Insight
Katz: Revenue durability is the single biggest risk for AI applications
“If you were to come down to one, if you were to say this, what's the single biggest risk would be durability of revenue because the switching costs that you and I talked about are very high for infrastructure software. The switching costs can be very low for a…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Katz: AI agents will be fully autonomous within three to five years
“If you look out three to five years, those agents are going to be fully autonomous.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Katz: Frontier AI labs will remain dominant over specialized models
“I think you're going to have specialized models for specific use case, like legal tech. If you look at Harvey, for example, I know they're, I think, leading the category in terms of specialization, but I think the large frontier labs are still going to be the …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katz: Top Silicon Valley startups are considering moving workloads on-prem
“And even companies that I thought would never be going back on prem are talking about going back on prem. Like some of the most innovative digital native companies in Silicon Valley are now thinking about moving their stack from, you know, one of the hyperscal…”
Insight
Katz: Very few open-source companies successfully defend their moats
“I think if you can maintain A competitive advantage with your cloud offering or your proprietary features that are very, very difficult to replicate, then you can maintain that moat. And I think very few open source companies get that right.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2027
Katz: ClickHouse will surpass $1B in ARR before December 2027
“Well, I'd put the over under at December, 20, 27. And I would take the under.”
Opinion
Katz: Low AI gross margins matter less given rapid growth
“As long as they can demonstrate a path to margin expansion over the course of the next few years, while still growing at these unprecedented levels with very healthy balance sheets, I worry less about gross margins like we did five years ago in traditional ent…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katz: ClickHouse's Anthropic spend is up 100x this year
“Our anthropic spend is up a hundred times from what it was at the beginning of the year.”
Opinion
Katz: Anthropic and OpenAI Outpace Open Weights on Application Harnesses
“Anthropic specifically and open AI have the benefit of being both a model provider and the harness provider that the open weights models right now are behind in.”
Assertion Partly supported
Katz: Tesla ingests one billion events per second into ClickHouse
“Tesla, for example, is ingesting a billion events per second into ClickHouse.”
Assertion Supported
Katz: Anthropic chose ClickHouse after asking Claude for a recommendation
“If you ask Anthropic how they chose to use ClickHouse, they'll tell you they asked Claude, what technology should we use for this specific observability use case? And Claude suggested ClickHouse.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Katz: AI token volume will split 50-50 between open and frontier models
“Well, the easy answer is fifty-fifty in the same way that what percentage of enterprise software today is open source versus proprietary. I think it's a pretty even distribution.”
Insight
Katz: Enterprise indemnification requirements will limit open-weight model adoption
“I don't, because I think it, especially in the enterprise, they want provisions and protections that potentially open weight models, especially those that come out of China, cannot provide. Around indemnification, for example, and output inference, and it's go…”
Assertion Open · timeframe Aug 2027
Katz: ClickHouse extended its financing despite having $1B on its balance sheet
“And so we did a financing earlier this year, and then we extended it and brought in some strategic investors like yourself and David Sachs and Michael Dell and JP Morgan. We didn't need the capital. We had a billion dollars on the balance sheet.”
Disclosure
Katz: ClickHouse raised at a $2B valuation with zero revenue
“The Series B that Cotu and Altimeter jointly led at two billion felt expensive. We had no revenue. We had no product. We had control of an open source database. We had no customers. We had 15 employees.”
Disclosure
Katz: AI customers represent less than 12% of ClickHouse's revenue
“The basket of AI companies that's using us in nearly every AI companies built on ClickHouse from Harvey, Sierra, Decagon, Anthropic, OpenAI, et cetera, represents less than 12% of revenue.”
Insight
Katz: Companies Should Not Manufacture Internal Adversity or Enemies
“I worry about creating adversity inside of a company. Well, you have so much adversity outside of your company, right? You've got to deal with competitors, disparaging yourself and the company. You've got to think about how you stay ahead of the competitive la…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Katz: Software Engineering Graduates Will Face an Uncertain Market in Four Years
“If you're studying software engineering, I think you're going to be entering a market that's very uncertain in four years time.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Katz: AI token management jobs will be made irrelevant by self-governing agents
“And then that job will be made irrelevant five years from then, because AI agents will govern themselves.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katz: ClickHouse powers Microsoft's largest analytical workloads
“Microsoft's one of our power users. We power the largest analytical workloads at Microsoft”
Assertion Supported
Katz: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Weights & Biases all use ClickHouse
“It's the world's most popular open source database, and it satisfies a very broad Array of use cases, and it's used by nearly every AI native company, Anthropic, OpenAI, Weights and Biases.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katz: Following Datadog's PLG playbook was easier than Snowflake's enterprise sales
“Datadog had this PLG self-service developer-led motion, so you could get started, deploy an agent, instrument your application, never talk to anybody in sales. Snowflake went heavy after the enterprise through, you know, very expensive sales and marketing. I j…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katz: ClickHouse net dollar retention is over 200%
“You know, we had over 130% net dollar retention at previous companies. We're over 200% because these use cases expand.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Katz: Open-weight AI security concerns will be addressed in 1-2 years
“Today, I think it is. If I look out a year or two from now, I think a lot of these concerns will be addressed.”
