Thirty years ago last month, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I started a company called Palantir Internet Services, later known as Palantir.net. I had been building personal websites for nearly two years at that point and was captivated by this revolutionary new medium that allowed anyone, anywhere, to publish something that anyone else in the world could read.
While the internet touches nearly every part of our lives today, in the summer of 1996 it was still seen by many as a novelty. There were only about 250,000 websites on the web, and while Amazon and eBay had already launched, Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia were still years away.
That fall, I met Tiffany Farriss, and together we built Palantir into a company that developed websites for clients of all shapes and sizes. As college students, we were featured in a news story on CNN and profiled in a front-page Chicago Sun-Times article. Our first paying clients were colleges and universities, and then for several years we partnered with Chicago design firms who were making the transition from print to the web.
During that time, we built and deployed several versions of our own in-house content management platform, eventually deprecating it in 2007 in favor of the newly released Drupal 5. Putting our energy into contributing to an open source project not only brought us new business opportunities but also introduced us to a community we are proud to still be part of today.
Along the way we grew into a full-service digital consultancy, bringing our strategy, design, build, and support services to public sector agencies, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations whose needs are genuinely complex and whose work has a profound impact on others.
Only a handful of companies in our industry have been around as long as we have. Over the years, we've watched it go through several transformations: the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the rise of "Web 2.0" and social media in the mid-2000s, and the emergence of smartphones and the mobile web in the late 2000s.
Today, we are in the middle of one of the web's biggest transformations yet, as generative AI has fundamentally disrupted the traditional ways that online content is both created and consumed. The business models that built the web are no longer sufficient for an environment increasingly dominated by bot traffic and bot-created content. As more money has flowed into generative AI, we've seen less of it invested in other forms of online infrastructure, and that shift has affected us and many others in our industry.
At the same time, these tools have already demonstrated their usefulness for automating manual and labor-intensive work, from code review to content audits. We believe that when used thoughtfully, generative AI can improve the online experience and make vital information more accessible to more people.
And that's why, in an era of slop and enshittification, we feel it's more important than ever to recommit to our mission and vision. Palantir exists to help others discover, create, and share knowledge, and to strengthen humanity through the work that we do and the way that we do it.
We may not be able to predict the future, but 30 years of experience gives us a lot of perspective on where things have been and where they might go next. Technology keeps changing, but it's people who decide where to put their time and attention. That's the choice we've made so far, and it's the one we will continue to make.
