Transcription
Oh boy, I'm not allowed to talk about Palantir stock anymore. Here's what happened. I first started covering Palantir about a year ago. At the time, my channel was almost exclusively focused on tracking ARK Invest's funds and explaining their research.
Well, one day, out of nowhere, Kathy Wood bought Palantir stock in every single ARK Invest fund. Actually, Palantir was one of just two stocks in all six of those funds. So, I kind of made it my mission to learn everything I could about the company. The more I learned, the more I felt that ARK was onto something big—that I was onto something big.
See, Palantir was co-founded by the legendary Peter Thiel, and it's named after the powerful but dangerous magic seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings. Their early clients include the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and their reputation is one of secrecy, spying, and operating from the shadows. Is that reputation justified? How can you not want to dig into that?
Over the last year or so, I made a ton of content around Palantir, covering everything from what they do and who they do it for to the way they market themselves and the companies that they invest in. The reason I made all that content was because there's a large part of the retail community that doesn't really understand what they do, how they're different, or why you should or shouldn't consider investing in them.
Somewhere along the way, ARK Invest dropped their Palantir position completely out of all six funds—poof, gone! By that point, Palantir had become one of the biggest holdings in my portfolio and one of the biggest parts of my channel.
See, not only do they have a crazy list of clients, but they also make crazy investments of their own. They're invested in Sarcos Robotics, which is a company that makes robotic exoskeletons for humans. They're invested in Wiliot, a company that makes electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. And of course, they're invested in Wijo, a company that collects data from millions of cars for a wide variety of real-time applications, like training AI models for full self-driving, weather and hazard detection on roads, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and so on.
I even got to interview Wijo's CEO three separate times right on this channel, all thanks to my research on Palantir.
Here's the thing: talking about something as an outsider and actually using the product are two very different things. If you've ever been in a Tesla, think about every conversation you've had with someone about Tesla who hasn't been in one. If you're a Mac user, think about the conversations you have with PC users, and vice versa. There’s a big gap between knowing of something and knowing something.
As an outsider, I know of Palantir's platforms, I know of Palantir's use cases, and I know of the different modules and widgets because I read about them and watched their videos on YouTube. Then, one day a few months ago, I got a message from a guy named CodeStrap. He said he had first-hand experience with Palantir's Foundry platform and offered to talk me through his experiences, including what he liked, what he thought was different about it, and why it matters to developers, systems engineers, data analysts, and decision-makers across a wide variety of industries.
So, I sat down for an interview with him and picked his brain for about 90 minutes. We covered a ton of ground on what Foundry does, how it does it, and what makes it pretty different from the offerings of other companies like Snowflake or services like AWS. CodeStrap told me that Foundry is really more of an operating system plus an ecosystem—kind of like Microsoft's Azure plus Windows plus all the apps in Office, but for real-time data. It's the kind of thing you'd want to build a business on top of.
Just as an example, I'll leave a link to that interview in the top right-hand corner of your screen right now and in the description below as well.
But there's a problem with that interview. CodeStrap was talking to a guy who had never touched Foundry, so there was a lot of stuff I just couldn't know. At the end of the interview, CodeStrap told me that I should record a little intro before uploading it, asking Palantir to give me access to Foundry. This is YouTube, after all, and you never really know who's watching your stuff.
I'm not a developer, but it couldn't hurt to try. I'm making this interview available to anyone who's interested, but it's aimed specifically at anyone at Palantir who can decide whether or not I could possibly evaluate Foundry.
Well, believe it or not, Palantir reached out to me, and they said they're interested. But now there's a different issue. It turns out that you can't talk about the stock of a company that's compensating you. Let me be super clear about what I mean here: Palantir isn't paying me, and they have absolutely no control over what I say about my experience with Foundry once I'm given access.
Foundry is a service that typically costs money, and I'm not paying for it. So, me having access to Foundry is the compensation. But I might also try to convince them to give me a T-shirt or two. All jokes aside, if I want to get this benefit from Palantir, I can't share my bullish or bearish opinions on the stock. That's a conflict of interest, and I take that pretty seriously.
Actually, so does the SEC, and I'm not going to kick that hornet's nest. In exchange for not being able to talk about the stock, I'll be one of a handful of people with access to Foundry, and I get to share what I learn right here on my YouTube channel. What do you think? Is that a trade worth taking? I'm just kidding; I already said yes. I'll take that trade any day because this is the channel that invests in you by showing you the science behind the stocks.
So, here's my plan to make sure that everyone gets as much value as possible out of me having access to Foundry. I'm going to focus on finding answers to high-level questions that every potential customer should be asking Palantir—questions like: How hard is it to transform my giant, messy pool of data into something useful? Is it easy to visualize once I have the data all cleaned up and in one place? What happens if I add in new data sources over time? Is it easy to combine data with different formats?
What kinds of things can Foundry do to add value on top of my data once it's in there? Like, is it easy to set alerts when something happens or make predictions on what future data should look like? How much of the work that I do by hand today can Foundry really automate for me in a reliable way?
My goal is to answer those questions by walking you through the process of creating a data analysis tool from scratch with very little training. That way, we can see if Foundry's time to value is really as short as Palantir claims, and I'll be analyzing data that I know my audience already cares about—ARK Invest's trading data over the last two years. But this time, I'm raising the stakes. It won't just be ARK Invest data, but other funds that compete with ARK Invest as well.
Then, we can see which institutions are buying and selling some of our favorite stocks and try to figure out why.
Here's how you can help me make this opportunity awesome for everyone. Just like CodeStrap makes Palantir videos to help developers and builders understand the platform, my videos are going to help decision-makers understand the platform. So think of all your questions about Palantir and put them in the comments below.
Maybe you use Microsoft Excel a lot and you want to know if you can do the same things easier in Foundry. Maybe you run an online business and you have to look at data from a ton of different apps to decide how well you're doing or what you should be doing next. Maybe you're a data scientist and you're curious what kinds of modules come out of the box with Foundry compared to your current business intelligence tools.
Hit me with all your questions, and I'll try to answer them on my way to building out these dashboards. I don't have access to Foundry just yet until I upload this video. That way, there's no conflict of interest.
That means this could be the last time that I get to talk about Palantir stock for a long time. So let me say this: I've spent hundreds of hours digging into every aspect of this company. I've read almost all of their white papers and watched almost all of their demos. I've interviewed people who use it and founders who've built businesses on top of it.
I've read Peter Thiel's book *Zero to One*, and I closely follow the Founders Fund, which is his VC firm that funded companies like SpaceX, Airbnb, and Stripe, and of course, Palantir.
Yes, there's execution risk, just like every other high-tech company on the bleeding edge of their field. Yes, there are real macro risks, just like there are for every growth stock that's getting crushed as interest rates continue to rise. And yes, there will always be confusion and controversy around Palantir as their culture and CEO keep working with governments and distance themselves from Silicon Valley.
This is a company that should be on every investor's list until you have a good reason to remove it—not the other way around. And there's no better way to do that than to actually use their product and make that decision for yourself, or follow along with somebody else who is.
So, if you want to see all of my research on Palantir so far, check out this episode next, and hit those like and subscribe buttons if you want to follow along as I switch from covering the stock to covering my experience with the platform.
Thanks for watching, and until next time, this is Ticker Symbol U. My name is Alex reminding you that the best investment you can make is in you.