Matt Bevan

He and his university buddy named Alex Karp started focusing on the data.

The government already had plenty of information that they could use to prevent terror attacks.

They just weren't using the information efficiently.

Teal and Carp founded a company called Palantir, named after Saruman's all-seeing glass ball from Lord of the Rings.

Now, naming your nascent tech company after a tool used by the very bad guy trying to take over Middle Earth is an interesting decision, but we'll, again, get to that a little bit later.

As far as Alex Karp and Peter Thiel were concerned, the company was designed to gather all the data points siloed within individual agencies and make connections.

Palantir's first investor was the CIA.

It's been widely reported, though never officially confirmed, that in 2011 Palantir played a key role in processing information which led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in his secret compound in Pakistan.

So how exactly does it work?

For the first decade of Palantir's existence, basically nobody knew who they were or what they did.

They didn't even start posting on social media until 2015.

A person can see a pattern in a hundred things, but it's very hard for them to see a pattern in a million.

The company embedded technical experts inside classified US intelligence operations and facilities, trying to access as many different information sources as possible and figure out how they relate to each other.

Sticking with the marbles in jars, it worked like this.

Rather than all the information being siloed in individual jars, Palantir set up a table where all the marbles from the FBI, the CIA,

the NSA and other agencies could be poured onto and examined, allowing users to get a full picture by sorting information more logically and identifying patterns and connections.

Like really what it is, is creating a unified view

over lots of disparate data sources, which don't otherwise make sense together.

The reason they had so little public presence is that they really only had one customer, the US government.

Fighting ISIS, stopping human trafficking, supporting money laundering investigations.