The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 50 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Databricks and OpenAI IPOs will be nail in coffin for SaaS
“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”
Enterprise software companies only pretend to offer outcome-based pricing
“No one does that outcome. They talk about it, but they just tip, they just pretend that they do it. No one puts a two billion dollar deal on the line for an outcome based resolution.”
Lemkin: Palantir is the only public B2B firm with a competitive agent
“If you look at all the publicly traded B&B companies, there's only one that has a competitive agent. It's Palantir.”
Lemkin: Tech Companies Do Not Need Half Their Workforce
“You don't need half your company, and Palantir and Shopify are proving it. You don't need half your company. You literally don't need half the people working at your company. You don't need them today.”
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.”
Lonsdale: Lean startup methodology is useless for complex enterprise companies
“The whole lean startup movement I thought was bullshit when it was happening in terms of the things I wanted to do. There definitely was a lean startup movement. Didn't make sense at all for the areas I wanted to work on and focus on. You couldn't have done a …”
Weitzman: Alex Karp inflates Palantir's P/E ratio while Zuckerberg depresses Meta's
“What Meta doesn't have is what Palantir has, which Palantir has the Alex Karp effect. Alex is really good at pumping up the PE ratio of the stock, and Zuck, I agree, is the opposite.”
Palantir accelerated revenue growth from 18% to 98% following AI pivot
“Palantir went from 18% growth to 98% growth, right? Unprecedented in our lifetimes, right? It may be the one of n or the n equals one.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir is the only firm credibly delivering enterprise AI transformation
“Palantir right now is the only business that can credibly say, hey, Mr. Corporate America, Fortune 500, you want to move your needle with an AI initiative that has measurable, demonstrable results, That is about enterprise-wide transformation. We can deliver y…”
Lemkin: Top 25 public software stocks slowed every quarter since Q1 2022
“Every single quarter since Q one of 20, 22 growth has slowed for the, for all public software stocks. Every single quarter it has slowed and it continues to slow. And there are a handful of folks that have reaccelerated like Mongo and Palantir. And there are a…”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic's revenue multiple is lower than Palantir's
“It's a much lower revenue multiple than Palantir. It's kind of comparable with Cloudflare for God's sake in the public markets.”
Lemkin: Three of today's top six B2B stocks will retain 2026 leadership
“My Pekumumusukus, Pekumumusukus, Palantir, Cloudflare, Mongo, Shopify, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, I'll bet you 10 grand, three of them are in the top six of this cohort at the end of next year.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir Is the Only Public Software Company Growing Over 30%
“There is literally only one public company growing more than 30%, and that's Palantir.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir and AI CapEx Will Face a Major Correction Within Two Years
“I think, Michael, it's very hard to imagine a company trading north of a 110, 120 times revenues like Palantir, growing at 50 or 60% last quarter. Great. Amazing quarter. Kicking off cash. It's very hard not to imagine the next two years that doesn't have a si…”
Benioff: US Government is Salesforce's largest customer after beating Palantir on Army contract
“Because the US federal government is already my largest customer, right? That's our, you know, we run the Veterans Administration, the GSA, and we just won You probably read just, we just run a huge U S army contract. We beat Palantir.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir's 120x Revenue Multiple Is Unsustainable
“At the same time, 120 times revenues plus or minus is probably not sustainable.”
Stephens: Billionaire Co-Founders Give Defense Startups Crucial Capital Advantages
“There is a capital advantage to having a billionaire as a co-founder. At Palantir and SpaceX, certainly, it took a really, really long time To get momentum on the business side of things. And so you needed to be able to raise money through a drought.”
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…”
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.”
Palmer Luckey: SpaceX and Palantir Were Defense's Only Recent Unicorns
“And when I looked at national security, it was a very interesting space where the only two unicorns in the last 30 years in defense, Palantir and SpaceX, were both founded by people who had just sold their company for billions of dollars.”
Randle: Top public SaaS platforms trade above 15x NTM revenue
“You have, I mean, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, all these companies trade above 15 times NTM revenue again.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir needs two to three years of growth to justify valuation
“Palantir is the best situated. And yes, it's wildly expensive. You know, you really have to go for two or three years to get into this valuation. But you know, if the boom has legs, they're the most likely to grow into it.”
Lemkin: Growth momentum is software's only defense in the AI age
“I'm betting on momentum is the only thing that's going to save us. Save us in the age of AI. So I'm betting on overpriced Palantir, Cloudflare, which is re-accelerating and benefiting from AI, and Shopify which is gaining market share.”
Calacanis: xAI lost military deal when Palantir chose Anthropic
“He wasn't even approved at the Department of Defense for this application, right? Only XAI was, and they had lost. They had lost because Palantir picked Anthropic.”
Fitzpatrick: Palantir uniquely foresaw the necessity of forward-deployed engineering
“I think I call out Palantir because I think they realized 10 years before the rest of the kind of tech market that forward-deployed engineering and customization would be important, and I think that was a very countercultural leap at the time. You know, I, cau…”
Jason Lemkin: Public software multiples jump sharply above 20% and 30% growth
“If you're growing less than 20% of a cherry pick basket, 5.1 X AR, Wix is lower. It's not in my basket. 20 to 30, 11.8 X AR. And then the 30% plus, which is Rubrik, Palantir and Figma, average 23.7 X AR, but Palantir and Rubrik push that up.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Palantir is cash flow positive trading at 123x revenue
“Palantir is trading at 123 times revenues. And this cash flow positive.”
Degnan: Forward-deployed engineer models do not scale in mid-market software
“For the high end of the market, it works well. Palantir shows that. For the mid-market, it is not a scalable business.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir Market Cap Will Not Reach $2 Trillion in Five Years
“I just think compounding to two trillion from here is pretty damn hard. So I'm a no.”
G Squared made a 3x return selling Palantir stock at $9
“I sold it at like, I think we made a three X on it and sold it at like nine dollars a share.”
Hartz regrets turning down Peter Thiel's invitation to join Palantir at inception
“The day that acquisition of PayPal by eBay was announced Peter had resigned, and I met him up at the Sundeck restaurant in up on Sand Hill Road, and he said, you know, Kevin, I'm working on this business, and, you know, we're taking kind of the fraud algorithm…”
Eisenberg: Anduril will scale defense contracting much faster than Palantir
“Palantir took 20 years to crack this code. Andrew will crack it much faster because of Palantir.”
Levie: Bespoke value-based pricing is nearly impossible to scale in software
“That one's tough to scale because everything's bespoke. So let's kind of throw away the value, the kind of bespoke value oriented approach, because that does never, you can, you know, Except for maybe like a Palantir or something, it's very, very hard to kind …”
Stephens: Every Big Founders Fund Win Had a $100B Advocate
“If you look at any of the big outcomes across our portfolio, whether it's you know, Spotify, Stripe, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX, Andrel stem centric. So if you look at all of these big outcomes for us, every single one of them, there was someone on the team bang…”
Companies should design roles around exceptional talent instead of rigid slots
“Really talented people are highly asymmetric. You're much better off designing a role around who they are, rather than saying, what role can I slot you into?”
Cohen: Sand Hill Road VCs completely missed investing early in Palantir
“Pretty much all of Sandhill had completely missed the boat on Palantir, and this guy had been there, and he saw it early.”
Tan turned down being Palantir's first engineer due to media sentiment
“Why did I turn down being first engineer at Palantir? I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out, and it actually came out of this thinking, because this is why I'm very, very careful about it, that when I was 23 and I got an offer from one of the best in…”
Stebbings: I invested in Palantir momentum over beaten-down SaaS
“Rory O'Driscoll, who we do the show with every week, has done that, and I put my money into Palantir and said, I'm a momentum surfer. I did better.”
Sierra aims for far greater customer volume than Palantir
“My understanding is, you know, Palantir has kind of low hundreds of customers. We are and intend to be at a lot larger scale than that.”
Rory O'Driscoll: Palantir trades at 70x forward sales with 45% growth
“You could have also cited, at Palantir, at 70 times forward sales, right, for a 45% grower”
Lemkin: Palantir Re-Accelerated from 12% Growth to 45% Growth
“It goes from 12% growth at about two billion revenue in twenty-twenty-three to almost 45% growth at four billion in ARR.”
Lemkin claims Palantir raised gross margins from 20% to 70% before IPO
“Palantir ran that playbook, their metrics were atrocious before the IPO. They weren't even SAS. They had like, 20% gross margins. Forget our profits. Then magically their margins were in the 70 the year before the iPhone, and they've done pretty well.”
Stephens: Operational Startup Knowledge Decays After Three Years
“The entropy on, like, knowledge of operationally being engaged with the startup is so fast. All the things that I did at Palantir for six years, like, I feel like were relevant for, like, my first three years at Founders Fund.”
Palantir survives frequent corporate reinventions by operating like an artist colony
“And I think it's actually only survivable because the whole thing is set up as an artist colony.”
Managers should shield creative talent from the brutal reality of budgets
“What you really want, I mean, that's the job of the talent manager, is to manage to the budget without exposing the brutal reality of the budget to the talent. You know, how can I get the talent to feel a few less constraints while actually being constrained?”
Sunak: a16z, Palantir, OpenAI, and Anthropic are establishing UK offices
“Andreessen Horowitz, you know, all the world's most successful VC investors opening their first international office here in the UK. And that just comes on the back of Palantir saying that they're going to do their AI headquarters for research here in the UK. …”