Technology History | Palantir — The Shire at 100 Hamilton Avenue
· 2003-5
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · Report an issue
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Technology History | Palantir — The Shire at 100 Hamilton Avenue
kevin
People treat Palantir as a Miami software firm.
The office the company nicknamed the Shire was a four-storey brick building at 100 Hamilton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto.
Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings founded the company on 6 May 2003.
The name came from the seeing-stones in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium.
Palo Alto was the Shire.
McLean, Virginia, was Rivendell.
London was the Grey Havens.
Thiel backed an early prototype that applied fraud-detection logic from PayPal to records governments already held.
The building at 100 Hamilton went up in 1983 and was renovated in 2001.
It faces Alma Street across from the Caltrain tracks.
By the mid-2010s Palantir leased most of the 72,000 square feet.
It remained the public face of the firm until the headquarters label moved first toward Denver and later to Aventura, Florida.
The Palo Alto office still stands and is still marked Palantir on the map.
The product sold from those floors was not a new warehouse of data.
It was software that stitched together systems a customer already ran and let analysts query across them.
Gotham served intelligence and defense contracts.
Foundry later carried the same idea into hospitals, factories, and civil services.
The sidewalk at Hamilton and Alma is public.
The lobby is not.
Stand on the street corner if you want the pin.
The Shire was never a hillside.
It was a brick office beside a railway.
Photo: Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Palo Alto City Hall).
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