Outside of my own, or my colleagues experience with them, they literally wallpapered the metro station at the Pentagon with adverts. I've never seen that anywhere else in the system - ever. We're talking one of the most competitive advertising stations in the system, with many multi-billion dollar companies competing for the eyes of the senior military decision makers, and it's Palantir Tech that has everything from the floor to the ceiling completely covered, not Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, etc. I refuse to believe that an engineer in a back room, one day, decided he was tired of hashing out java code and picked up the phone and rang WMATA and bought a quarter million in advertising. No, that was done by their sales and marketing staff.

Their last conference had ~700 attendees, fully 100 of the attendees were Palantir employees flown out from the home office to fill out the space and make a big presence felt. That's fully 50% of the staff at the time. Oh, and to helpfully answer questions I suppose, but very few were able to coherently answer questions beyond a superficial level. Me and some of my colleagues kept getting passed off to probably the same half dozen engineers over and over again -- sometimes humorously so ("didn't we just meet upstairs at the breakout and talked about something completely different?"). It also doesn't help when there's so many Palantir people hanging out in reception area that it's impossible to walk a straight line from one part of the conference to the next because of the clusters of track jacketed employees lounging about and giggling excitedly whenever a uniformed Army officer walks by.

And let's not forget the conference itself, two floors in the Ritz Carlton, with catered lunch of Filet Mignon and similar fare for 1000 people? With an open bar after the conference? (Thanks for the coffee cups guys! They're actually pretty nice!) That's not a DBA running that.

Some other colleagues of mine at a different site described a team of "slick haired, googly dressed, sales guys" (actual quote) descending on their facility to hawk their wares. The brass was impressed that "even the sales guys knew the technical stuff". Which of course happens when your sales guys have engineering degrees -- I'd actually like to see more of this in the future in general, so it's a trend I like.

Direct personal experience? For every decent engineer of theirs I find at a site, I find 2 or 3 that don't seem to do anything except hand out stock business cards with direction to go check out operation tradestop or whatever their online demo is called.

If that doesn't persuade you that they have invested large dollars in a sales and marketing apperatus, my own interactions have been through people with "Business Development" in their titles.

Yes my friend, just because they happened to have graduated from Stanford or CalTech or wherever with an Engineering degree does not prevent a person from being in sales and marketing.

Like most things that come from the company, there's actually a pretty interesting kernel at the core of a giant pile of BS. The fact that their sales staff actually are engineers by training is a great thing to see in a large company. I've been on the receiving end of too many pitches by clueless sales guys with marketing degrees, when what I needed in that hour I was able to allocate to hear the pitch, was some hard technical answers. Having guys who know their stuff getting out there and pound pavement is no doubt a big part of their rapid success. But let's not be mistaken, they are salesmen, and the company does spend large amounts of money on marketing, press releases, advertisements, etc.

They actually stand out as much for their product as they do for the fact that they're by far the most "present" company in their competitive space on billboards and marketing materials in the entire area.