from Hacker News

Palantir to relocate headquarters from Silicon Valley to Colorado

by j_shi on 8/19/20, 9:04 PM with 4 comments

• by legerdemain on 8/20/20, 6:11 AM

  Palantir's had a large, well-appointed, and almost entirely empty office on Blake Street in Denver for years, while hiring in Palo Alto has slowed to a crawl, compared to its offices in New York and London. Palo Alto isn't in proximity to any of Palantir's major clients, not since Fox poached one of Palantir's senior biz dev leads to be their CISO and then fired Palantir as a vendor.

  A little curious what's going to happen to the legacy Gotham product, which is the bread and butter of their government work and is an insane ball of spaghetti code that runs on the shoulders of a few veeery long-tenured employees who all have Bay Area houses and kids now.

  Ultimately, this is just admitting something that's been a reality for years. For all their claims to their employees that "Palo Alto will always be our home," this is just another example of Palantir's motto of "strong opinions, weakly held."

• by hdhjsss on 8/19/20, 10:30 PM

  > Thiel’s move may have been made because of “backlash from tech industry peers, particularly within Facebook’s ranks,” for supporting Trump and that he was “surprised by what he called a ‘visceral reaction’ in socially liberal Silicon Valley to his support of the president.”

  I wonder if he is still surprised.

• by magneticnorth on 8/20/20, 12:01 AM

  This article is mostly quoting a 2013 interview & 2018 article about Peter Thiel and why he thinks the bay area isn't a great place for startup employees (housing costs) and for him personally (a Trump supporter).

  As far as I can tell, no one from Palantir has commented publicly about this specific move, but I did find the linked article in the Denver business journal to be a bit more illuminating - e.g. Denver was aware of the move but didn't provide incentives. https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2020/08/19/palantir-...