Shyam Sankar is the CTO of Palantir Technologies. He contrasts Palantir's defense contracting growth strategy with commercial software-as-a-service expansion.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI value will accrue to infrastructure and apps, squeezing model providers
“I think they'll get a lot of the compute for sure. And that's, and I should say, I think the value is going to accrue in those two directions, infrastructure and app layer, and that the models are going to be squeezed.”
Opinion
Defense procurement processes fail at delivering both fairness and speed
“In an effort to have a perception of fair competition, we have created so much process that we either have fair competition nor speed.”
Disclosure
Palantir refused hourly government services revenue to force software license sales
“And so, I think the great opportunity, and really, so the playbook was, look, I'm not gonna let you pay me by the hour. I'm going to refuse to accept any revenue that's services based from you, and instead, I'm gonna build a product, and I'm gonna keep investi…”
Insight
Software R&D costs continuously increase over time, contrary to government expectations
“Software, first of all, software R&D costs only increase. You know, it's like no one, no investor thinks Microsoft's gonna spend less in the future on R&D than they spend in the present moment. That would be crazy. But the government somehow expects that to be…”
Insight
1993 defense consolidation replaced venture innovation with dividends and stock buybacks
“The much more profound consequence of The Last Supper is it began a deep financialization of defense. It became about dividends and buybacks and leverage ratios. It, you know, it became about M&A. New venture formation was about spin-outs and mergers, not abou…”
Insight
Constraining defense procurement to avoid catastrophic failure guarantees mediocre outcomes
“In order to constrain the variance in outcomes, we have constrained ourselves to mediocrity. You know, it's like, we don't want projects to fail catastrophically, but that also means you can't have projects succeed catastrophically, and the amount of process w…”