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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Large companies usually make or lose more money than most individuals deal with.

Yeah but ... consistently? Quarter after quarter? In advance of an IPO? No obvious uptrend in profit despite rising revenue? Obviously they won't get rich following my advice but I don't want to be on the hook providing the fuel for that fire.

I'm looking forward to seeing who will buy this thing; risky is an understatement looking at the P&L graph in the article. Lucky this youthful startup has only been around for 17 years. Maybe once it can legally start drinking it will find its way.

Amazon lost money every quarter as well for years. There is a huge market in government and defense IT globally that Palantir could potentially tap into. Historically, it's been IBM's gig, but that could change very quickly.

Amazon chose to invest money in growing its business - presumably with a lot of new products and infrastructure to support them.

Government and defence IT is a service business - where do you invest the money?

Note: I'm not saying they don't invest the money, just curious where it goes.

Features, requirements, scope, datasets. It's not like services are cheap and easy to make.

The other part of .Gov contracting is integrating so tightly that you become a defacto standard that is not easily replaced. Then lobbying to ensure you keep that position.

You really need to look at this in cashflow terms, not paper losses. Amazon and Palantir are not equivalent at all.

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