In 2004, a close-knit group of seasoned entrepreneurs from the early days of PayPal, eBay, and other successful Silicon Valley companies teamed up with some friends from Stanford's computer science PhD program to create Palantir Technologies, a startup with a unique mission: to revolutionize the way in which government agencies and financial institutions analyze information. Huddled together in a one-story office in Palo Alto and fueled by copious amounts of Red Bull, the team pushed the state of the art in search, collaboration, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Those in-house technological advances were augmented by Palantir's advisory group of top intelligence and financial experts from around the world, who have provided indispensable counsel on how to tailor the product to the complex needs of analyst communities. Palantir's analytical platforms have been designed specifically to make the analyst's world both exponentially easier to navigate and infinitely more interesting to inhabit. And already, a growing number of individuals and organizations are noticing the dramatic difference.