palantir philanthropy engineering oftware...

CASE: SI-125 DATE: 10/2/15

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PALANTIR PHILANTHROPY ENGINEERING: SOFTWARE TO IMPROVE LIVES

“Today, we think of philanthropy as giving of one’s time, financial, or physical resources—but there’s a fourth piece that comes into play: data philanthropy.”

—Jason Payne, Philanthropy Engineering Team Lead, Palantir Technologies1

By 2014, Palantir Technologies, a fast growing Silicon Valley company with global impact at the heart of its mission, had spent several years donating the same software to nonprofits that it sold to commercial customers to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. It had consolidated these philanthropic activities in 2011, when Jason Payne, a long-time software engineer at the company, made an internal transition to found the company’s Philanthropy Engineering Program. Palantir developed software that pulled diverse and extensive data into a unified platform, allowing customers to generate new insights by analyzing and exploring their data. The company’s software could be used across a wide range of sectors. It helped organizations detect fraud, defend against cyber attacks, drive operational planning and strategic decision-making, track disease outbreaks, improve standards of care, and respond to crime. Palantir had recognized early on that its suite of applications were also extremely valuable to social sector organizations—those with the potential to make significant global impact, but that lacked the resources to purchase Palantir’s technology. The company therefore decided not only to make its software and engineering support freely available to these organizations, but also to engage closely with them to support their work. It was an approach to corporate philanthropy that differed significantly from the traditional model, where companies set aside funds or created foundations to carry out their charitable 1 Interview with Jason Payne, Philanthropy Engineering team lead, Palantir Technologies, June 30, 2014. Subsequent unattributed quotes of Jason Payne in this case are from this interview.

Palantir Philanthropy Engineering: Software to Improve Lives SI-125

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activities. First, Palantir’s philanthropy was almost entirely in-kind giving (contributions of software and engineering expertise, rather than money). The company believed that this created more value than a one-off grant, particularly when making long-term philanthropy investments. Second, Palantir did not differentiate between paying and non-paying customers, allowing social sector organizations to access a suite of applications that it had tested and refined in the field for more than a decade. Its approach was to identify opportunities that played to its core strengths as a company and where its technology could be deployed against a specific, measurable goal. Third, Palantir organized a dedicated, full-time team of engineers that partnered with data-driven organizations to tackle the hardest problems in the social sector. This team was fully integrated into the company and was considered equal to other business verticals. However, in order for Payne and his team to increase the scale of their impact and, with their partners, to move the needle on a variety of complex social issues, the company needed to refine the strategic planning, portfolio management, privacy practices, and due diligence processes associated with its philanthropic engagements.

INTRODUCING PALANTIR

Based in Palo Alto, Palantir Technologies was established in 2004 to develop software applications for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing information. Its cofounders were Peter Thiel, the founder of both the online payment company PayPal and the venture capital firm Founder’s Fund, and his Stanford Law School roommate Alex Karp. Thiel and Karp based the company on technology developed at PayPal, which Thiel had sold to eBay in 2002.2 After PayPal had suffered losses resulting from stolen credit card numbers, the company had developed software that allowed analysts to uncover crime networks by making connections across vast amounts of data between seemingly unconnected incidences of fraudulent activity. Thiel and Karp believed that they could use the same type of software to combat terrorism. Palantir’s software optimized the relationship between the computer and analyst, allowing both to focus on what they did best—the computer to process vast amounts of data and the human to use intuition and critical decision-making capabilities to make sense of this and identify trends and patterns. Palantir referred to this principle as intelligence augmentation. “Humans are bad at dealing with really large amounts of information,” said Payne. “Computers are very good at working with massive troves of information, but bad at providing insights into that data.” Intelligence augmentation was therefore necessary, he explained, to marry the power of computing with human insights and creative thinking. Palantir recognized that, when properly analyzed, data could be used to reduce the risk of disasters, to detect disease outbreaks more quickly, or to fight corruption and crime. Palantir’s technology allowed organizations to use large data sets to identify patterns and trends that could inform their strategies and actions, whether those were for increasing profits, tackling cyber-crime, detecting fraud, improving healthcare standards, discovering new drugs, or battling the illegal narcotics trade. Payne explained:

2 Quentin Hardy, “Unlocking Secrets, if Not Its Own Value,” New York Times, May 31, 2014.


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The technology we’re building at Palantir takes massive amounts of information from many different sources and helps uncover actionable insights within that data that can be used to make better fiscal decisions, security decisions, and resource allocation decisions.3

Over the years, the privately held company attracted customers ranging from companies, governments, military organizations, and law enforcement agencies to nonprofits, think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and foundations. Because Palantir wanted a wide range of individuals and organizations to be able to use its technology to solve complex problems, it built easily accessible and intuitive platforms for capturing, managing, and analyzing data that did not require sophisticated skills in computer languages or statistical modeling. This approach helped realize its ambition to build an enterprise that would seek impact rather than revenue. Describing itself as a mission-focused company, it established an overarching philosophy that, as it explained on its website, was based on “working for the common good and doing what’s right.”4

A NEW MODEL OF IMPACT-DRIVEN PHILANTHROPY

While innovating in the development of their company’s technology, Palantir’s founders had a clear vision of what kind of organization they wanted theirs to be—an impact-driven enterprise that would bring about change by providing cutting-edge software and engineering support to companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and others. Because they wanted to build an enterprise that would seek impact rather than revenue, they wanted to put their technology in the hands of high-impact organizations, regardless of whether they were companies or nonprofits. And if high-impact nonprofits could not afford to pay for their technology, Palantir wanted them to have it anyway. For this reason, philanthropy was fully integrated into the Palantir model from the outset, even before it had started referring to Philanthropy Engineering and had established a dedicated team. Payne and Karp sought to pledge between 10 and 20 percent of Palantir’s revenue as in-kind donations to deserving organizations.5 Payne explained:

We’re going a very different route on philanthropy. Our belief is that with the analysis of public data, open data and other sources, we can have a bigger impact on civil society by helping organizations decide where they’re going to allocate their resources rather than giving them money to purchase more resources.

3 Interview with Jason Payne, Philanthropy Engineering team lead, Palantir Technologies, June 30, 2014. Subsequent unattributed quotes of Jason Payne in this case are from this interview. 4 Palantir website, “What We Believe”: https://www.palantir.com/what-we-believe/ (August 10, 2014). 5 Palantir website, “Giving Back in Our Own Way: The Philanthropy Team”: https://www.palantir.com/2012/08/giving-back-in-our-own-way-the-philanthropy-team/ (August 3, 2012).


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This operating principle contrasted with the philanthropic activity typically seen in the private sector. While many corporations tended to make money in one part of the company and give it away through another—generally a corporate foundation or a fund replenished annually with a preset percentage of pre-tax income—Palantir saw philanthropy as intimately connected to the rest of its operations. Palantir’s strategy was part of the evolution of corporate philanthropy.6 In the late 1990s, as companies started embracing the concept of “corporate responsibility,”7 many began to approach philanthropy more strategically, using their skills, knowledge, and other assets, as well as their for-profit activities, to help tackle social and environmental problems. But while much of in-kind corporate giving tended to be in the form of free office space, IT equipment, volunteer days, or pro bono consulting, the concept of “data philanthropy”—helping nonprofits turn data into wisdom—was relatively new. Yet the potential was immense, since an increasing number of nonprofits, foundations, development organizations, funding intermediaries, healthcare groups, and other entities had deep data reserves, few of which were being tapped for the kinds of insights Palantir’s software could produce. The concept of “data philanthropy” was central to Palantir’s approach to giving. By offering intelligence augmentation, Palantir believed that new solutions to seemingly intractable problems could be found. “Our technology has tremendous applications in the social sector,” said Payne.

PALANTIR SOFTWARE APPLIED IN THE SOCIAL SECTOR

For the social sector, the applications of the company’s software were no less broad than they were in the for-profit world or in government. From its inception, Palantir worked with NGOs and nonprofit groups. In the same way it did for companies, Palantir helped nonprofits make correlations between their internal data and the data found elsewhere, including open data, to gain insights into multifaceted questions and tough social problems. Palantir’s technology helped nonprofits to make better decisions on where and when to direct their limited resources. One example might be nonprofit organizations working to combat malaria. Palantir’s software could also help organizations react more effectively to immediate crises. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, for example, Palantir worked with Team Rubicon, an NGO founded by former U.S. marines that deploys rapid response teams in emergencies, to help it improve resource deployment. The Hurricane Sandy challenge entailed assessing the damage and identifying the greatest areas of need. Going from street to street and house to house, assessment teams could upload into mobile devices information such as the level of damage to a home, its size, how many residents remained inside, and what assistance they needed. That data

6 Corporate philanthropy is a term used to describe the charitable donations—financial or in-kind (goods or services)—made by companies, either directly or though a corporate foundation. 7 Corporate responsibility is a term that is used to describe the way companies manage their impact on society and the environment.


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could then be overlaid with external data sets such as weather information on the hurricane’s path, U.S. census information indicating residents’ age and their poverty levels in order to prioritize resource deployment based on residents’ relative need. Meanwhile, Palantir could help increase nonprofit collaboration, as was the case during Hurricane Sandy. “We can take it a step further and use it as a common operating tool with other organizations to distribute these work orders with other groups working in the same area,” said Jake Wood, Team Rubicon’s CEO. “That’s critical because the duplication of efforts creates a ton of inefficiencies in disaster response.”8 In addition, Palantir’s software enabled nonprofits to turn data into insights that informed longer-term strategy and planning. In 2012, for example, Polaris, a U.S. nonprofit, started using Palantir’s software in its efforts to halt modern-day slavery and human trafficking. The software was able to uncover previously unknown connections between traffickers and individual cases and identify criminal networks and patterns in global trafficking to understand which interventions were most effective. Palantir referred to this work as gaining “actionable insights” from raw data by bringing together data sets from different sources and integrating them on a single platform for analysis. “We’re focused on helping organizations unearth knowledge they can use to make better decisions,” said Payne. “Enabling multiple organizations to securely share sensitive information and analyze it in real time to drive operations and strategy is where our software is extremely valuable.”

THE PARTNERSHIP APPROACH

Rather than simply handing over its software to nonprofits, Palantir formed deep, hands-on, and often long-term relationships with NGOs and social sector organizations, regularly sending engineering teams to work with these organizations and collaborate on developing solutions. Often Palantir would use a rotational model to get the company’s high-performing engineers and designers working on a project for a development cycle of four to 12 weeks. However, the learning process was not merely one way. Palantir learned many lessons from the nonprofits it collaborated with. And many of its partnerships proved either turning points for the company in its approach to philanthropy or starting points from which Palantir built deeper relationships and created broad coalitions of players to work on solving social problems. Between 2007 and 2014, its deployments included:

Analysis of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq (2007-2008)

In November 2007, using Palantir software, the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point started analyzing personnel records of almost 700 foreign fighters in Iraq that were obtained during a raid by U.S. and coalition ground troops from an Al-Qa’ida safe house near the city of Sinjar along the Syrian border of Iraq. The relationship grew from a visit Payne paid to West Point military academy, New York, where he demonstrated the

8 Interview with Jake Wood, CEO, Team Rubicon, July 9, 2014.


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company’s software capabilities to Colonel Joseph Felter, then head of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Not only was Felter extremely impressed but also, having recently gained access to the foreign fighter records, he was able to present Payne with an immediate challenge to which Palantir’s software could be applied. “The timing was perfect because we were trying to make sense of this important information that people needed to learn about,” said Felter. “So it was an instant project and it played to Palantir’s strengths.” It was the first time Palantir’s technology had been deployed to uncover information that could be used to save lives, in this case by gaining insights into the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria. The analysis yielded insights into the determination of these fighters as well as the recruiting and organizational capability of Al-Qa’ida. However, it also helped develop Palantir’s philanthropic strategy into one in which it sought out challenges for which its resources could have tangible impact. “These were the brightest computer scientists on the planet,” said Felter. “They knew how to do everything with data, but they needed some context. We were able to show them the impact.” For Palantir, this engagement was an early example of how the company would operate in the philanthropic sphere. It was applying the work it was already doing with the private sector and government to the social sector. And at the heart of the model was a process by which Palantir and its partners worked alongside each other. Partnering with nonprofit subject matter experts, it offered not only its software, but also its human resources—what Palantir called “Forward Deployment Engineers”—to uncover and solve problems.

Human trafficking (2010-2014)

During this period, Palantir deepened its philanthropic portfolio by working on social issues with not just one organization, but by creating a body of work addressing social problems. One example was human trafficking. First, in 2010, Palantir entered a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which fights the abduction and sexual exploitation of children. Palantir unified multiple disparate databases, along with case reports, maps, images, and videos, so that NCMEC staff could conduct faster information searches and analyze cases. In one case, a 17-year-old girl was reported missing in California, suspected of being a sex trafficking victim. An analyst at NCMEC found many online posts advertising the missing child for sex and was able to tie them to other posts from the same pimp advertising nine different women across five states. Palantir created an analysis graph that highlighted the links between these posts, making it easy for law enforcement agencies to see the scope of the prostitution ring and link the pimp to many other crimes and female victimizations.9 In 2012, Palantir entered into a partnership with Polaris, which operated the National Human Trafficking Resource Center and Hotline. First, the company increased the operational effectiveness of the hotline—a service that connected callers with call center specialists, who provided emotional support while learning about a caller’s situation. Call center specialists advised the caller on staying safe and, if requested, contacted law enforcement agencies to help

9 Finding Missing & Exploited Children: A Palantir & NCMEC Partnership, Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/wp-assets/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NCMEC-Impact-Study.pdf (October 1, 2014).


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the caller escape their trafficker. The hotline played an instrumental role in connecting callers to local human trafficking survivor services organizations, legal services, and resources such as shelters, transportation, and mental health services. However, hotline specialists would have to cross-reference online map resources, an online database, and Word documents covering more than 200 geographically specific protocols—a complex process taking several minutes to navigate, and up to 15 minutes in complicated cases. Working with Polaris, Palantir created a platform that integrated data from calls—whether from a victim or someone witnessing an incident—with Polaris’s database of 3,000 referral organizations. This brought down to a matter of seconds the time it took for call specialists to find the nearest and best-suited resource available to help the caller. Palantir’s contribution to Polaris went beyond operational efficiency. By overlaying its data with other data sets, it helped Polaris to identify patterns in types of human trafficking. For example, Polaris used Palantir to map trends and identify hotspots of sex trafficking at truck stops in America (see Exhibit 1). With this knowledge, Polaris was able to collaborate with organizations such as Truckers Against Trafficking to target their awareness and outreach work to increase victim identification and to work with the truck stop industry to help prevent abuse at their locations. During its partnership with Polaris, Palantir embarked on a rotational model for a regular engineer to support the deployment. It gave the organization a software license, along with technical support in rolling out the software, an engineer on site, and training for anyone who would use the system. This approach allowed Palantir to build experience and knowledge it could then use to support efforts combating modern slavery in corporate supply chains. “Having an engineer onsite really helped them to develop a foundational understanding of the human trafficking field,” said Brad Myles, chief executive of Polaris. “And that became a springboard for other partnerships and other ways their software could be used to fight human trafficking.”

Hurricane Sandy (2012)

Palantir’s first work on disaster relief came after Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey in 2012. Working with Team Rubicon, Palantir built a triage algorithm10 to divide and assign volunteers to different jobs, according to the urgency of need. The partnership proved a learning experience for both parties. Initially, Team Rubicon leaders were uncertain as to how Palantir’s technology could play a role in disaster relief. “I wasn’t able to wrap my head over what they could do,” said Team Rubicon’s CEO Jake Wood. However, after the hurricane had hit and Palantir experts had spent a day in New York, Wood received a call from a team member who told him: “These are the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, and they’re going change what we do.” Palantir’s technology enabled Team Rubicon staff and volunteers to maximize their responsiveness and prioritize their actions by presenting a more detailed picture of the damage and the relative vulnerability of families the storm affected. Team Rubicon could also improve

10 An algorithm is a set of steps that are followed in order to solve a mathematical problem or to complete a computer process.


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its long-term efficiency. Relief workers who once relied on pen, paper, and hand-delivery could use Palantir Mobile (an app allowing teams to answer queries, create reports and surveys remotely, and track personnel in the field) and, one year later in the Philippines, Palantir MIMOSA (which ran on low-cost, satellite-enabled GPS devices that operated in the absence of other telecommunications services) to execute damage assessments and transmit them to planning teams in real time.11 At the same time, another nonprofit partner, Direct Relief, used Palantir’s software to conduct data analysis of the likely path of the storm and analyze real-time weather data after it hit. This enabled it to pre-position supplies and medicine, and provide emergency medical supplies most effectively in the storm’s aftermath. However, while working on relief efforts, Palantir saw that it could play a role not only in assisting individual organizations, but also by enabling coordination between different organizations. The experience of supporting the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts further underscored the company’s belief in collaborating across diverse organizations to improve efficiencies and avoid duplication. It also highlighted the need for standardized, open data, and the interoperability of IT systems so that different organizations could share information in real time.12 “In the fog of war or disaster no one knows at a granular level who is doing what and where,” said Payne. “So there are massive economies of scale if you can get a collaborative environment.” For this reason, Palantir was starting to look for more opportunities to bring its software and engineering services to groups of social sector organizations rather than individual nonprofits.

2014: Anti-slavery (2014)

As Palantir’s approach to philanthropy evolved, it began to address social problems by bringing together even broader coalitions that included organizations ranging from nonprofits to corporations. Building on its work with NCMEC and Polaris, Palantir formed a partnership with Humanity United (part of the Omidyar Group), and Verité (a nonprofit that conducted supply chain analysis and developed the tools and guidance needed to support responsible supply chain production, minimize labor abuse, and provide better protection for workers). Verité had built up data over decades about electronics factories and the brokers and subcontractors that sourced migrant labor. By 2014, Palantir was starting to help Verité analyze this data, which would ultimately allow the organization to identify unscrupulous operators and help corporations remove slavery from corporate supply chains. “What’s exciting to me about this project is that we have corporations voluntarily sharing precompetitive data about their supply chains and subcontractors with a trusted entity, that is, Verité,” said Payne. “No multicontinental corporation, when acting alone, has the capacity to completely stamp slavery out of its supply

11 Palantir information sheet: “Palantir Humanitarian Response Platform / Typhoon Haiyan”: https://wget2014.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/16_impact-study-palantirs-response-to-typhoon-haiyan.pdf (August 10, 2014). 12 Statement of Jason Matthew Payne, Philanthropy Lead, Palantir Technologies Inc., before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response and Communications, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., June 4, 2013: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/HM/HM12/20130604/100924/HHRG-113-HM12-Wstate-PayneJ-20130604.pdf (July 10, 2014).


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chain. However, when many leaders in an industry share data to address the problem collaboratively, real progress can be made.” The initiative reflected Palantir’s objective of promoting cross-sector collaboration, since supply chain manufacturing—an industry involving a wide range of businesses—would require many companies to share precompetitive data on suppliers and labor subcontractors, and the subject-matter expertise of an NGO such as Verité to collect and analyze additional data sources. “Our goal has been to build those collaborative links,” said Payne.

THE EVOLUTION OF PHILANTHROPY AT PALANTIR

From its inception, Palantir had focused on what it came to call Philanthropy Engineering. Even before its technology was commercially viable, the company was supporting academic institutions, think tanks, and nonprofits. However, while Palantir underwent an evolution in the type of causes it supported and the scale of the work it undertook, it also became increasingly sophisticated in its choice of partners and projects, moving from a reactive, scattergun approach to making strategic decisions about the causes and organizations it supported. And increasingly, rather than working with single organizations, it looked to create cross-sector collaborations. It also created a detailed due diligence process that it applied before embarking on partnerships with nonprofits and NGOs. As a relatively young and small company, Palantir had initially selected partner nonprofits and NGOs by crowdsourcing ideas for organizations from its staff and their networks. However, it began to realize that it needed a more systematic way of identifying the right causes and organizations to focus on in its philanthropic activities. It therefore took time to assess multiple issues—from veteran wellbeing to climate change and environmental challenges—to identify the areas in which it could add the most value. It also worked to take a disciplined, strategic approach to the causes and organizations it supported so that it did not stretch its resources too thinly. “We weren’t sure we could move the needle as much on environmental advocacy issues as on more human focused issues,” explained Payne. Having come to this conclusion, the company instigated a process by which it conducted regular evaluations of its engagements. With philanthropic partnerships established through annual contracts, it reviewed their progress 90 days before renewing the contract to decide whether or not its philanthropic partners were delivering positive returns on investment. It posed a series of questions to potential partners. For example, it asked them to evaluate the impact created by working with Palantir in the previous year. It also asked them what success could look like in the year ahead, how Palantir’s analysis tools could be applied to new challenges to generate more impact, how progress could be tracked, and over what timeline the goals would be met. It also asked about instances where Palantir had failed to deliver as promised for the partner. “It’s important to discuss candidly failures with our partners in order to learn from our mistakes,” said Payne. “Far too often, nonprofits only discuss wins and successes with their funders and supporters, and I think that bias can negatively affect mission impact.” In general, Palantir found a positive return in 80 percent of the engagements. Based on setting Palantir’s manpower investment against each nonprofit or NGO partnership’s social impact


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returns, it would review the remaining 20 percent of engagements with the company’s directors during the 90-day window to jointly decide whether or not to continue supporting the NGO. Early experiences also taught Palantir that many NGOs did not yet have the capacity or the capability to drive on-the-ground action, even when equipped with Palantir software. Moreover, the company was encountering more promising opportunities than it had resources to pursue. With its goal of helping organizations unearth knowledge that would enable better operational decisions, it needed to find partners that would have the capacity to use its technology to achieve maximum impact. This led to the creation of a sophisticated due diligence process. Palantir also developed a framework to enable its Philanthropy Engineering team to make sophisticated assessments of potential philanthropic opportunities and to decide whether or not an engagement would enable the company to make the most of its limited resources while also avoiding reputational, legal, privacy, and other risks. It referred to this tool as “red teaming,” a term, often used in the military, that describes the practice of improving decision making by viewing a problem or operation from the perspective of an adversary or competitor. Payne explained:

When seeking to help people impacted by some of the worst human conditions in the world such as war, disease, slavery, hunger, domestic violence, child abuse, and natural disasters, there can often be unintended, negative consequences to a well-intentioned project to help. Our opportunity evaluation framework helps us ensure that we adequately assess risk and achieve positive impact through the projects we support.

At the heart of Palantir’s partner due diligence process were four questions: Did the organization have sources of data significant enough to utilize Palantir’s robust analytical capabilities? Did the organization have questions that could be answered by analyzing this data? Did the organization have analysts in place who were capable of using Palantir’s software to ask those questions? Lastly, for a nonprofit, what was the difference between having and not having Palantir? In other words, was this a good problem for Palantir and did a philanthropic investment significantly increase the impact of the nonprofit’s work and the quality of its operational outcomes? Risks were assessed in four areas: The potential risks associated with the organization itself; the potential risks associated with the data; the potential risks associated with the challenges to be tackled; and potential risks in Palantir’s ability to both provide sufficient resources to the project and account for the opportunity costs. These risks would not necessarily prevent the company from embarking on a partnership, but they had to be balanced against the engagement’s potential positive impact. “There’s a class of NGO that doesn’t necessarily have the capacity or the capability to drive on-the-ground action,” explained Payne. “So we decline folks who we don’t think can use Palantir to make a substantive difference. We aggressively seek partners that directly improve and save human lives, and we do all that we can to amplify their impact.”


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EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL IMPACT

For most of Palantir’s partnerships, engagements led to positive outcomes, helping NGOs and nonprofits react more effectively to disasters or make faster progress in achieving their goals. However, the philanthropic engagements also had a powerful impact internally, helping the company attract, retain, and engage employees. Pursuing this dual impact—external and internal—remained an important part of Palantir’s Philanthropy Engineering strategy. “While we are solely focused on the direct, positive impact we have on people’s lives, there are a few positive externalities generated by our partnerships that are worth recognizing,” said Payne.

Internal impact

For Palantir, data philanthropy came at a cost. In addition to the engineers it rotated through NGO and nonprofit projects—taking time away from their profit-making activities—the company employed a team of about 10 people on a full-time basis. By 2014, when office space, salaries, and travel costs were taken into account, the company was allocating a budget of about US$2.5 to US$3 million a year to philanthropic work.13 Aside from the obvious external returns, the internal return on investment, if hard to measure, was significant in terms of attracting and retaining top software developers in a highly competitive labor market. Because the company had a five-year vesting schedule,14 Palantir needed to provide other incentives to engage and retain employees once they had secured the majority of their benefits.15 “To build the type of software we’re building, it takes the best engineers in the world,” said Payne. “And to recruit and retain the best in the world, Palantir offers them meaningful work and an opportunity to make a difference.” Staff found going on rotation with nonprofits and NGOs to be a powerful, inspiring experience. “It’s a reward and recharge,” said Payne. “We have a lot of engineers who are working extremely hard on problems that have up to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue riding on success. So it allows the engineer, after having delivered success, to take a step back and work on something emotionally rewarding.” The rotations provided internal networking and team building opportunities. “I got to meet a whole team of folks I’d normally only engage with from time to time,” said Branden Jordan, a Palantir support engineer, who led the initial implementation work at Polaris and trained the first cohort of Polaris team members in the partnership. “And it exposes you to the way other teams do things.”16 13 Notes from meeting between Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation (LAAF) team and Jason Payne, Philanthropy Engineering Team Lead, Palantir Technologies, April 23, 2014. 14 Vesting gives an employee rights to employer-provided assets such as stock or employer contributions to an individual’s retirement plan, which gives the employee an incentive to perform well and remain with the company. 15 Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation (LAAF) team interview with Gavin Hood, Chief of Staff, Palantir Technologies, and Jason Payne, Philanthropy Engineering Team Lead, Palantir Technologies, April 17, 2014. 16 Interview with Branden Jordan, Support Engineer, Palantir Technologies, July 24, 2014. Subsequent unattributed quotes of Branden Jordan in this case are from this interview.


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It also exposed Palantir employees to different ways in which their work could make an impact, whether they were working on commercial projects or nonprofit engagements. Felter, who worked with Palantir on the project to analyze foreign fighters in Iraq, said that while these individuals were experts in analyzing data, the project enabled them understand how they could use that expertise in different contexts and “connect what they’re doing 24-hours a day in their cubes to what’s happening in the field and how it’s changing lives.”17 Moreover, employees were able to maintain and expand their expertise, particularly since, while on rotation with a nonprofit or NGO, they would work intensely on one project. “I was a lot more involved than I’d normally be,” said Jordan. “I reach a dozen different customers from across the globe on any given day. This was a three-week deep dive, and it gave me a different perspective on the Palantir solution from end to end.” Lastly, the Philanthropy Engineering team regularly conducted brown bag lunches called “PhilTalks” to allow interested Palantir employees to meet senior members of their NGO partners and watch live demonstrations of how the partner was using Palantir to create positive impact. For members of the engineering team that were not working directly with clients, seeing Palantir in action was particularly rewarding.

CONCLUSION: LESSONS LEARNED AND CHALLENGES AHEAD

In the years leading up to 2014, Palantir had made significant strides in moving away from a reactive approach towards developing a portfolio that balanced local impact with global scale. During Hurricane Sandy and in its initial work with Verité in encouraging companies to share data on their labor brokers, it had learned the importance of collaboration when addressing social issues rather than a landscape in which organizations each carved out their own territory. When it came to partnerships, early mistakes—such as a partnership that had failed because the nonprofit ran out of funds and had to turn its focus from implementation to fundraising—prompted Palantir to develop a formal process to identify appropriate partners through due diligence and asking the right questions. This process—which was similar to that used for its product development—allowed the company to make continual improvements to its philanthropic strategy and implementation based on what it learned from each engagement. However, challenges remained for the Philanthropy Engineering team. Determining metrics to measure the impact of its philanthropic interventions remained difficult. It was hard to take the measurement of its activities beyond empirical assessments.18 Even where impact was measurable—for example, delivering emergency relief more effectively—it was difficult to separate the impact of Palantir’s philanthropic investments from the impact that others were responsible for generating. Moreover, the traditional metrics that software companies relied on, such as number of users or time spent on a software platform, were not able to capture social

17 Interview with Joseph Felter, senior research scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and research fellow, Hoover Institution, July 15, 2014. 18 An empirical assessment is one based on experience or observation rather than scientific proof.


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impact. For this reason, the company was keen to learn from the best practices of social organizations, founders, and other technology firms in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, for Payne, one of the biggest challenges ahead was preventing big data from being poorly used in the social sector. He believed that a “blind rush” towards big data could—when it did not turn out to be a panacea for solving big global challenges—lead to a loss of confidence in its potential to solve problems. Worse, he saw the potential for data being used for ill without appropriate privacy and civil liberties guarantees. “The data that can help the social sector support the most vulnerable people in the world can also be used to exploit them,” he said. “That’s a big risk.” From its founding, Palantir held the protection of privacy and civil liberties as a core value. The company built its technology from the ground up to make it easier to protect private data and ensure it would be used appropriately. Beyond protections in the product itself, Palantir ensured privacy and the protection of civil liberties in two ways. First, in its own operations, it kept the number of people with access to personal data to a minimum, whether working with organizations from the private sector, government, or civil society. “The fewer people that have access to that data, the less likely you are to have a substantive problem,” said Payne. In addition, it established a dedicated team of privacy and civil liberties engineers to conduct Privacy Impact Assessments with all clients. This was a non-binding framework that clients used to articulate possible privacy and civil liberties issues, and to demonstrate that they were taking these issues into account in decision-making processes or addressing them through risk mitigation strategies. More broadly, Palantir took steps to engage in discussions about the ethics of data in civil society. It did this by attending and organizing conferences and hosting sessions at its offices. In 2014, it was also exploring the possibility of working with a consortium to establish codes of conduct and best practices for the use of data. “There needs to be more of a dialogue about civil liberties in the social sector,” said Payne. For Palantir, being part of this broader dialogue was closely aligned with its focus on ensuring that its software and engineering support helped social sector organizations scale and make measurable progress. And by partnering with enterprises that had the capacity to make use of Palantir’s donations of software and skills, the company could use data philanthropy to make a significant impact on some of the world’s most pressing problems.

CASE QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS

• How is Palantir using technology to improve the delivery of nonprofit and humanitarian services? What elements of its philanthropy program are innovative in the corporate sector?

• How does Palantir ensure that the partnerships it forms with nonprofits can generate the maximum social impact? Given a specific example for each component of its decision-making methodology.

• In what ways have Palantir’s philanthropic activities benefitted the company internally?


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Exhibit 1

Reports of Trafficking at Truck Stops in the United States 2007-2014

Source: Palantir Technologies

palantir philanthropy engineering oftware...

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