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Jordan Tigani

Co-Founder and CEO, MotherDuck · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineerauthor@jrdntgn ↗LinkedIn ↗motherduck.com ↗

He is the CEO and co-founder of MotherDuck, an analytics platform built on DuckDB. Previously, he was a founding engineer for Google BigQuery, Chief Product Officer at SingleStore, and co-authored Google BigQuery: The Definitive Guide.

14statements → 8claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 2.14/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 2said about them ↓

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 7 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Jordan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
MotherDuck executes queries in milliseconds compared to BigQuery's 400-millisecond overhead
“You know, we can do queries in sort of single digit milliseconds. And you know, in BigQuery, we were very, very happy when we got kind of the overhead down to like, 400 milliseconds.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 10:03 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.6 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.7

answered every one of 12 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

273 words/min while actually speaking · 38.8 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 10,355 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Jordan Tigani said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Google BigQuery's largest customers never ran 100-terabyte queries, says Jordan Tigani
“The query sizes they were using was a hundred terabytes, and I remembered back from my time at BigQuery you know, we had some of the, Largest customers in the world. We had Walmart, Home Depot, Equifax, HSBC, you know, like, and nobody was using anything, you …”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 2:17 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Insight
Distributed data systems impose a massive complexity tax over single-node hardware
“There's just this huge tax that you pay to have to build a distributed system that scales out and can do, like, you know, distributed transactions and shuffling data and, you know, if you were gonna design something for kind of modern hardware, you could make …”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 4:43 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Assertion Supported
MotherDuck executes queries in milliseconds compared to BigQuery's 400-millisecond overhead
“You know, we can do queries in sort of single digit milliseconds. And you know, in BigQuery, we were very, very happy when we got kind of the overhead down to like, 400 milliseconds.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 10:03 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Open data formats like Apache Iceberg will pressure incumbent database margins
“I think that's going to be hard for the incumbents, and I think it's going to be a net benefit to the, you know, kind of the people that are coming in with new with new tools and new ways of doing things, and it's going to put pressure on margins which again i…”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 46:20 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Opinion
Tigani: DuckDB is amazing software, but not a data warehouse
“DuckDB is an amazing, amazing, amazing piece of software, but it's not a data warehouse.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 26:00 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Network latency makes 60 FPS data visualization impossible in traditional cloud architectures
“This is how you get the 60 frame per second kinds of you know, visual, visual visualization speeds that are literally impossible in more traditional architecture, because if the, if like, if I'm talking to a data center that is, you know, on the other side of …”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 38:06 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Assertion Supported
Modern laptops are 10 to 100 times faster than MapReduce-era servers
“But you know, nowadays, like, you know, I've got a Mac M two laptop. It's two years old. It's like probably an order of magnitude to two orders of magnitude faster than the server machines were back when, you know, MapReduce came out and people started buildin…”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 4:02 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Disclosure
MotherDuck gave DuckDB's creators a co-founder-sized equity stake at inception
“We also gave them a chunk of the company when we started, like essentially a co-founder share.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 23:34 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Disclosure
DuckDB's co-creator agreed not to assist any MotherDuck competitors
“On the other hand, he did agree not to work with anybody who's doing something similar to what we're doing.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 23:56 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tigani: DuckDB ported to Apple Silicon in just two hours
“When the Mac Silicon came out, it took them, like, two hours to make it work on the new Mac Silicon versus, like, having to, sort of, do all this, like, complex hand, hand coding hand coding stuff.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 36:54 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Insight
Ex-Google engineers must realize marketing is war because nobody cares naturally
“I realized that marketing is war. You know, when you're at Google, you think, oh, well, you don't need to do marketing. Who needs to do marketing? But then you realize outside of Google is like, well, nobody cares about what you're doing. And you have to basic…”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 56:58 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Assertion Supported
Google BigQuery lacked time zone support for years due to engineering difficulty
“In BigQuery, we didn't implement time zones for, I think, like six or seven years, because it's just really hard to get right, and like, you know, there's all kinds of bizarro things in in, when you deal with you know, with time zones, and we're like, well, we…”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 19:24 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Disclosure
MotherDuck is not well-suited for database working sets exceeding 10 terabytes
“So, I mean, scale is certainly one limitation, and I think, you know, if you're gonna push past working sets of, like, 10 terabytes or larger, then you know, I think then, you know, Mother Duck doesn't work well yet.”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 39:18 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck
Assertion Not checkable as stated
SingleStore reached $100 million in ARR during Tigani's tenure as CPO
“I mean, there was, there were a hundred million in ARR”
Jordan Tigani Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 57:25 The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck

The other half of the tape: Jordan Tigani's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Tomasz Tunguz 1Matt Turck 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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000.51122024episodesmentions per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck Oct 24, 2024 48m
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