- Tyler Okland On Palantir Foundry For Builders Importance.
- Wall Street on Palantir’s Unconventional Approach.
- COO Sankar On Reduction Of Sales Cycle Times.
- Tyler Okland on Palantir Foundry For Builders Importance.
Attending a podcast with Christian, from Darntons, Tyler Okland expressed his optimistic view on Palantir’s unconventional initiative – namely Foundry For Builders. Whilst the conventional narrative from Wall Street paints a more cautious view on the unconventional leveraging of software within the context of small start-ups and organisations. Other more innovative investors are recognising the importance of “Foundry For Builders” when it comes to long term competitive moat garnering.
Tyler Okland, a Stanford-trained surgeon and self-proclaimed optimist, stated how “Foundry For Builders is one of the most vital initiatives for Palantir’s business model.” Despite the fact Tyler is not a technical expert, from a business strategy point of view, the importance of this unconventional initiative for Palantir, could not be more overstated. Tyler mentioned how historically Palantir has had a 3 stage sales cycle iteration – acquire, expand and scale. This often takes Palantir over a year in some cases to truly build value and to figure out the needs of the set organisation. Excitingly, after this cycle, the organisation using Foundry does not need their “hand held” anymore, and can build applications on top of Foundry, leverage no-code or low-code solutions, and therefore derive true value within the context of data.
Tyler noted convincingly, how the scale phase is exciting because of the fact within this phase Palantir can achieve gross margins of north than 90%, linking clearly to the notion of building a product that is at least 10 times better than the rest. Regardless, a common criticism of Palantir is the fact that the sales cycle procedure is far too long, and if Palantir wants to have a larger TAM, it must work on this invasive and often elongated sales cycle procedure.
- Wall Street on Palantir’s Unconventional Approach:
Whilst Wall Street mention, within an array of initiation notes that Palantir is “buying revenue” through these procedures, Tyler & Christian totally disregard this short sighted view.
The reason as to why among optimistic Palantir investors the Foundry For Builders projects are vital is because, once Palantir offers a service and obtains deep insights into a set industry or company, these insights no longer need to be relearnt. Instead these insights can be packaged into an out-of-the-box solution for all other companies within the set industry.
Tyler smartly pointed towards the case study of AirBus and how Palantir have been gaining deep insights and learnings over a long period of time. Now, in consideration of the lessons that Palantir has learnt with AirBus, these insights can now be leveraged with no cost to a company like Boeing. Another example Tyler noted is how within a pharmaceutical company, Palantir can use the same insights learnt, and leverage these insights into other related companies.
Tyler notes how this approach is likely to pay huge dividends for Palantir within the future.
- COO Sankar On Reduction Of Sales Cycle Times.
This also comes after vital news from the COO of Palantir, Sankar, whom mentioned recently that in light of Palantir’s new changing sales force ramp-up, the company is likely to drive down the “cycle times on these relationships”. This is because, according to Sankar, within the new model of the sales cycle, Palantir can meet their customers on price and still capture value on time.
Palantir historically has been very poor on the sales front, and by admission of the CEO – Alex Karp – this was an area in which Palantir failed to capture true value. However, in recent times, Palantir are now moving more aggressively within the context of sales hiring. Within 2021 Palantir achieved upwards of $1.5B within revenue, however only with a sales team of 25 (fully trained) individuals. Optimistically, Palantir expect this sales team ramp-up to increase rapidly within the next few month, and across the FY22.
