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Prophecy sits at zero for years
Palantir shows the shape. The valley spent 20 years calling it a consulting firm, and now literally every company in the world has a forward-deployed motion.
Anyone running this play has to be willing to be seen as wrong or weird for an exceptionally long time. Almost everyone quits in the flat part, and the rest fail to gather the number of followers needed for the value to show up.
Along the way the message has to be lived. Prophets sin all the time and survive, but they can't survive apostasy: when someone stops practicing what they preach and cracks show, the following rebels.
Why do slow bets look like failures early?
Futurist Roy Amara is credited with the saying now called Amara's law: people tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. Compounding growth follows a curve that looks nearly flat for most of its early life. A value that doubles each year is still tiny after several doublings, then overtakes everything around it in a few more.
How slowly did Palantir grow at first?
Palantir was founded in 2003 and received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct listing on September 30, 2020. The company reported its first full year of profit under US accounting rules in 2023, twenty years after it was founded.
Why do people judge hypocrites so harshly?
In a 2017 paper in Psychological Science, Jillian Jordan, Roseanna Sommers, Paul Bloom, and David Rand tested why hypocrisy angers people. Participants judged someone who condemned a behavior and then did it as worse than someone who simply did it. The authors argued that the condemnation sends a false signal of virtue, and people punish false signals. The hypocrite was also rated less trustworthy than the person who never claimed to be better.
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