The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 37 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Katz: Tesla ingests one billion events per second into ClickHouse
“Tesla, for example, is ingesting a billion events per second into ClickHouse.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Katz: ClickHouse powers Microsoft's largest analytical workloads
“Microsoft's one of our power users. We power the largest analytical workloads at Microsoft”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Katz: Major financial enterprises are adopting technology faster than ever
“A lot of the times, historically, the sales cycles into these big firms would be measured in years, not quarters, right? They're now adopting technologies much faster than they ever have before.”
Katz: Sports franchise valuations will reach $20 billion
“I do. I mean, we just saw that with the Lakers. I think it was the most expensive sports transaction in history.”
Katz: Over half of ClickHouse revenue and customers are outside North America
“Over half of our revenue comes from outside of the US. 40% here in EMEA, 10% in Asia. Over half of our customers are outside of North America.”
Katz: Having any customer or sector exceed 10% of revenue creates risk
“If I've got one customer that or one category or one industry that accounts for more than 10% of revenue, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. And that seems to be kind of the industry standard, that threshold, that if some dimension of your revenue base a…”
Katz: ClickHouse Engineering Team Average Age Is Mid-to-Late Thirties
“The average age of our Engineering organization is in the mid to late thirties, which is a little bit different, I would imagine, than a typical venture backed company that's only had a product for three years.”
Katz: Autonomous Robotics Will Be More Disruptive to Medicine Than Pure AI
“I think robotics would be probably more disruptive, frankly, to the medical industry. We had a family member have a procedure that was done entirely autonomously with just a doctor overseeing it, but didn't actually touch an instrument. And I think that will b…”
Katz: Dedicated AI token-management finance roles will be common within 5 years
“An AI finance function. Solely dedicated on AI consumption inside of an organization. That's all they wake up thinking about.”
Katz: Hyperscalers and Frontier Labs will be relevant chip providers
“I think a lot of the hyperscalers in Frontier Labs are going to be very relevant providers in the chip ecosystem.”
Katz: Tech market valuations are highly unlikely to return to 2014 levels
“Is there going to be some sort of compression?
Possibly.
You know, are you going to get back to the levels we were at 10 years ago?
Highly unlikely.”
Katz: ClickHouse could go public next year if it wanted to
“We could take the company public next year if we wanted to.”
Katz: ClickHouse generates over $100M with about 100 quota-carrying reps
“We've got about a hundred quota caring salespeople, for example, and I think, you know, our revenue scale is significantly more than a hundred million. And so our average rep productivity is quite high relative to the industry average.”
Katz: ClickHouse's midpoint customer spend is approximately $100K
“Average customer spend. I mean, we've got customers that spend tens of millions of dollars with us every year. We've got customers that spend thousands of dollars with us every month and everything in between. So averages can be a little bit misleading. If I w…”