How Peter Thiel’s Premier Data-Mining Firm Validated Clinton Global Initiative - Joe Conason
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In 2004, Thiel was one of the five co-founders of Palantir Technologies, an innovator in data analysis that has grown into one of the most respected and valuable corporations in its field, with such heavyweight clients as the Pentagon, the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA (indeed, the intelligence agency’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, reportedly invested $2 million to start Palantir, and much of its success, ironically for the libertarian Thiel, has derived from its patronage by government). After several rounds of financing, Thiel remains the largest shareholder of the privately held Palantir, which was valued last year at $20 billion — making it the third most valuable tech startup in the U.S., behind Uber and AirBnB.
Ten years after its founding, Palantir’s chief executive Alex Karp — one of the firm’s co-founders with Thiel — agreed to perform a highly sophisticated and costly feat of data analysis for the Clinton Global Initiative, at no charge.
The task was to evaluate over 3,000 “commitments to action” made by nonprofits, corporations, unions, and other organizations at CGI’s annual meetings in New York City, hosted by its founder, former President Bill Clinton. Those commitments represent CGI’s central purpose, by transforming the typical conference on global problems, which usually began and ended with talk, into an opportunity for participants to act. To remain active in CGI, every member must make a commitment, and those commitments must be “new, specific, and measurable” in their positive impact on a global problem.
Over the history of CGI since its founding conference in September 2005, the projects undertaken by its thousands of members are estimated to have improved the lives of more than 400 million people, at a cost of at least $85 billion, in areas ranging from education, job creation, and women’s empowerment to water, sanitation, and climate change. As CGI’s tenth anniversary approached in 2013, its leadership and management, including Bill and Chelsea Clinton, decided that rigorous evaluation of its commitments was overdue. Such analysis required the kind of software and analysis that Palantir routinely provides to its government and corporate clients.
Released in 2014, the Palantir report found that nearly 42 percent of all the CGI commitments made between 2005 and 2013 had been completed successfully, while 40 percent were continuing to work toward their objectives. Only five percent were unsuccessful. Just under two percent were deemed to be stalled, while 11 percent were marked “unresponsive” for failing to report any progress for two years (and were removed from the list of active commitments). More than two-thirds of the successful commitments had exceeded their original goals.
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http://www.nationalmemo.com/peter-thiels-huge-data-mining-firm-validated-clinton-global-initiative/
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