While an awesome company, Palantir is hardly the biggest or most prominent tech company in Palo Alto. Even though giant Sun Microsystems is gone, HP, VMWare, SAP, Lockheed and other giants remain. Loral Space Systems (by 101) is one of the city's biggest employers.

Indeed, as a general point, I do hope that Palo Alto is not known solely for Palantir, but also for its many long-standing institutions. From Stanford and the Palo Alto Unified School District's amazing (top-ranked) public schools, to its 6 libraries (for 66,000 people).

--A Palo Alto native (born and raised).

And Microsoft Research has a big facility near Google in Mtn View, and NetApp in Sunnyvale, a bunch of more mundane companies (Grumman, Lockheed, and Etc). I do need to get out and hike more though.

and VMware, which is the largest non-hospital, non-Stanford employer in town.