Palantir Adds First Woman to Board Ahead of Stock Listing

(Bloomberg) -- Palantir Technologies Inc., the data-mining company that has become a quiet force in government, policing and business since its founding in 2003, is adding the first woman to its board ahead of a planned public stock listing.

The Silicon Valley company named a journalist, Alexandra Wolfe Schiff, as director, along with two men, according to an email sent to investors that was seen by Bloomberg. Wolfe Schiff is the daughter of novelist Tom Wolfe, who wrote “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” and has been a reporter at the Wall Street Journal since 2013. A spokeswoman for the paper said late Tuesday that Wolfe Schiff will be resigning before joining Palantir’s board.

The other new directors are Spencer Rascoff, a founder of Zillow, and Alexander Moore, an early Palantir employee who is now a partner at venture capital firm 8VC. The group will consist of seven directors, expanding the four-man board chaired by billionaire co-founder Peter Thiel.

The homogeny of Palantir’s board has been an obstacle standing in the way of its plan to hold an initial public offering this year. The Palo Alto, California-based company is looking to file paperwork confidentially with U.S. regulators this month and go public as soon as the fall, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. Palantir’s home state requires public companies by law to have at least one woman on their boards, and large financial firms, including BlackRock Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., have said they won’t support companies without demographically diverse boards.

A complicating factor for Palantir’s public profile is the controversial uses of its products by some public agencies. The company supplies law enforcement and U.S. immigration officials with tools that have sparked protests over alleged discrimination, invasions of privacy and abuses of power. Unlike other tech leaders that have bowed to public pressure, Palantir Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp has resisted calls to sever contracts. He has maintained that Palantir has a moral obligation to provide the U.S. military with the best technology available, while arguing that it’s not a company’s role to decide public policy.

Palantir told investors earlier this year it expects to break even for the first time in 2020 and generate $1 billion in revenue, with business split evenly between government and corporate customers. For the director search, a name on the wish list for several Palantir insiders was Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who has worked with Palantir in various capacities over the years.

It’s possible Palantir expands the board again later. The other three board members, besides Thiel and the new additions, are co-founders Karp and Stephen Cohen as well as longtime Thiel acquaintance, Adam Ross of Dallas-based Goldcrest Capital. They’re all White, except for Karp, who is half-Black.

(Updates the status of Wolfe Schiff’s employment in the second paragraph.)

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