Reflections on Palantir – in brief
any interesting anecdotes?
Here are five scenes that show how Palantir’s embed-then-productise habit played out on the ground.
Kandahar airfield, late 2009. A two-person Forward-Deployed team landed with duffel bags and a hard drive of half-clean sensor logs. Marines were losing vehicles daily to IEDs but had no single view of where blasts, patrols, and cell-phone pings overlapped. Overnight the engineers stitched a crude ontology, ingested months of reports, and gave analysts a map that highlighted likely next-day routes. Casualty rate on those roads fell by a quarter in the next six weeks—and the “Edge Ontology” they hacked later became the template for Foundry’s ontology module.
New Orleans, spring 2010. In the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, logistics for booms, skimmers, and volunteer crews were tracked in Excel files e-mailed twice a day. A trio of FDEs set up a live common-operating picture; Coast Guard command could finally see which parishes were still short of gear. The real-time inventory widget they built in a motel room is now the Supply Chain application sold to pharma customers.
Toulouse, 2015. Airbus had a mysterious wiring-harness delay on the A350 final-assembly line. Plant data sat in four SAP instances that couldn’t talk. Palantir embedded for 12 weeks, unified line-side scans with vendor schedules, and surfaced that a single Polish sub-supplier was batching deliveries to hit its own quarterly bonus. Fixing that choke point pulled €25 m of work-in-progress off the floor; the analytics pack shipped later as “LineSight.”
NHS England, March 2020. COVID PPE burn-rate was guessed on phone calls. Nine days after the contract inked, a dashboard tracking masks, gowns, and vents was live across 200 trusts. The speed shocked hospital IT chiefs who expected months. That sprint hardened Palantir’s “deployment diary” playbook—daily logs, 4 PM demo, midnight release—that is now standard.
U.S. commercial fishing fleet, 2022. To curb illegal catches, regulators needed AIS ship pings plus paper logbooks. FDEs laser-scanned soggy forms in harbors, trained an OCR micro-service on the fly, and fused it with satellite tracks. It caught one trawler offloading 30 % over quota; the OCR trick was folded back into Foundry’s data-connector library.
Each vignette follows the same rhythm: embed in the mess, build a one-off fix, then generalise the code so the next customer gets a polished knob instead of a hero engineer.