Inside Palantir: Building Software That Matters with Shyam Sankar

Bullish:

• $PLTR - Palantir is positioned to benefit from AI infrastructure layer value accrual and defense reformation momentum, with more change in the Pentagon in the last year than the prior 19 years.

  • “Now I I think the good news is in the last year, more has changed in the department than I've seen change in the prior nineteen years, and people are seizing that moment for reformation.”

    Shyam·4:22

  • “So our theory has always been the value is gonna accrue in two places, at the chips layer and at the AI infrastructure layer, what we would call ontology. But those two layers, I think, are gonna be pretty defensible.”

    Shyam·28:20

  • “On the flip side for us, at least COVID was a huge tailwind, specifically because we were able to help our our our customers adapt to this reality at the speed of the disruption.”

    Shyam·26:18
• $DEFENSE - Defense tech sector experiencing a reformation with founders returning and new companies emerging to rebuild the American industrial base for national security.

  • “There was a huge amount of energy. People wanted to build in the national interest.”

    Shyam·3:30

  • “What's been exciting over the last year or so is I'm seeing those people. I'm seeing them inside the building. I'm seeing outside the building, and that is what is driving the change.”

    Shyam·16:04
• $CHIPS - Semiconductor layer expected to capture significant value in the AI stack alongside AI infrastructure.

  • “So our theory has always been the value is gonna accrue in two places, at the chips layer and at the AI infrastructure layer, what we would call ontology.”

    Shyam·28:20

Bearish:

• $SAAS - Beta-focused SaaS companies that make companies more similar to each other will struggle as AI enables company-specific alpha software.

  • “I think that the software that's about beta is going to really struggle. This is software that made you more similar to everyone else.”

    Shyam·24:51

  • “They no one talked about the $5,000,000,000 ERP implementation they did that saved their supply chain, because all of them fell over like paper tigers in two weeks.”

    Shyam·25:50

  • “That is that that should've been a Sputnik moment for the software industry to say, Wow, we haven't built shit that's valuable.”

    Shyam·26:06
• $AIMODELS - AI model layer being commoditized with pressure from both directions as companies build infrastructure above and below.

  • “the models are being commoditized and or always under pressure. So the model companies are expanding up.”

    Shyam·27:53