Starburst was bootstrapped and profitable for its first two years
Justin Borgman · Trino, Iceberg and the Battle for the Lakehouse | Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst · Jan 30, 2025 · at 42:42
Justin Borgman, CEO of Starburst, outlines Starburst's early corporate history prior to raising institutional venture money to build their cloud platform.
0:00 / 0:03exact quote · 4.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We were bootstrapped the first two years, and we were running a nice little profitable business.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Justin Borgman
Borgman: Tabular acquisition gives Databricks marketing win, not open-source control
“I think probably the biggest thing that they get out of the acquisition is the ability to tell the market, That they can do iceberg two and not look like they had made a mistake with Dell with Delta. You know, that, that they can, they get sort of a marketing …”
Justin Borgman: Apache Iceberg won the open table format war in 2024
“I feel like the summer of twenty-twenty-four, the world said, okay, it is Iceberg. And that was like VHS, Betamax, You know, decision made.”
Borgman: Databricks will not control or kill Apache Iceberg
“Iceberg has, you know, is, is bigger than Databricks, honestly. And it will continue to be, I think, the ubiquitous format. You know, so if they had hopes of, like, killing it, I don't think that worked. If they had hopes of controlling it, I don't really thin…”
Justin Borgman: Open-source enterprise infrastructure beats proprietary alternatives over time
“I believe, gradually over time, enterprise software technology, at least infrastructure technology, wherever there are two things that are mostly the same, and one is open and one is not, the open is going to win over time.”
Borgman: Presto is mostly Facebook internal, while Trino is the mainstream branch
“They started as identical copies, but the code bases have diverged quite a bit. And today Presto is really just used by Facebook. So it's sort of like their own private branch in a way used by a small number of people. And Trino has become the mainstream commu…”