I wonder if this is how the excellent German engineers who made all those pretty shower heads and ingeniously laid out rail networks for Dachau thought about their day jobs. Efficient, aligned with stated objectives… Good grief, are none of you people interested in who uses Palantir’s tech, and for what? I suspect you know — one of A16Z’s “new media team” or whatever told me privately once that “yeah, they’re basically straight up evil”. I guess the engineering is sufficiently shiny and the pile of money is sufficiently large. Good luck explaining it to your kids, though.
Yes. Great post. For me having lived a lot of my career building platforms its was just all head-nodding all the way; first time in a while I read an entire post end to end.
One comment: building a platform requires some founder/high-level person to be really quite technical and able to communicate to non-technical folks why there needs to resourcing on something that looks like it doesn't add overall product value in the short term; otherwise building those primitives are never going to be staffed appropriately...
This is a useful corrective to the overused “Palantir-for-X” framing and rightly emphasizes that Palantir’s differentiation is not high-touch delivery per se, but a platform-first architecture where forward-deployed engineering functions as a temporary adoption accelerator rather than a permanent revenue engine. The key risk the post highlights, and that investors should underwrite explicitly, is mistaking bespoke, engineer-heavy deployments for scalable software economics when the underlying product lacks reusable primitives, unified data models, and workflow abstractions. From a financial lens, the telltale signals are straightforward: improving subscription-to-services mix, declining engineering cost per dollar of ARR, and expansion-driven net retention that confirms platform leverage. Absent these dynamics, “Palantirization” is less a strategy and more a euphemism for a services-led business with capped margins and limited long-term defensibility.
At Palantir, there’s the idea of “decomp,” which is the art of breaking a problem down into its most critical subparts. To take this one step further, I’d encourage companies/startups to think less of “to FDE or not FDE,” and instead “decomp” what kind of network of roles and responsibilities makes the most sense for their product and company. We live in a world where it is easier than ever to blur the boundaries of traditional tech roles. You can be a customer-obsessed MLE, or a product-oriented infra engineer or some other crazy combination. You can demand this out of the people you hire, or go through the discovery process to figure out what this should look like.
While the success is partly the work of FDEs themselves, it’s also the culture of how the entire company operates. It’s a testament to the humility of the company to take a step back, tune out the noise, and say “hey, the traditional SWE/PM/manager model doesn’t work for us, we want to invent a role that is unique to the work we do” and that’s really where the value lies.
The “product spine” distinction also matters from the customer’s side.
When an enterprise has urgency but no agreed destination, each forward-deployed engagement is implicitly asked to supply both the solution and part of the strategy. The vendor makes locally rational choices, the internal sponsor gets a working outcome, and another bespoke architecture becomes permanent.
Palantir can absorb that complexity because Foundry and the Ontology provide an opinionated center of gravity. Most imitators can't - and most customers haven't created one of their own.
The result is a strange symmetry: vendors risk becoming services firms without a platform, while their customers accumulate platforms without an architecture.
Enterprise software spent twenty years pretending services were ugly margin pollution.
Then LLMs made ideas and features cheaper, and suddenly the moat became humans embedded inside customer chaos, fixing workflows, data, incentives, and politics.
So yes, “Palantirization.”
Consulting has returned wearing body armor and a software multiple.
21 years of unprofitability, bankrolled by Peter Thiel entirely for the first 3 years, long-term horizon essentially propelled by a SV incumbent. Heres a Gemini chat I had that gave me good context: https://share.google/aimode/ns2p5smpUCoapdDSJ
A lot of “Palantir for X” feels like brute‑forcing AI adoption with human FDEs; the AI‑native services opportunity, I think, is to replace that with opinionated agentic primitives—small, reusable AI systems that embed into workflows, learn across customers, and compound like software while still meeting enterprises where their data and processes actually live.
This piece offers invaluable perspective for tech founders. As someone involved in the software and consulting industry within healthcare, I found your analysis both enlightening and relatable. It effectively underscores the challenges I’ve been grappling with, providing a fresh perspective and potential solutions. Thank you for sharing your experience!
I wonder if this is how the excellent German engineers who made all those pretty shower heads and ingeniously laid out rail networks for Dachau thought about their day jobs. Efficient, aligned with stated objectives… Good grief, are none of you people interested in who uses Palantir’s tech, and for what? I suspect you know — one of A16Z’s “new media team” or whatever told me privately once that “yeah, they’re basically straight up evil”. I guess the engineering is sufficiently shiny and the pile of money is sufficiently large. Good luck explaining it to your kids, though.
Same thought. Palantir is part of a political and cultural push. Nothing fun or smart about this
“We’re like Nazis, but for X!”
Agreed - it’s representative of everything we don’t want in the next chapter of AI
Yes. Great post. For me having lived a lot of my career building platforms its was just all head-nodding all the way; first time in a while I read an entire post end to end.
One comment: building a platform requires some founder/high-level person to be really quite technical and able to communicate to non-technical folks why there needs to resourcing on something that looks like it doesn't add overall product value in the short term; otherwise building those primitives are never going to be staffed appropriately...
This is a useful corrective to the overused “Palantir-for-X” framing and rightly emphasizes that Palantir’s differentiation is not high-touch delivery per se, but a platform-first architecture where forward-deployed engineering functions as a temporary adoption accelerator rather than a permanent revenue engine. The key risk the post highlights, and that investors should underwrite explicitly, is mistaking bespoke, engineer-heavy deployments for scalable software economics when the underlying product lacks reusable primitives, unified data models, and workflow abstractions. From a financial lens, the telltale signals are straightforward: improving subscription-to-services mix, declining engineering cost per dollar of ARR, and expansion-driven net retention that confirms platform leverage. Absent these dynamics, “Palantirization” is less a strategy and more a euphemism for a services-led business with capped margins and limited long-term defensibility.
At Palantir, there’s the idea of “decomp,” which is the art of breaking a problem down into its most critical subparts. To take this one step further, I’d encourage companies/startups to think less of “to FDE or not FDE,” and instead “decomp” what kind of network of roles and responsibilities makes the most sense for their product and company. We live in a world where it is easier than ever to blur the boundaries of traditional tech roles. You can be a customer-obsessed MLE, or a product-oriented infra engineer or some other crazy combination. You can demand this out of the people you hire, or go through the discovery process to figure out what this should look like.
While the success is partly the work of FDEs themselves, it’s also the culture of how the entire company operates. It’s a testament to the humility of the company to take a step back, tune out the noise, and say “hey, the traditional SWE/PM/manager model doesn’t work for us, we want to invent a role that is unique to the work we do” and that’s really where the value lies.
The “product spine” distinction also matters from the customer’s side.
When an enterprise has urgency but no agreed destination, each forward-deployed engagement is implicitly asked to supply both the solution and part of the strategy. The vendor makes locally rational choices, the internal sponsor gets a working outcome, and another bespoke architecture becomes permanent.
Palantir can absorb that complexity because Foundry and the Ontology provide an opinionated center of gravity. Most imitators can't - and most customers haven't created one of their own.
The result is a strange symmetry: vendors risk becoming services firms without a platform, while their customers accumulate platforms without an architecture.
Enterprise software spent twenty years pretending services were ugly margin pollution.
Then LLMs made ideas and features cheaper, and suddenly the moat became humans embedded inside customer chaos, fixing workflows, data, incentives, and politics.
So yes, “Palantirization.”
Consulting has returned wearing body armor and a software multiple.
PoC and endless Poc, followed by trials. I guess now it's the time to bring Palantirization back to AI times.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u86agPx77wA
When the Director of US National Counterterrorism publicly states the intelligence behind a military attack was a lie.. go to the source
https://bylinetimes.com/2026/03/05/palantirs-double-conflict-of-interest-in-the-war-against-iran/
Where Palantirization works: if you want to accelerate genocide and wrongful mass detainment/deportation of POC.
Thanks for the inspo Mark!
Wrote a few words extending the thinking a bit in a couple of areas based on our on the ground experience: https://enterprisecontextmanagement.substack.com/p/the-saas-selloff-is-a-verdict-on
21 years of unprofitability, bankrolled by Peter Thiel entirely for the first 3 years, long-term horizon essentially propelled by a SV incumbent. Heres a Gemini chat I had that gave me good context: https://share.google/aimode/ns2p5smpUCoapdDSJ
https://open.substack.com/pub/jverheyden/p/ted-kaczynski-charles-reich-and-the?r=5f3kwg&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Will try
A lot of “Palantir for X” feels like brute‑forcing AI adoption with human FDEs; the AI‑native services opportunity, I think, is to replace that with opinionated agentic primitives—small, reusable AI systems that embed into workflows, learn across customers, and compound like software while still meeting enterprises where their data and processes actually live.
This piece offers invaluable perspective for tech founders. As someone involved in the software and consulting industry within healthcare, I found your analysis both enlightening and relatable. It effectively underscores the challenges I’ve been grappling with, providing a fresh perspective and potential solutions. Thank you for sharing your experience!
Well written piece on the topic. A lot of early-stage teams are falling into this trap at the moment and would benefit from reading this