IPO – Matt Turck

The Palantir S-1 is a long and meaty read, and a pretty fascinating one considering the company was highly secretive, and often controversial, for so many years. It is also written in a very opinionated style: the newly Colorado-based company takes aim at Silicon Valley and is not exactly charitable to its competitors.

Particularly compared to a Snowflake that has had a meteoric rise since inception in 2012 (see our Snowflake teardown here), the Palantir S-1 also presents the picture of a company that, while unique, has had a long road since it was founded in 2003.

It seems that the company went through an important transition in the last couple of years on the product and go to market front – evolving away from a services company into more of a software one – perhaps in anticipation of an IPO.

Ironically, in some ways, this evolution has made Palantir look more like the Silicon Valley companies it feels so different from.

Here are some quick thoughts and notes (from Avery Klemmer and myself)

The Snowflake IPO is shaping up to be particularly exciting. Their S-1 shows very impressive metrics across the board, including explosive revenue growth at scale (growing 174% annually to $264.7 million for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2020), and “land and expand” motion (169% net revenue retention in 2020), making Snowflake one of the fastest growing enterprise companies ever.

In addition to the intrinsic merits of the company, this is yet another example showing how gigantic the market is for data technologies (storage, analytics, machine learning, etc.). Snowflake estimates its addressable market at $81B.

We’ve had the pleasure of hosting Snowflake’s former CEO, Bob Muglia, a couple of times at our Data Driven NYC event of the years (see videos below), and it’s been really fun to watch the company grow.