in American media. Then Palantir's government business began to grow again and began to expand to American overseas allies.

There is no place in Silicon Valley.

Although Thiel is the chairman and largest shareholder of Palantir, the specific business operation of the company has been handed over to Karp, who has been the CEO of Palantir. Interestingly, Thiel is one of the few Trump supporters in Silicon Valley, while Karp is a leftist who calls himself a socialist. Karp got his Ph.D. from Frankfurt University, and his hair was messy. His tutor was the famous jurgen habermas. 20 16 Karp voted for Hillary, and even refused to meet with President-elect Trump, saying that he did not like Trump.

Although they have different political views, both Thiel and Karp are incompatible with Silicon Valley. Because he publicly supported Trump, Thiel was rejected by Silicon Valley and had to move to Los Angeles on 20 18. Till now, Till now, in this year's presidential election, Till has kept a bystander and silent attitude, and did not publicly stand up for Trump like 20 16. Although Karp supported Hillary Clinton, he publicly expressed his opposition to Silicon Valley's increasingly intolerant culture of excluding dissidents.

It is no exaggeration to say that Palantir is the most unpopular technology company in Silicon Valley. In addition to Thiel's public support for Trump, Palantir also directly participated in many controversial actions of the US government. They participated in the CIA's attack on the Wikileaks website, and also participated in the surveillance prism project of American intelligence agencies. More importantly, Palantir provides the government with data analysis based on visual recognition technology, helps the US government find and repatriate illegal immigrants, and helps the US police identify and arrest street protesters, which makes them a bad company in the eyes of Silicon Valley.

After Paranier applied for listing, Karp even announced that he would break with Silicon Valley. "Palantir was founded in Silicon Valley, but our values and corporate goals are increasingly contrary to the Silicon Valley technology industry. The engineering elites in Silicon Valley may know how to build software better than most people, but they know little about how society should be organized or what justice needs. In the past fifteen years, Silicon Valley has kept a distance from me, and I am used to keeping a social distance from them. "

In the past few years, Palantir's headquarters in Toto and parol, as well as Tyre's and Karp's residences, have been protested by mass organizations, which has strengthened their determination to leave. Just before applying for listing, Palantir announced that it would move its headquarters from Palo Alto, Silicon Valley to Denver, Colorado, to show its determination to make a complete break with Silicon Valley. Karp said in an open letter, "We provide software services to US defense and intelligence agencies to safeguard national security, but we are constantly criticized, and Internet companies that sell consumer data to make advertising profits are used to it."

Although Karp didn't name names, the object of his reprimand should be Google. Till had previously publicly condemned Google as a traitor to the United States. Due to the resistance of employees, Google gave up the technical project of providing drone visual recognition for the Pentagon; Because many Google employees don't want their visual recognition technology to help the US military develop killing weapons. However, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all actively competing for the lucrative cloud service projects of the Pentagon.

Although Palantir is alienated or even resisted by Silicon Valley because of its relationship with the US military, the rise of Silicon Valley itself has a lot to do with the US military. Steve Blank, a well-known entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, told Sina Technology that Stanford University was the weapon technology research center of the US military during the Cold War. Frederick Terman, the former president of Stanford University, known as the "father of Silicon Valley", opened the road of cooperation in Industry-University-Research and was also the head of the military secret research team. The Silicon Valley region received a lot of capital investment from the Pentagon, which attracted a large number of engineering talents and laid the foundation for the rise of the chip industry later.