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What's truly incredible is how much is spent on Sales/Marketing. It's not like they're marketing to millions of small businesses or hundreds of millions of consumers.

They have 125 customers. Even assuming everey single one of them came online last year, we're looking at millions of dollars each?

That's a lot of…bribes? Idk even know what could cost that much.

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I read about some company recently (unsure whether it was Palantir - in fact Improbable is ringing more of a bell) that they put a huge amount of engineering effort into proofs-of-concept for many potential customers. Effectively half-solving every potential customer's problems could plausibly consume such a huge budget and could plausibly be labelled "sales and marketing".

The company I work at follows that queue. Engineering might not build anything custom for new clients, since it's a software platform product, but Sales Engineers invest heavily into building turn-key solutions to their clients' problems using our platform. I just finished a project allowing our own sales people to duplicate their efforts into the actual system once the customer is converted and they estimated that simple copy operation would save them 500 hours a quarter. That's a ton of investment for a company of my employer's size. If we're talking about a company like Plantir, whose primary engineering workforce is, "Implementations Consultants", then that absolutely makes sense. Especially since those are government contracts, which can attach strings to the proposal requiring proof the bidder is capable of doing what they promise.

Preparing a response to a DoD RFP costs a shitload.

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