Raw data is an increasingly abundant and inexpensive commodity. Intelligently filtering, analyzing and visually understanding data is where the value is. Palantir invents technology and products that enables human analysts to harness the power of computers in an intuitive way to quickly and deeply analyze large amounts of data.

The value of data analysis as a career was recently emphasized by Hal Varian in the Freakonomics blog in The New York Times. Hal is an internationally known economist who is currently serving as Google’s Chief Economist while on leave from his three professorships at the University of California at Berkeley.

Q: Your job sounds extremely interesting. What jobs would you recommend to a young person with an interest, and maybe a bachelors degree, in economics?

A: If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on. [emphasis added]

I often ask candidates if they’re familiar with what we do at Palantir. Most people think they are. “Oh, you’re that data viz. company,” or, worse, “You guys do data mining, right?” At least they’ve heard of us and at least they’re on the right track, but I cringe anyway. We aren’t just a “data visualization” company and we don’t do “data mining.” It’s almost impossible to convey the scope and complexity of what we do in a few short minutes—or to do so without taking the conversation to an eye-glazing level of abstraction.

The following is my attempt at describing what we do at a high level without oversimplifying. I hope that after reading this a candidate will ‘get’ what we’re about, or at least understand enough not to apply tiny labels to our expansive vision.

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