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 124 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
Levine: No Open-Source Company Has Been Fully Displaced by Cloud Providers
“Can you name a single example of a company that's been fully displaced by a cloud provider? And the answer is no. And so I think that our concerns around large cloud vendors coming in and just co-opting an open source project and putting you out of business, t…”
Levine: Traditional imperative logic programming is reaching the end of its lifecycle
“I believe that programming is sort of in the life cycle of Programming is sort of at the end. Like, you can only write so many if-then-else statements. You're kind of done with logic, right, in that sense.”
Disk drives, tape drives, and SSDs will all go away
“We will have much more in-memory data, systems that literally live in real memory, and the notion of disk drives and tape drives and even SSDs will all go away.”
Levine: Google and Facebook infrastructure is more advanced than AWS
“I think that the Google and Facebook infrastructure is now moving in my opinion, more advanced than what Amazon is. Amazon was created several, many, sort of, already generations ago, relative to this commoditization curve.”
Levine: The replacement of cloud computing is already underway
“About six months ago, I started to think, well, what happens when cloud computing goes away? You know, of course, to myself, I'm like, well, it's so popular, and now how could it go away? I think it's actually happening right under our nose, and let me show yo…”
Levine: Machine learning applications will execute at edge endpoints, not the cloud
“So the only way that we can look into an image or look into the massive amounts of data is with machine learning, and that machine learning, the algorithms and the applications employing machine learning will run at the end point. It's not going to be machine …”
Levine: The explosion of sensor data will kill the cloud
“Sensor data explosion will kill the cloud. Sensors are going to produce massive amounts of data. The existing infrastructure will not be able to handle the data volumes or the rates, and data is going to be stuck at the edge, and computing is going to move alo…”
Levine: Delay sales team expansion until strong customer demand emerges
“We're not going to in, we're not going to expand the sales organization till we see the whites of their eyes... When the customer starts demanding this, then we're going to go build a sales organization, right? Or add the reproducibility.”
Levine: GTM fit requires 70% of sales reps generating 3x loaded cost
“What I like to look at is that a sales person is generating greater than three times their loaded cost, meaning Base plus commission. Let's say a salesperson cost 500,000 dollars a year or 200,000 dollars a year. They need to generate a three X multiple on tha…”
Levine: Startups need 4x pipeline coverage to hit quarterly sales numbers
“One of the metrics to be used in the industry is at the beginning of the quarter, you want to have between three and five times the pipeline to close the quarter. Ok? If you don't have four times the pipeline At the beginning of the quarter, you're not gonna m…”
Levine: Non-technical domain experts manipulating data will be the next programmers
“By using data, and having folks optimize the data, they actually become the next generation of programmers. They're not trained as programmers. They won't even know what a program really is. They're all manipulating data in the context by which they are famili…”
Levine: Data science will replace traditional coding as computer science foundation
“You know, I think that data science will become the new academic approach in computer science. There'll be less coding and more about data science. New algorithms for data science, new Approaches to understand the world around us. So, you know, we can call thi…”
Levine: Pure open-source support business models are not viable beyond Red Hat
“The whole support model really not being very viable outside of what Red Hat has done.”
Levine: The Red Hat Open-Source Support Model Has Only Worked Once
“And that model has worked, in my opinion, exactly one time. That's worked for Red Hat and not so great for everyone else.”
Levine: Activist Investors Would Have Blocked EMC From Buying VMware
“Because activists were involved with current EMC, if EMC were now, it was 15 years ago, and EMC were faced with buying VMware, and they had activist pressure on their board, they would not be allowed to buy VMware”
Levine: Dell Bought EMC Because EMC Had Activists and Dell Didn't
“Dell was able to do this deal because they had no active. They were a private company and had no activists. EMC could only do this deal because they had activists”
Levine: Code authorship matters more than IP ownership in open source
“IP ownership is, to me, less important than who actually wrote the code”
Levine: Commercial software forks will never rival original code inventors
“The fork company is never going to be as strong as the one, ah, who has invented it.”
Levine: Computing and analytics will shift from the cloud to edge devices
“And I think the Internet of Things and drones and however you want to define these, this sort of range of computers that exist not so much in our pocket but out there in the world, I believe that there's going to be computing that will be fundamental to how we…”
Levine: a16z targets investments in projects that consensus views as crazy
“When more people disagree, that's the project we want to go invest in. Because, like, you know, it's too crazy for, you know, hell, that'll never work.”
Levine: Mobile hardware supply chains will replace PC architectures in data centers
“What I'm specifically talking about with respect to the consumerization of IT is the idea that the components of mobile devices will become the basis for hardware in the data center of the future. And so, not unlike we saw the PC revolution replace mainframes …”
Levine: Mobile phone components will form the basis of future data centers
“Mobile, the components of mobile phones will become the basis of the next generation data center. Really, really inexpensive, sort of, you know, cheap components that require a lot less power, floor space, cooling, But all of that stuff being sort of connected…”
Levine: On-premise datacenters will disappear in favor of cloud models
“I think that the economics and the way that data centers are going to be built is going to drive everyone to private or public clouds, and the notion of the on-prem data center starts to disappear.”
Levine: Cloud service models will dominate all open-source software segments
“So that model is exactly what I believe is going to happen at every segment of the open source market will be around.”
Levine: Real-time data processing will need to occur at the edge
“The other part is, so it's real-world information coupled with the idea that real-time data processing will need to occur at the edge where the information is being collected.”
Levine: Computing architecture is returning to a distributed edge intelligence model
“Believe it or not, we are returning to an edge intelligence distributed computing model that's absolutely thematic with the trends in computing of moving from centralized back out to distributed.”
Levine: Total connected computing devices will expand into the trillions
“I can imagine a world where there will be trillions of devices out there. So if you think about the challenges of management, security, data, all of the issues of distributed computing, that's now going to, it's the opportunity and the challenge of what we're …”
Levine: Data processing and key decision-making will shift to edge devices
“Important information will still get stored in a centralized cloud, but much of the processing in this new world will move out to the edge, and that's where the most important decisions will get made at the edge.”
Peter Levine predicts return to decentralized peer-to-peer computing models
“We are absolutely going to return To a peer to peer computing model where the edge devices connect together, creating a network of endpoint devices, not unlike we saw in the original sort of distributed computing model.”
Levine: Next generation of coders will be mathematicians, not logic writers
“The other thing is that we are going to move to a world of Data-centric programming. It's kind of interesting in the same way that, you know, I believe that cloud disaggregates into this new model. We're teaching everyone to code now, and we're teaching everyo…”
Levine: LiDAR sensor costs will eventually fall to 50 cents
“The first LiDAR for a Google car was 75,000 dollars. Now LIDAR is sub 500 dollars, and I'll bet you, and this is just like, there are no self-driving cars out there. I bet you it goes to 50 cents in the not-too-distant future.”
Levine: Open Source Is the Best Way to Create Software
“Open source was and is the best way to create software because it speeds product feedback, it drives adoption, it improves reliability.”
Levine: Open-Source Startups Spend Too Much Early Energy on Licensing
“Licensing is a heavily debated topic, and while it's important, I see a lot of companies spending too much energy in the early days on licensing. I think it's way more important to understand your competitive advantage and use licensing as part of a go-to-mark…”
Levine: Buyers cannot appreciate non-obvious software value without a sales team
“Often what gets missed in the whole product adoption cycle is the idea of selling value into the customer where value is not necessarily felt through a self-service product or whatever. You just can't see the value or appreciate the value until an organization…”
Levine: Individuals will control and monetize personal data via open markets
“And so, I think there will be a lot of cases where data becomes the purview of each individual, And we will choose how we want to go dispense it, and I think in certain cases, our data and what we produce will become valuable to consumers, and there'll be a ma…”
Levine: Data-driven programming models will proliferate across industry within a year
“And so I'll leave you with that, and next year we can revisit this. I guarantee you it will start to proliferate through the industry in the same way that some of the other things are.”
Levine: Cloud and SaaS enabled the commercial monetization of open source
“Well, the element, I believe, that has brought open source from fringe hobby project out of academia to mainstream is the fact that you can actually build commercial businesses On top of open source. Right. And a lot of that, which you guys at Databricks are d…”
Sensor and machine data volume will expand by orders of magnitude
“It will be literally orders of magnitude and in the exact mathematical sense, orders of magnitude, more data that needs to be stored in process.”
Machine learning cannot function effectively without in-memory processing
“Unless we get to in memory processing and in-memory data structures, machine learning doesn't really work.”
Levine: Monetizing freemium products requires a dedicated sales organization
“And with that, I believe that you need to have a sales organization actually come in to sell the premium products such that the users can be educated. The organization can be educated on the additional features that are available outside the base freemium prod…”
Levine: Bottom-up virality is a head fake without direct enterprise sales
“It's sort of a head fake when, you know, the best products, the products with this unbelievably great product market fit from day zero with freemium start to take off. And the assumption is like, oh, well, look at here. We don't need a sales organization. Let'…”
Levine: Most tech mergers fail due to sales and go-to-market confusion
“Most of these mergers fail because the go-to-market is muddled and the sales organization is, is muddled after the merger, you know, after the merger happens.”
Levine: Relations between tech boards and activist investors are toxic
“Well, I think it, I think for large tech companies, the relationship between management and the existing board and activist shareholders has become quite toxic.”
Levine: Short-term focus and limiting M&A harms public tech companies
“And you know limiting innovation and limiting M&A in favor of short-term results, I think really is going to have a big impact on, you know, large public companies and their ability to I would say do the right thing.”
Levine: AMPLab spinouts are far more innovative than Cisco or Oracle
“The companies coming out of there are way, way different than what I found, you know, from people coming out of, let's say, Oracle or Cisco.”
Levine: Spinning hard disk drives will be completely phased out
“Spinning disks are going away, okay?”
Levine: Find future opportunities by asking what replaces currently dominant technologies
“My whole philosophy around this is I take something that's very popular right now, cloud computing, and I say, what happens when cloud computing doesn't exist anymore? What fills that place?”
Levine: Legacy operating units consume corporate budget, killing internal innovation
“When it comes time for budgeting All the existing operating groups say we need X dollars, you expect us to grow a hundred percent a year, therefore we need a hundred percent of the dollars, and after everyone jumps in, there are no cookies left in the jar to g…”