Palantir: On Building A Dynasty

seekingalpha2021-06-29

Summary Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power. There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...

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Disclaimer: Investing carries risk. This is not financial advice. The above content should not be regarded as an offer, recommendation, or solicitation on acquiring or disposing of any financial products, any associated discussions, comments, or posts by author or other users should not be considered as such either. It is solely for general information purpose only, which does not consider your own investment objectives, financial situations or needs. TTM assumes no responsibility or warranty for the accuracy and completeness of the information, investors should do their own research and may seek professional advice before investing.

Comments

TMENG88
2021-06-30
TMENG88
Good
- TMENG88:
  good
老实和尚
2021-06-30
老实和尚
織田信長怎麼變小田
Ianer
2021-06-29
Ianer
Very well said. Good analysis PLTR.
LordOfPie
2021-06-29
LordOfPie
I hope so ?
ArkInvest
2021-06-29
ArkInvest
PLTR is the best stock to HODL and my no.1 conviction. the company can survive at least the next 10 years with the government contracts and also earn more through foundry by selling to organisations. ? hands
Jordlee88
2021-06-29
Jordlee88
Hehe

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Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n","source":null,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. 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Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","kind":"news","is_publish_news":false,"is_publish_highlight":true,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":1},"commentList":[{"id":153223049,"gmtCreate":1625028610881,"gmtModify":1703850494862,"author":{"id":"3568810226950152","authorId":"3568810226950152","name":"TMENG88","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2bb3f8172672ef6aad545e2729ee93b4","vip":1,"hat":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0a8758340a08196056f8bc1e54805193","crmLevel":8,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"authorIdStr":"3568810226950152","idStr":"3568810226950152"},"htmlText":"Good","listText":"Good","text":"Good","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/153223049","repostId":1115559324,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1115559324","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624952930,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1115559324?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 15:48","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Palantir: On Building A Dynasty","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1115559324","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate stayin","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.</li>\n <li>There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.</li>\n <li>These moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0361567f2939770c4946a5568ce8dc7e\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1033\">Scott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n<blockquote>\n Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n</blockquote>\n-Peter Thiel, Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir\nIn&nbsp;7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn&nbsp;Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n<blockquote>\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n<blockquote>\n We believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/604faf2a51bd7d6e60abbc5d89663571\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"378\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's&nbsp;Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,”&nbsp;is listed&nbsp;within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n<blockquote>\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n</blockquote>\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Switching&nbsp;Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n<ul>\n <li>CDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response</li>\n <li>Palantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command</li>\n <li>Palantir and Space Force Expand Partnership</li>\n</ul>\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the&nbsp;digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70fc6c13c9c0d3ca0b559fd48bdff1da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"457\">Source:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n<blockquote>\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n</blockquote>\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03bd98e9e9f53009b19523de56ceb5dd\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"384\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n<ol>\n <li>Complain about Palantir’s SBC and--</li>\n <li>Argue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent</li>\n</ol>\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n<blockquote>\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n</blockquote>\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6e1a1a03982b19a3b4181802ebb450f6\" tg-width=\"608\" tg-height=\"758\">Source:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/033d44206281f6449c0178f2f5943681\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"402\">Source: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PLTR":"Palantir Technologies Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1115559324","content_text":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"comments":[{"id":5077441,"gmtCreate":1625028690026,"gmtModify":1663230321057,"authorId":3568810226950152,"author":{"id":3568810226950152,"idStr":"3568810226950152","authorId":3568810226950152,"name":"TMENG88","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/2bb3f8172672ef6aad545e2729ee93b4","vip":1,"currentWearingBadge":{"badgeId":"972123088c9646f7b6091ae0662215be-3","templateUuid":"972123088c9646f7b6091ae0662215be","name":"Legendary Trader","description":"Total number of securities or futures transactions reached 300","bigImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/656db16598a0b8f21429e10d6c1cb033","smallImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03f10910d4dd9234f9b5702a3342193a","grayImgUrl":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0c767e35268feb729d50d3fa9a386c5a","redirectLinkEnabled":0,"hasAllocated":1,"isWearing":1,"stampPosition":0,"hasStamp":0,"allocationCount":1,"allocatedDate":"2021.12.28","exceedPercentage":"93.97%","individualDisplayEnabled":0,"individualDisplaySort":0,"categoryType":1100},"crmLevel":8,"crmLevelSwitch":1,"individualDisplayBadges":[]},"repliedAuthorId":0,"objectId":153223049,"type":1,"supId":0,"prevId":0,"content":"good","text":"good","html":"good"}],"langContent":"EN"},{"id":153116863,"gmtCreate":1625013268852,"gmtModify":1703850028084,"author":{"id":"3459825047422682","authorId":"3459825047422682","name":"老实和尚","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/30c1204cde8ab1a7e61e21d53e5e30ff","vip":1,"crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3459825047422682","idStr":"3459825047422682"},"htmlText":"織田信長怎麼變小田","listText":"織田信長怎麼變小田","text":"織田信長怎麼變小田","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/153116863","repostId":1115559324,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1115559324","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624952930,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1115559324?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 15:48","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Palantir: On Building A Dynasty","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1115559324","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate stayin","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.</li>\n <li>There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.</li>\n <li>These moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0361567f2939770c4946a5568ce8dc7e\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1033\">Scott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n<blockquote>\n Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n</blockquote>\n-Peter Thiel, Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir\nIn&nbsp;7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn&nbsp;Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n<blockquote>\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n<blockquote>\n We believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/604faf2a51bd7d6e60abbc5d89663571\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"378\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's&nbsp;Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,”&nbsp;is listed&nbsp;within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n<blockquote>\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n</blockquote>\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Switching&nbsp;Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n<ul>\n <li>CDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response</li>\n <li>Palantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command</li>\n <li>Palantir and Space Force Expand Partnership</li>\n</ul>\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the&nbsp;digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70fc6c13c9c0d3ca0b559fd48bdff1da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"457\">Source:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n<blockquote>\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n</blockquote>\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03bd98e9e9f53009b19523de56ceb5dd\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"384\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n<ol>\n <li>Complain about Palantir’s SBC and--</li>\n <li>Argue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent</li>\n</ol>\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n<blockquote>\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n</blockquote>\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6e1a1a03982b19a3b4181802ebb450f6\" tg-width=\"608\" tg-height=\"758\">Source:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/033d44206281f6449c0178f2f5943681\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"402\">Source: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PLTR":"Palantir Technologies Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1115559324","content_text":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"CN"},{"id":159251862,"gmtCreate":1624971805556,"gmtModify":1703849091244,"author":{"id":"3582704169214897","authorId":"3582704169214897","name":"Ianer","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6dfad3c43fd6d82b6a4f7c429853f818","vip":1,"crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3582704169214897","idStr":"3582704169214897"},"htmlText":"Very well said. Good analysis PLTR.","listText":"Very well said. Good analysis PLTR.","text":"Very well said. Good analysis PLTR.","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/159251862","repostId":1115559324,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"1115559324","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624952930,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1115559324?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 15:48","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Palantir: On Building A Dynasty","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1115559324","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate stayin","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.</li>\n <li>There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.</li>\n <li>These moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0361567f2939770c4946a5568ce8dc7e\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1033\">Scott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n<blockquote>\n Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n</blockquote>\n-Peter Thiel, Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir\nIn&nbsp;7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn&nbsp;Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n<blockquote>\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n<blockquote>\n We believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/604faf2a51bd7d6e60abbc5d89663571\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"378\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's&nbsp;Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,”&nbsp;is listed&nbsp;within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n<blockquote>\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n</blockquote>\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Switching&nbsp;Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n<ul>\n <li>CDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response</li>\n <li>Palantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command</li>\n <li>Palantir and Space Force Expand Partnership</li>\n</ul>\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the&nbsp;digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70fc6c13c9c0d3ca0b559fd48bdff1da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"457\">Source:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n<blockquote>\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n</blockquote>\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03bd98e9e9f53009b19523de56ceb5dd\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"384\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n<ol>\n <li>Complain about Palantir’s SBC and--</li>\n <li>Argue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent</li>\n</ol>\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n<blockquote>\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n</blockquote>\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6e1a1a03982b19a3b4181802ebb450f6\" tg-width=\"608\" tg-height=\"758\">Source:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/033d44206281f6449c0178f2f5943681\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"402\">Source: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PLTR":"Palantir Technologies Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1115559324","content_text":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":159632766,"gmtCreate":1624961186855,"gmtModify":1703848883607,"author":{"id":"4088061894927290","authorId":"4088061894927290","name":"LordOfPie","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/a5a0355358294e7526922e59e405f03e","vip":1,"crmLevel":1,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"4088061894927290","idStr":"4088061894927290"},"htmlText":"I hope so ?","listText":"I hope so ?","text":"I hope so ?","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/159632766","repostId":1115559324,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1115559324","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624952930,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1115559324?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 15:48","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Palantir: On Building A Dynasty","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1115559324","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate stayin","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.</li>\n <li>There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.</li>\n <li>These moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0361567f2939770c4946a5568ce8dc7e\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1033\">Scott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n<blockquote>\n Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n</blockquote>\n-Peter Thiel, Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir\nIn&nbsp;7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn&nbsp;Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n<blockquote>\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n<blockquote>\n We believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/604faf2a51bd7d6e60abbc5d89663571\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"378\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's&nbsp;Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,”&nbsp;is listed&nbsp;within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n<blockquote>\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n</blockquote>\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Switching&nbsp;Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n<ul>\n <li>CDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response</li>\n <li>Palantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command</li>\n <li>Palantir and Space Force Expand Partnership</li>\n</ul>\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the&nbsp;digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70fc6c13c9c0d3ca0b559fd48bdff1da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"457\">Source:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n<blockquote>\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n</blockquote>\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03bd98e9e9f53009b19523de56ceb5dd\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"384\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n<ol>\n <li>Complain about Palantir’s SBC and--</li>\n <li>Argue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent</li>\n</ol>\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n<blockquote>\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n</blockquote>\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6e1a1a03982b19a3b4181802ebb450f6\" tg-width=\"608\" tg-height=\"758\">Source:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/033d44206281f6449c0178f2f5943681\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"402\">Source: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PLTR":"Palantir Technologies Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1115559324","content_text":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":159847283,"gmtCreate":1624958445042,"gmtModify":1703848830122,"author":{"id":"3559463359065359","authorId":"3559463359065359","name":"ArkInvest","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6dfcf7df27430673110d69ba1374e540","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3559463359065359","idStr":"3559463359065359"},"htmlText":"PLTR is the best stock to HODL and my no.1 conviction. the company can survive at least the next 10 years with the government contracts and also earn more through foundry by selling to organisations. ? hands","listText":"PLTR is the best stock to HODL and my no.1 conviction. the company can survive at least the next 10 years with the government contracts and also earn more through foundry by selling to organisations. ? hands","text":"PLTR is the best stock to HODL and my no.1 conviction. the company can survive at least the next 10 years with the government contracts and also earn more through foundry by selling to organisations. ? hands","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":3,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/159847283","repostId":1115559324,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1115559324","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624952930,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1115559324?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 15:48","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Palantir: On Building A Dynasty","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1115559324","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate stayin","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.</li>\n <li>There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.</li>\n <li>These moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0361567f2939770c4946a5568ce8dc7e\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1033\">Scott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n<blockquote>\n Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n</blockquote>\n-Peter Thiel, Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir\nIn&nbsp;7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn&nbsp;Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n<blockquote>\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n<blockquote>\n We believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/604faf2a51bd7d6e60abbc5d89663571\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"378\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's&nbsp;Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,”&nbsp;is listed&nbsp;within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n<blockquote>\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n</blockquote>\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Switching&nbsp;Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n<ul>\n <li>CDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response</li>\n <li>Palantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command</li>\n <li>Palantir and Space Force Expand Partnership</li>\n</ul>\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the&nbsp;digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70fc6c13c9c0d3ca0b559fd48bdff1da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"457\">Source:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n<blockquote>\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n</blockquote>\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03bd98e9e9f53009b19523de56ceb5dd\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"384\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n<ol>\n <li>Complain about Palantir’s SBC and--</li>\n <li>Argue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent</li>\n</ol>\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n<blockquote>\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n</blockquote>\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6e1a1a03982b19a3b4181802ebb450f6\" tg-width=\"608\" tg-height=\"758\">Source:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/033d44206281f6449c0178f2f5943681\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"402\">Source: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PLTR":"Palantir Technologies Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1115559324","content_text":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"},{"id":159846714,"gmtCreate":1624958222638,"gmtModify":1703848825915,"author":{"id":"3566777210018518","authorId":"3566777210018518","name":"Jordlee88","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/1b6fd82d565980c00d01a02b919bb70e","vip":1,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"authorIdStr":"3566777210018518","idStr":"3566777210018518"},"htmlText":"Hehe","listText":"Hehe","text":"Hehe","images":[],"top":1,"highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":1,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/159846714","repostId":1115559324,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1115559324","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1624952930,"share":"https://ttm.financial/m/news/1115559324?lang=&edition=fundamental","pubTime":"2021-06-29 15:48","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Palantir: On Building A Dynasty","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1115559324","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate stayin","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>Moats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.</li>\n <li>There are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.</li>\n <li>These moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0361567f2939770c4946a5568ce8dc7e\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1033\">Scott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n<blockquote>\n Growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n</blockquote>\n-Peter Thiel, Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir\nIn&nbsp;7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn&nbsp;Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n<blockquote>\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n<blockquote>\n We believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n</blockquote>\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/604faf2a51bd7d6e60abbc5d89663571\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"378\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's&nbsp;Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,”&nbsp;is listed&nbsp;within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n<blockquote>\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n</blockquote>\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Switching&nbsp;Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n<ul>\n <li>CDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response</li>\n <li>Palantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command</li>\n <li>Palantir and Space Force Expand Partnership</li>\n</ul>\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the&nbsp;digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70fc6c13c9c0d3ca0b559fd48bdff1da\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"457\">Source:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n<blockquote>\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n</blockquote>\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder &amp; Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/03bd98e9e9f53009b19523de56ceb5dd\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"384\">Source:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n<ol>\n <li>Complain about Palantir’s SBC and--</li>\n <li>Argue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent</li>\n</ol>\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's&nbsp;Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n<blockquote>\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n</blockquote>\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6e1a1a03982b19a3b4181802ebb450f6\" tg-width=\"608\" tg-height=\"758\">Source:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/033d44206281f6449c0178f2f5943681\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"402\">Source: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Palantir: On Building A Dynasty</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPalantir: On Building A Dynasty\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-06-29 15:48 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir ...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"PLTR":"Palantir Technologies Inc."},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4436865-palantir-seven-moats-building-a-dynasty","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1115559324","content_text":"Summary\n\nMoats are competitive advantages built by businesses to protect profits and generate staying power.\nThere are seven types of moats, and great companies generally have two or three. Palantir has all seven.\nThese moats will allow Palantir to build an enduringly impactful and profitable business.\n\nScott Olson/Getty Images\nNewsIntroduction: On Building a Dynasty\nIn the mid 16thcentury, Japan was engaged in all-out civil war.\nOda Nobunaga, a samurai regarded as the “Great Unifier” (or “Devil king,” on the battlefield) was emerging as the most powerful samurai warlord in all of Japan. His name had become synonymous with military brilliance, and he had a knack for unseating more powerful opponents.\nDespite the power of Nobunaga, a faction of the Buddhist faith, called the Ikkō (Single Minded) Ikki (League), began consolidating power, building fortresses and accumulating growing numbers of warrior monks. The Ikkō Ikki ultimately established themselves in the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Stone Mountain) in what is modern day Osaka.\nBy the 1560’s Nobunaga had defeated all opposing samurai warlords in Japan, and only the Ikkō Ikki stood in the way of Nobunaga blanketing Japan with his hegemony.\nAnd so, in 1570 Nobunaga set out for Ishiyama Hongan-ji with 30,000 troops, many of whom were trained with early versions of rifles known as arquebuses. Nobunaga himself was armed with the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna: Japan’s most famous sword. Legend has it that the Dōjigiri Yasutsuna was used to kill the most terrifying demon of its time: the Shuten-Dōji.\nDespite the considerable weapons at his disposal, Nobunaga’s attack on the fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji was unsuccessful. For ten years his forces laid siege to Ishiyama, and for ten years he was repelled. Indeed, when the Ikkō Ikki finally surrendered in 1580, it was at the request of the Imperial Court rather than the fortress being overrun.\nSo how did the Ikkō Ikki fend off the most fearsome shogun in medieval Japan?\nA moat, of course.\nFlowing around the cathedral fortress of Ishiyama was an intricate labyrinth of moats surmounted by featureless walls. As a consequence of the moats, these walls could not be assaulted with siege towers or tunneled through. They could not be climbed or vaulted. It was unassailable.\nIn reference to this medieval structure that could provide defense against attackers for 10 years or more, the word “moat” has since become a common measure of a business’ longevity. I appreciate when history makes sense.\nPalantir’s Seven Moats\n\nGrowth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.”\n\n-Peter Thiel, Founder & Chairman, Palantir\nIn 7 Powers, Hamilton Helmer writes about the seven moats a business may employ to guide value-creation efforts. By combining operational excellence with thoughtful moat-building, Helmer argues, a business may be able to make itself enduringly valuable. The seven powers are: Scale Economies, Network Effects, Counter-Positioning, Switching Costs, Branding, Cornered Resources, and Process Power.\nHelmer outlines case studies of these moats represented by modern day enterprises. Pixar had the brain trust (Cornered Resource), Nike(NYSE:NKE)can charge more for a pair of shoes than competitors (Brand), and Netflix’s(NASDAQ:NFLX)content costs less to produce as it gains subscribers (Scale Economies). The most iconic companies in the world have two, maybe three moats.\nPalantir (PLTR) has all seven.\nI know that sounds crazy because Palantir went public nine months ago, and yes, it remains unprofitable. Yes, the stock based compensation is corpulent. Yes, revenue is concentrated and yes, valuation is optimistic. Yes to all of it.\nNo take backs. Palantir has seven moats. Let me show you.\nPalantir's Scale Economies\nThe quality of declining unit costs as volume increases\nPalantir’s sales cycles are perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of their business model. Naysayers argue Palantir is a services company. Bag holders who bought at $35/share argue Palantir is a SaaS company. They’re both right.\nGotham and Foundry drive high margin, recurring software contracts for government and commercial customers alike. Meanwhile, Palantir parachutes in technical consultants to expand and mature these contracts. Palantir describes this sales cycle as “Acquire, Expand, and Scale.”\nAcquire\nWhile Palantirisa software company, it stands quite apart from others who share this label. For example, there are some differences between selling a software like Zoom (ZM) to an enterprise, and selling Foundry. As of Q1 2021, Palantir reported $8.1 million in annual revenue per customer. This staggering product revenue belies the value of Palantir’s offerings, but also underscores the complexity of their sales cycle.\nIn Palantir’s S-1, Acquire customers are described as those enjoying short-term pilot deployments of Palantir’s technology. Palantir operates these accounts at a loss, and notes this selling phase generally lasts 6-9 months on average.\nExpand\nThe second phase, Expand, is characterized byvalue building.Palantir focuses on understanding the customer’s challenges and delivering against them. These are customers who provide larger revenue contracts to Palantir, but also generally represent negative contribution margins.\nI know, two stages in a row of unprofitable product delivery. However, this stage is marked by an almost viral expansion of Palantir’s personalized value creation, informed by 6 – 9 months of data ingestion and customer feedback during the Acquire phase. It is in this stage that Palantir’s offerings begin to merit the descriptorbespoke.\nExpand is fueled by CEO Alex Karp himself, who, prior to the pandemic, spent 250 days a year visiting clients in person. This is perhaps the most ineffaceable contribution of Karp; the CEO served as a salesforce for a company that never had one. Palantir’s customers are whales. Karp is Captain Ahab.\nScale\nThe word “scale” is used a full 44 times in thePalantir S-1, and Palantir defines Scale customers as those contributing mature contracts with a positive contribution margin. During Scale, we witness a reversal of Palantir’s unit economics. As customer accounts mature, Palantir’s investment costs decrease. Customers can now operate independently, building their own applications on top of Foundry or Gotham. This results in new use cases, less services fees, and a greater proportion of high-margin recurring revenue.\n\n It is in the Scale phase of our partnerships with customers that we generally see contribution margin on particular accounts improve. In 2019, we generated $565.7 million in revenue from customers in the Scale phase, with a contribution margin of 55%. In H1 2020, those same customers generated $296.3 million in revenue, with a contribution margin of 68%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1\nAnd also:\n\nWe believe that all of our customers will move into the Scale phase over the long term.We also believe that contribution margin for Scale phase accounts will increase further as we become more efficient at deploying our software platforms across the entirety of our customers’ operations and at managing and operating our software…In H1 2020, the top 25% of customers by contribution margin in the Scale phase as of the end of 2019 had a\n contribution margin during the period of 89%.\n\nSource:Palantir S-1, emphasis mine\nFor those of you wringing your clammy hands over Palantir’s inability to turn a profit, take notice:Palantir has just begun to leverage this moat to drive astronomical contribution margins approaching 90%.As Palantir converts more customers from Expand to Scale, margins will improve, costs will depress, and revenue concentration will diversify. As Palantir optimizes and in some cases automates software deployment, I expect the Acquire and Expand cycles shorten, allowing this flywheel to spin faster.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nPalantir's Network effects\nThe product becomes more valuable as more customers use the product\nIn Palantir’s S-1, “Generate Network Effects,” is listed within the First Principles section. They go on to describe how Palantir’s software becomes more valuable to the customer as more employees use the product.\n\n At a financial services customer, network effects enabled our platforms to scale from a single use case to more than 70 workstreams across compliance, front office, risk, and internal audit desks.\n\n-Source:Palantir’s S-1\nImagine, for a moment, you are a sweater-vest wearing software engineer at Okland Bank, who just agreed to a Foundry pilot. As you sip your oat milk latte, you begin clicking through Foundry information dashboards, and slowly you explore and experiment with the Foundry platform. You realize you can run data-analytics on AI-infused applications, and begin identifying inefficiencies, which are shared with your team and supervisors (making you look quite brilliant).\nAs Foundry is used to identify optimization targets, developers begin building their own application layer on top of Foundry, which identifies new use cases and new applications, and new layers are added. Palantir’s network effects manifest as a digital opera cake; an indelible stack of use cases rising ever higher as utility begets utility. This is the second of Palantir’s moats.\nI believe there are sector-specific network effects in play as well. How much different would Palantir’s software deployment be for Boeing(NYSE:BA)as compared to current Palantir customer Airbus(OTCPK:EADSF)? Not much, I'd wager.\nThe Life Sciences sector, which Palantir identified as a major growth area moving forward is another example. Palantir revealed that a top 5 pharma company is using Foundry to integrate genotyping and lab data across thousands of clinical trials. This experience can be extended toanypharma company, and Palantir’s work with this customer allows foresight into the myriad use cases such companies would benefit from. Foresight here is not intangible; it results in accelerated product expansion at lower cost for each and every additional sector-specific customer who inks a deal with Palantir.\nThis moat is borne out in the numbers, as Palantir’s largest customers continue to expand and renew larger contracts.\nPalantir's Switching Costs\nCustomers would incur value loss if they switched to a different product supplier\nThis is perhaps the easiest moat to highlight for Palantir. If you understand machine learning at a basic level, you might intuit how a data analytics company like Palantir would have high Switching Costs.\nI believe there is apoint of no returnfor customers somewhere in the Expand phase of the sales cycle. At this point, Foundry use cases are multiplying, efficiencies are being realized, and the software is becoming less a service and more the central operating system of the enterprise. In a given organization, petabytes of data have been collated by Palantir and refined into actionable processes, and each day Foundry knows the organizational needs a little bit better. Remember, this is likely 18 months into a customer relationship, and Foundry has become an everyday analytics tool in the company workflow.\nI believe this is the point of no return, because the alternative here is unimaginable. First and foremost, who is this alternative software provider? Bueller? Even if there was a comparable service to Foundry, and there’s not, you would be starting entirely over again. Enterprises want to accelerate, no, hurtle towards a digital, AI-driven future. Try explaining to senior management we have to pull the plug 18 months in on Foundry because the price tag is too steep. You would have to go back to Day 0 with data collection, analysis and refining. It would be a duplication of effort, time and expense of the greatest scale. Somewhere in Expand you’re in too deep – if you turn off the lights, the ice cream melts.\nPalantir’s largest contracts have been customers of Palantir the longest. This is not coincidence. It is a moat, Palantir's third. Switching costs only increase as customers become deeper users of Palantir products.\nCommodity software services will never enjoy the strategic advantage Palantir owns. Would it really be that big of a deal if your company switched from Skype to Zoom?\nPalantir'sBranding\nThe durable attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offering that arises from historical information about the seller\nThe Branding moat is easier to understand in the context of basic consumer products, like Coca-Cola(NYSE:KO). I would probably pay double for a Coca-Cola than a Koka Kola, for example.\nMaking this comparison in data analytics software is challenged because I don’t believe there is an identical offering to Palantir. Hypothetically, however, let’s assume such a company exists.\nPalantir has built an iconic brand since its inception in 2003. Over the past 18 years, Palantir has been funded by the CIA, linked to the identification and killing of Osama Bin Laden, sued the U.S. Army and won, and has carefully curated a narrative of intrigue and ostensibly supernatural analytics capabilities. But this company image is not the Branding moat I aim to highlight here.\nThis is the publicly traded company theU.S. government hires to manage their nuclear program. This is the company the NHS hires to manage PPE inventory and vaccine rollout during the greatest public health crisis of our time. Over the past two decades, Palantir has a track record of coming through in the most extreme circumstances our country faces. To the U.S. government, I would argue, there is no software company that better epitomizes reliability and security than Palantir. That is an enduring brand.\nThe below press releases were announced over the past two monthsalone:\n\nCDC Renews Partnership with Palantir for Disease Monitoring and Outbreak Response\nPalantir Awarded $111m Contract to Provide Mission Command Platform for the United States Special Operations Command\nPalantir and Space Force Expand Partnership\n\nI don’t care how bearish you may be about Palantir’s valuation. There is no software company that has the brand value Palantir does with the U.S. government and her allies abroad. As Palantir expands into commercial vectors with clients evermore concerned about cybersecurity, and data fidelity… what competitor can point to the resume Palantir can? When the margin of error must be zero, and you are looking down the barrel of a no fail scenario, bet on Palantir.\nPalantir's Counter-Positioning\nA newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business\nCounter-positioning is a unique moat, I think best represented by Square (SQ) in the digital wallet space. Incumbent banks have moved with all the intention of an ice floe to counter Square’s moves, partly due to regulation, partly due to underestimated competition, but mostly because offering digital wallet solutions could cannibalize banks’ core products. This is the Counter-Positioning moat.\nPalantir’s Counter-Positioning moat is perhaps less obvious. First off, who is the incumbent? Palantir’s technology is so disruptive, it can be challenging to construe a natural competitor.\nFor Gotham (Gov’t), the incumbentwasthe government; the U.S. Army, the DoD, the CIA, etc. Let’s wind back the clocks to 2015. The U.S. Army released a solicitation seeking bids to build the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). This would be an integrated data analytics framework that could gather data from numerous sources, share data seamlessly across a suite of analytical tools and provide easy-to use visualization for soldiers in the field. Sound familiar? Sounds exactly like Palantir’s Gotham product to me.\nDCGS-A was actually an internal Army project over a decade in the making at a development cost of $3 Billion. Palantir entered into the bidding at a much lower cost, but the Army elected to continue its own internal development. Palantir ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Army, arguing that Gotham provided the exact services the Army was attempting to build, and at a fraction of the cost. In October of 2016, a federal judge ruled in favor of Palantir (§ 2377), and established the precedent that the government must procure commercial services and products to the maximum practical extent. This was appealed by the Army, but later held up in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2018.\nSource:Palantir S-1 Filing\nPalantir’s landmark lawsuit against the Army surprisingly resulted in a deepening relationship with the U.S. Government. In the year following the lawsuit, Palantir’s Army revenue equaled the sum of the eleven preceding years.\nSimilar to incumbent banks, there is something about size that begets bureaucracy and inertia. The U.S. government, for all its influence and power, either chose to underinvest in data analytics, moved too slowly, or underestimated the pace of innovation in the private sector. It was probably some of each.\nThese same competitive issues are manifesting in the private sector. Massive enterprise software behemoths like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) have spent the past decade building out sales teams for ‘good enough’ products. Meanwhile, Palantir has been obsessively proliferating and refining their offerings (more on this later) without a recognizable salesforce. Palantir’s entire focus over the past 18 years was engineering great product, and the incumbents are just now sensing the deep, almost planetary groan of enterprise software culture shifting, the jeremiad of an opportunity missed.\nPalantir is deepening its Counter-Positioning moat by investing in several young, disruptive companies in the data analytics space. In my prior Palantir article,Palantir’s SPACs: Do You See What Karp Sees?, I outlined Palantir’s investments in these companies as opportunities to expand market reach and build a valuable portfolio.\nI have since added another layer to this analysis. These investment companies are not just expanding Palantir’s market reach, they are lighthouses for Palantir’s products, emissaries that may evince the velocity Foundry contributes to product roadmap and go to market pace. By partnering with these companies, Palantir is cementing its technological leadership and demonstrating commitment to the innovative product DNA its reputation is built around.\nPalantir's Cornered Resources\nPreferential access at attractive terms to a coveted asset that can independently enhance value\nPalantir hoards two resources that confer a remarkable advantage over its competitors: technology and talent. I’m going to start with Thiel’s definition of technological advantage. It’s ambitious, but Palantir clears this bar.\n\n As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.”\n\n- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir,Zero to One\nTen times better. When the product offered is 10x better than the alternative, amazing things can happen. SpaceX’s (SPACE) rockets are 10x more efficient than NASA’s, meeting your next boyfriend is 10x easier on Bumble (BMBL) than it is in your local bar, and streaming Lord of the Rings on Netflix (NFLX) is 10x easier than driving to Best Buy (BBY) to wrangle up a set of DVDs.\nAlthough it’s early days, Palantir’s software already appears to be 10x better than competitors in several ways. In Q1 2021, for example, Gotham was used to enable all 11 DoD Combatant Commands to generate integrated strategic decision advantage from intelligence, operations, logistics and supply data. This capability otherwisenever existed. Palantir’s software is so advanced it continues to invent new use cases, which is a testament to the logarithmic improvement these offerings represent.\nSource:Palantir Q4 2020 Business Update\nAnd Palantir continues to out-innovate competitors. In Palantir’s Q4 2020 earning presentation, they provided an update on trajectory towards a DoD Impact Level 6 (IL-6) status. They are one of only four IL-5 companies (Mission Critical Information National Security Systems) in the world, and are targeting IL-6, which would make them the first SaaS for Classified Secret National Security Systems. For frame of reference, IL-2 companies include data analytics giants Snowflake (SNOW) and Google (GOOG).\nPalantir’s data are better because Palantir’s data quality is better. For as much import as we place on data volume in analytics, data quality is even more prized. Gotham has been humming in the mud, in space, and on the ocean floor more than a decade, informed by the harshest and most demanding scenarios. Gotham is battle tested enterprise software.\nPalantir’s second Cornered Resource is talent. Karp’s reported nose for and ability to seduce top engineering talent has resulted in a who’s who roster almost impossible to emulate.\nAs an investor, I am okay with Palantir bears doodling out their diluted cash flow models and how stock based compensation affects it. But these bears cannot in the same breath:\n\nComplain about Palantir’s SBC and--\nArgue Palantir does not have a moat of engineering talent\n\nPalantir is incentivizing engineering and product talent with SBC and an opportunity to change the world. If one NFL team had no salary cap, every position would be filled with the top player in The League. That is what Karp has done.\nPalantir's Process Power\nEmbedded company organization and activity sets enabling lower costs and/or superior product, and which can be matched only by an extended commitment\nProcess Power is Palantir's seventh, and final, moat. The most obvious examples are product deployment speed and the comprehensive nature of Palantir’s offerings.\n\n An energy supermajor deployed our ERP suite in hours. Within two weeks, they generated $57 million of cash savings and expect to generate $1 billion on an annualized basis.\n\n-Palantir Q3 2020 Business Update\nTraditional high touch software solutions offered by competitors are delivered in roadmap fashion, with an ultimate product delivery sometimes months or even years down the road. Palantir’s software can be deployed and benefits realized within hours.\nIn addition, there are no competitors that have the sweeping data analytics offerings Palantir does. This means customers who are not using Palantir are burdened with licensing fees from dozens of separate companies whose software oftentimes doesn’t communicate with each other.\nSource:The Generalist\nPalantir has built a full stack of data analytics applications and continues to do so as needed for clients. The resulting product offering is so compelling and so rapidly delivered that Palantir does not have any direct competitors. In the above chart, Palantir's 19 product applications are outlined, with brief descriptions and which competitors offer a comparable product. Notice that the next most comprehensive offering comes from Tableau, and has only four products overlapping with Palantir.\nSource: Me, with help from Palantir’s S-1 filing\nWhen I initially began writing notes about Palantir’s Process Power, features such as product deployment speed and their comprehensive nature were immediately apparent. However, the more I reflected on Palantir’s business model, the more I began to see a second moat, one that is wider and deeper.\nPerhaps Palantir’s greatest strategic advantage is that its products offer the Process Power moat to its customers.\nSaid another way, Foundry and Gotham allow customers to build their own Process Power moat. If you are a Fortune 100 company using Palantir, your lead over competitors widens as your supply chains achieve resonance, inefficiencies are trimmed and the product roadmap slope goes vertical. Palantir's software allows customers to look into the very seeing stone it was named for.\nPalantir recognized this moat, which is why they are investing aggressively in early data companies – so they might take share in rapidly growing businesses defended by Palantir’s moats.\nPalantir Final Thoughts\nI am fascinated with the concept of building a fortress-like business with the staying power of a dynasty. There are only a few companies that can boast Palantir’s mélange of seven powers, and none exist in the data analytics sector. Palantir’s Scale Economies, Network Effects, Branding, Counter-Positioning, Cornered Resources, and Process Power have set the stage for massive value creation for itself, its investors and its clients.\nOver the coming decades, these moats will pool and interact, driving an evergreen flywheel allowing Palantir to create a business that is, in the words of Helmer,enduringly valuable. Palantir is building a dynasty.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"tweetType":1,"langContent":"EN"}],"isCommentEnd":false,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":93,"commentSize":24,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":3,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.29.3","shortVersion":"4.29.3","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/1115559324"}