All the pretty dark horses: why markets can't value the unseen & misunderstood Palantir

From the intro of my finance master's thesis on how markets value knowledge capital - I examine how traditional accounting methods fail to capture valuation metrics for data analytics companies.

From a business perspective, notwithstanding certain classical approaches in the omerta, imagine the following rhetorical scenario: if a gun were held to your head and you were forced to give a number, to quantify something, how much would you say a relationship with the CIA is worth? A billion? Five billion? Ten? Twenty?

Palantir Technologies has one such relationship, and a rather strong one at that, given that the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel was an original investor in the company. In the decades since then, the relationship has only grown stronger through deployments which have in turn themselves opened infinite doors across the defense establishment, created barriers to entry no competitor can replicate, and generated revenue streams with near-zero bankruptcy risk. Yet on their balance sheet, this relationship has a recorded value of exactly zero dollars.

Or how do you quantify the knowledge of how seven million developers worldwide know and use your query language daily? MongoDB …