Palantir's Alex Karp Gives A HUGE New Interview

+ Shyam Sankar sets the record straight....

Karp’s New Interview

Alex Karp gave a pretty interesting interview yesterday — and by interesting, I mean…

He’s confirming our suspicions.

Karp:

“We just can’t keep up with our product demand. We are just breaking at the seams in the US. Demand for AIP is unprecedented.”

Why is this happening? In my opinion, the bootcamp strategy is working, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s working.

Take a look at this…

Snowflake is now doing LLM bootcamps in order to acquire customers. Now, Snowflake has always had an amazing salesforce because that is the nature of their business and culture. Palantir’s GTM strategy has revolved around these bootcamps over the past few months — I think for Snowflake to copy this means they are seeing how strong a strategy like this is and what it can do to entice potential leads to turn into customers since they are getting hands on experience with their own data in a workable product.

Having said that, I believe Palantir’s AIP is beyond most platforms on the market because Palantir has been working on it for years, attaches to an ontology, and has data governance at the highest of levels. If Karp is saying that demand is unprecedented, my question now becomes…

Is that demand going to show up in increased revenue growth in Q4, OR is the monetization of those clients not going to happen till later in 2024 BUT the customer count in Q4 will be higher, indicating that the revenue growth is coming…

Regardless, we knew AI demand going into 2024 would be large, have many data points to see that Palantir is up there when clients are discussing where to spend on AI — so if Karp is seeing more demand, if they can just capture it, Palantir will be a growth story in 2024.

Fujitsu and Palantir Partnership Extension

Here’s the reason Karp was on Fox yesterday, a $40M extension with Japanese Tech Consulting firm Fujitsu — Palantir began working with them in 2020:

The main thing I got from this partnership was that Palantir is seeing their existing partners call on AIP to implement LLMs for their clients at scale — most of those clients have some type of Ontology in place (and if they don’t wanting LLMs means upselling them on Foundry since the value in AIP is from connecting to an ontology) so there is further need for operationalizing AI within Palantir’s existing client network.

On top of that, this is international commercial growth, which is really good. Karp mentioned that US is growing very well but the international markets will also want to leverage LLMs — they will have to in order to remain competitive. It was really nice seeing that Fujitsu could potentially aid in bringing AIP to many clients they work with — and if successful in the commercial sectors, the next step could be bringing Palantir’s software to the government in Japan…

Palantir might be working with Japan’s government in some capacity, it is not well documented.

Karp was asked about if Palantir is working with Japan’s government and avoided giving specific details other than his admiration and respect for the Japanese people. We all know Palantir has had major ties to the country going back 5 years now, works with the largest Insurance company (Sompo Holdings) and has a subsidiary called Palantir Technologies Japan.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Karp going to Japan and beginning to meet with high level officials, especially on rising concerns of a potential invasion of Taiwan by China and what Japan’s role would be if that were to occur. Japan is a great ally of the US and Palantir would be eager to assist their government in preparing for any harsh geopolitical tensions that are coming. I will be keeping an eye on what could happen between Palantir and Japan’s government — specifically because of Karp’s comments yesterday.

Shyam Sets The Record Straight

So, remember the Louie DiPalma report that came out this week saying Palantir is at risk of losing their government contracts because the Army is not satisfied with them?

Well, it turns out the Army themselves had to come out and set the record straight — explaining that Louie’s comments about Palantir were too specific, they were speaking about technology vendors in general, and that they are happy with their Arm Vantage contract.

Now, Louie may still be right that the contract Palantir is supposed to get next week is less than what they initially got it for in 2019, but that may be due to ALOT of reasons — in 2019 Palantir got 450M for 4 years, and interest rates…were at zero.

I don’t know what the contract will end up being, but I’m not sure if Louie’s comments here, or frankly his comments about Palantir at all, are credible anymore. To come out with a research note that was so specific to Palantir and then have the ARMY have to issue a statement because of how wrong you got it simply shows too much bias to the downside on Palantir.

I have been very critical of Palantir, especially of their declining growth rates, but I don’t ground my criticism in some presentation I saw and come to an overarching conclusion about the future of the company based on what government contract that may or may not go them for external reasons.

He has been biased against Palantir for a long time, and has had good critiques before, but this was a bit irresponsible.

It was nice to see Shyam clarify this on twitter by quote-tweeting another popular Palantir creator that I’ve linked here.

Our Clip of Karp got 1M VIEWS

Alright — this was a big moment for Palantir & the community. We posted this video on the @DailyPalantir account last Saturday — It has 1 MILLION ORGANIC VIEWS. It was a 1 minute clip of Karp basically saying GFY in a classy way.

This video alone has drove 800 followers to the account, getting retweets from Bill Ackman, Mike Solana (CMO @ Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund) and Bari Weiss (Journalist w/ 1M followers).

Why should this matter to you as an investor?

Well, I don’t see many CEOs say something *controversial* running a tech company under a $100B MC yet being so unique and eccentric with their communication style that a video of them can go viral, to the tune of 1M people and retweets from the biggest names in finance. It means Karp is and always has been the right guy to steer this ship, and RANDOM PEOPLE get excited when he speaks — hence the necessity for them to follow the account called “Palantir Daily” and learn more about the company. Hundreds of comments under the post were either “this is why I love investing in Palantir” or “I like this guy and wanna hear more” implying NEW people that never discovered Palantir now learning about what it is.

It’s not about the video hitting 1M views — it’s about Karp’s message and communication style being strong enough to actually capture 1M peoples’ attention.

That’s why Palantir is special. Elon captured the everyday person to be excited about Tesla in some way — I believe in the new geopolitical landscape, with people TIRED of the nonsense we are seeing attacking western values, Alex Karp will get the everyday person to care about Palantir.

That is a type of marketing you can’t manufacture; you actually have to believe in your message enough so that when you communicate it, 1M people might actually be interested in what you have to say.

Product Launch Jan 2024

So, I got another paid subscriber yesterday to the newsletter - that makes 4 for the week, which I did not expect at all. Any creator that ever gets paid for making content always finds it a bit weird hahaha - thank you to everyone who subscribed this week, it really means a lot!

I just want to say AGAIN, you all really do not have to pay on substack! I don’t offer anything extra for paid subs so if you do subscribe it’s just to support.

I appreciate anyone who subscribes immensely - BUT subscribing to the substack is not my main ask, my main ask will come next year.

That’s when I want everyone to actually support, because that’s when you’ll actually get something for supporting, which is going to be one of the best products to research and understand Palantir that will exist in the entire market.

I really do think you all will love what we are building, at $5/month, it will be very, very cheap for the value it provides, and cheaper than subscribing to the basic $80 fee substack charges for a yearly subscription. We made major progress on it this week and it’s getting better every day.

Again, thank you to anyone who subscribed on substack just to show their support — I have forgotten what it feels like to send a newsletter every day when I took two months off, but I can GENUEINLY say I am loving the process as I make it part of my daily routine.

Have a great weekend and I’ll see you all in your inbox on Monday!