The significance was more ideological than financial. Any business Palantir gets from startups is dwarfed by its government contracts, after all. But you can’t put a price on philosophical bedfellows.
Palantir likes to remind the world that it’s not like other publicly traded companies, i.e. buttoned-up and appropriately distanced from its cowboy private days. Sankar ends his orientation by cheekily inviting the new employees to shout “f–k off” at him — a way, he says, to encourage a flat structure. And as he walks out of the event room into the office bullpen, he passes a sign referring to employees as “founders” and “trailblazers.”