Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at why Palantir’s approach to AI sovereignty, sales, and customer value deserves the software industry’s attention.
Highlights
00:02 — I wanted to talk a little bit more today about Palantir, and I know I’ve been mentioning the company, digging into what they did in Q2 and their discussions about customer developments, the huge advances some customers are making as they use Palantir.
00:18 — And the reason I want to do this is because when a company almost doubles its growth rate against some very intense competition, that deserves extra scrutiny. What’s going on there? Why is this happening? So, today I wanted to take a look at the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, as the company posted recently its Q2 numbers.
01:31 — Just to recap, Q2 Palantir’s revenues soared 93% to 1.9 billion dollars. Their U.S. commercial business grew 149 percent and is now almost bigger than their government business, and their net revenue retention was up 157 percent, which shows that once customers start to work with Palantir, they quickly accelerate the investments they’re making with Palantir.
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02:26 — His first point, he said, there is a revolution underway for independence and for AI sovereignty. He said this is well underway. It’s taking place. Businesses are going to demand that they be in control of their data and all the metadata surrounding that, the processes, the related workflows, that give the great value to that data as it’s used for AI outcomes.
03:10 — His second big point, he said, we are accomplishing this stunning industry-best growth, while he said we have a minuscule and shrinking sales headcount. So, while Palantir has been undergoing this incredible growth rate, they’ve been reducing the size of their sales organization.
04:21 — The third point, he said, we’ve always aspired to be paid as a derivative of value creation for customers. So, they don’t have a price list. He’s saying, we set up an agreement up front with customers that said if, in working with us at Palantir, you achieve the business outcomes you want and we’re a significant contributor to that, then we will extract our fees, our payment, our revenue as a derivative of that value that’s being created for the customer.
