Welcome to our
earnings.
We are in London.
In past earnings calls and over the
course of two decades, we've been
involved in many
of the most important things that
have affected Western society.
But, what makes these
times special is
the trends that we believed
would happen are happening
at an accelerating rate, and
what's super interesting is:
why is the broader world
so late in recognizing how these
things are accelerating?
What's happening?
What is the genesis of the escapism
that our broader institutions,
financial, cultural, legal,
technical, why are they
escaping to
the metaverse or
faculty lounge jargon
or political structures that are
clearly not solving problems - where
inputs and outputs are totally
anti- if at all correlated?
Why is it that we are unable
to see the violence
that is occurring as truly
something that it will be part of
our ongoing future and
not as episodic?
Why do we describe these things as
uncertainty when they are
certain and are happening?
Why is it that our institutions
are not even pretending
that they will be able to hold the
center, while simultaneously
pretending the center will coagulate
to a center independent of
new structures, new ways of doing
things, of
new products, new institutions, new
ideas.
Part of that is we
have theology,
theological, structures around
how we build, for example, in our
space, products.
That theology presupposes
that the world will be stable.
So specialized things that we built
for both commercial and,
for example, special forces, things
that are powering current events
now were built
over the last two decades precisely
because if you are in
the periphery doing the most
sensitive, important work in the
world, as you need
to be able to interact with your
software in a way where it's
disconnected and then reconnects.
Simple problem, normal software
sucks at it.
You need a very specialized product.
We've been supplying this to the
world's most important elite
soldiers for nearly a decade under
the context of what we call Nexus
Peering.
You need an ability to interact with
space where you solve certain
problems
involving compute and involving the
reduction of data using
colloquially-defined 'AI' tuned by
Foundry, getting that to the
soldier.
You need to be able to, in the
context of commercial entities,
rebuild the supply chain because
there's war. There's obviously going
to be food shortages.
There's disruptions.
You can no longer get certain
resources from countries.
You have to get them from others
overnight.
The systems literally presuppose
that will never happen, and,
therefore, fall completely apart
when it does happen.
There is no plan for when it doesn't
happen.
This is why, you know, even
though we've been a completely
focused product company that is
only focused on building these
products, and we have new products
coming, and not as focused on
actually convincing people that
we're right, they still sell.
Because the other products are not
built for this world.
You have a financial context.
We have raging inflation.
We are very likely to see
this war increase.
The risk of a nuclear event is so
much higher than is being presented
in the public world.
It's almost surreal
to watch the coverage.
And yet, you know, there's
really no idea of what
you would do with evaluating
the quality of revenue.
Palantir, for example,
we are a company to thrive
in in
good times and we
thrive in bad times.
We are not built in
the way that the theologians of
our financial institutions would
love us to be built.
So that you're built, you know,
exactly like...
If we had listened to them, we would
only be growth and no free cash
flow.
We're a company that throws off free
cash flow.
We're a company that expected
inflation.
We are obviously super committed to
the mission, but it was obvious
to us, even at inception, in bad
times, the quality of government
revenues would be
crucial, because other
revenues would suffer from
inflation.
They would have a lower quality;
they'd be less sticky.
We built these products for the
right reasons, and we're not ashamed
to say that we're winning maybe
because we were right.
We didn't want to be right.
But some of this stuff was so
obvious. It was obvious that these
institutions, the theology of
how we model these things in every
context is just corrosive.
So you end up with the wrong
products, the wrong quality of
revenue, so you have growth without
free cash flow or free cash flow
without growth.
You have products that work now that
can be hyped up with sales, but
clearly are not going to work the
day after tomorrow.
No ability to build new products.
Why would you build new products?
You're going to have this perfectly
tinkered model.
Get the institutions to invest
in you and acquire all these
companies that actually build
products.
Yeah, but it's nearly impossible
to build products for tomorrow.
There aren't companies to acquire.
You actually have to do
it yourself.
Sure, here and there you can look
for things to accelerate.
Palantir has done that.
So, we
at Palantir are not fleeing
to a different world: whether it's
the metaworld, or a theological
world, or financial version of
theological world, or
a grad school version
of theological world -.
which isn't even actually academic,
because academic presupposes
interacting with the object from
a theoretical perspective,
differentiated from the object, not
importing a theological preconceived
version of an object onto the theory
and re-importing that onto the
object.
Products don't work
like that. Reality doesn't work like
that.
Palantir, we are playing
a critical, crucial and much bigger
role than we're allowed to mention
or discuss in public in
current events.
Obviously commercially, because our
partners, and other future partners,
are being disrupted.
Their supply chains are disrupted.
There's a threat
of a disruption in the broader
economy.
And then you
realize that the reality of
a truly monumental,
epic and horrific
disruption in the form of a nuclear
attack is much higher than is being
reported.
But also in the government
context, where we are playing
an outsized role.
And we're very proud of that, and
we're proud of the people we are
able to support.
And we're
also
eager to continue to help to support
them.
I must also say the people who
are watching this, many of
whom share our belief that
the future is
to be won by people who accept the
reality of what it is and not what
it ought to be, that you can only
change the ought by accepting what
is.
You've stuck with us and I hope will
stick with us.
We are going to continue supplying
the world's most important products
to the most interesting, creative
and effectual people in the world.
And we will continue to thrive as
this hybrid company
that is both bull and
bear and comes
into full stride in both
environments - but an absolutely
anomalous stride when times are
rough and people are hiding.
Palantir's products are on the
absolute frontline;
you see them in the news every day.
We would love some day to discuss
exactly what we're doing, but we
are playing a good role.
Your support and buying
into the world as it is,
is enormously important to us.
Thank you.