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Mike Palmer

CEO, Sigma Computing · 1 appearance on the record.

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

executiveoperatorLinkedIn ↗sigmacomputing.com ↗

Mike Palmer has served as CEO of Sigma Computing since 2020, leading the cloud analytics platform past $100M ARR. He previously held executive product roles at enterprise technology companies, including Chief Product Officer at Druva and EVP and CPO at Veritas Technologies.

18statements → 8claims → 1claims resolved → 3.94/5average certainty → 2.72/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources →

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 5 assertions · 5 opinions · 2 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 7 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 Mike argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Palmer: Sutter Hill Ventures incubates all its portfolio companies in-house
“And where Sutter Hill's a little bit unique is that Sutter Hill doesn't invest in pre-existing companies. All the companies are incubated directly out of Sutter Hill.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 7:47 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data

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

4.2 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.4 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.5

redirected or did not address 1 of 8 assessed questions (13%). Watch them ▸

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? →

274 words/min while actually speaking · 22.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,637 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 Mike Palmer said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Mike Palmer: Tableau acts as superficial wrapping paper for data
“And I think that Tableau is wrapping paper in Japan. You really wanted the toothbrush, but somehow what you really got was wrapping paper.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 3:34 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Opinion
Mike Palmer: Microsoft Fabric is a marketing rebrand of legacy software
“And I'm directly accusing Microsoft here. I think their application products are not good in their cloud products. I think fabric is a run it back strategy on office through 65, where they just provide a marketing name to some longstanding old products.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 30:25 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Opinion
Mike Palmer: Google's Looker acquisition failed by locking out non-experts
“Google's experiment with Looker has failed, and with Looker, they built a LookML, which by the way, I would say back in 2017, it was probably the best product on the market, but they built a product for experts, and they ensured that it was going to be a produ…”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 32:56 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sigma CEO Mike Palmer says text-to-SQL AI products are a joke
“So I think these products are a joke. I don't think that they're going to succeed and we don't care about them.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 36:56 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Opinion
Sutter Hill's Mike Spicer funds companies despite overwhelming failure evidence
“Which is, by the way, a testament to Mike Spicer at Sutter Hill because he is, he has so much conviction in his companies that despite overwhelming evidence that the company is a total failure, he keeps investing in it.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 13:47 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Disclosure
Mike Palmer requires all Sigma Computing employees to work in-office
“Even in face masks, I required everybody to come back to the office and I still require that today. Which is its own conversation, but I'm not a believer in remote work”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 15:26 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Palmer: Data stack tools will consolidate into fewer categories in 3 years
“I think if you were to fast forward three years from now, you'll see all these categories, many of these categories rolling into smaller numbers of categories.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 29:13 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Opinion
Mike Palmer: Forcing SQL concepts into natural language is engineering hubris
“So the idea that I'm supposed to adopt a SQL semantic concept into my natural language is the ultimate hubris of engineering.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 36:34 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Palmer: Sigma's query transaction overhead is under one second
“Our customers have up to trillions of records. And our overhead on that transaction is less than one second.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 17:30 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Palmer: AI models will live directly inside cloud data warehouses
“I think that the models are going to live next to the data in these warehouses, and we're already seeing that.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 20:45 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Assertion Not checkable as stated
JPMorgan built a six-billion-row pivot table using Sigma Computing
“But the fun part is like a reference JP Morgan Who uses our product, and when they connected the first time, the guys, I think, is sort of like, I can swear in here. Holy , holy , I just built a six billion row pivot table, right?”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 22:45 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Internal study: Enterprise clients touch only 0.1% of warehouse data tables
“So we looked at all of our enterprise customers Table utilization over a 60 day period, and .1% of the tables in their warehouses were ever touched.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 26:51 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Insight
Palmer: "Download to Excel" was the most common feature in all BI tools
“The most common feature in all BI products was the button that said download to Excel.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 3:59 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Assertion Contradicted
Palmer: Sutter Hill Ventures incubates all its portfolio companies in-house
“And where Sutter Hill's a little bit unique is that Sutter Hill doesn't invest in pre-existing companies. All the companies are incubated directly out of Sutter Hill.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 7:47 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Disclosure
Sigma had under $800K ARR and 50 customers at year seven
“So I joined, you know, almost seven years into the company. They had less, you know, about 800,000 dollars in ARR, 50 customers and about 50 employees.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 13:36 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sigma Computing grew from $2M to $100M ARR in 3.5 years
“We went from a couple of million dollars in June of 21 to a hundred million dollars three and a half years later”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 15:49 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Disclosure
Sigma CEO: Sigma does not cache data, running all queries live
“We do not do any caching. So everything you do in Sigma is live query on the warehouse.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 17:25 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data
Insight
Palmer: Financial services is fundamentally a data arbitrage business
“If you work in financial services, you're in a data arbitrage business. So the faster you can get to unique data, the better you are at your job.”
Mike Palmer May 1, 2025 ▶ 23:12 Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data May 1, 2025 28m
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