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 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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 …”
Kaplan: Lakehouses will absorb adjacent tools like ETL and governance
“You know, from my historical perspective on the industry, I think lots of capability that sits outside those things will fall inside those things. Whether it's data governments, whether it's different ETL, whether it's different conversions, these things are g…”
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…”
Antitrust locks Big Tech out of M&A, empowering Snowflake and Databricks
“But you look at like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are under an attack trust and basically impossible for them to acquire. So there's, you don't really have the big chip stacks at the table anymore, which means if you're an acquirer like Snowflake o…”
Starting later than Snowflake and Databricks was VAST Data's biggest advantage
“And so I think our The biggest advantage versus those other companies that you mentioned is that we started late, and that allowed us to see this deep learning problem in front of our eyes versus machine learning, again, a lot smaller, a lot slower, and it als…”
Incumbents will dominate text-to-SQL, making it a bad startup problem
“The bigger companies, like Databricks or Snowflake might build these tools and offer it on their sequel editor or, like, some kind of, like, you know, assistant And that could probably solve the problem. It's not a great problem for a startup to work on.”
Turck: Enterprise data market will remain fragmented, avoiding single-platform consolidation
“So the future that we see is, you know, as much as the Databricks and the Snowflakes of the world would want to be The one platform where all things data and all things AI happen we actually from our vantage point, see much more of a particular persistent subs…”
Ghodsi: Databricks open-sources products only after achieving product-market fit
“So our secret sauce is look at an enterprise problem, figure out what that is, understand it deeply by being really customer obsessed, bring the problem back, have the innovators, the PhDs that know how to solve these problems. Solve the problem. Iterate quick…”
Ghodsi: Snowflake coexists with Databricks in about 70% of accounts
“It's certainly going to coexist, and it already coexists with Databricks in probably 70% of the accounts we're in.”
Ghodsi: Creating open-source software gives cloud hosts a competitive advantage
“We're going to host open source software in the cloud, but the difference is we'll create open source software. That way we get competitive advantage with respect to anyone else who would want to do the same thing, right? Otherwise anyone can pick up any open …”
Ghodsi: Founders cannot pick their sales channel; product-market fit dictates it
“You don't get to pick your channel. You can, you don't get to say, oh, I want my ASP to be 50 K or 60. That's not your choice. You have a product. You have a market. If it has fit, you have to find the right channel to connect those two.”
Stoica predicts big data infrastructure will eventually unify around one system
“Now, I do think that looking forward you are going to see more and more of this unification. This happens in many other industries and technologies. I do think this will happen in big data because it's so much easier if you have only one system than if you nee…”
Kaplan: Apache Iceberg is becoming the standard base table format
“And now it seems like Iceberg is certainly with Databricks buying Tabular. That'll be interesting, but Iceberg feels like the base format, although DeltaShare is also relevant.”
Rogojan: Databricks is better suited for machine learning than data warehousing
“I think Databricks makes sense to me still more from an ML standpoint. I know they like the data warehousing side. I know they, that's where they're going to pitch themselves”
Rogojan: Databricks and Snowflake are fighting for workflows, not contract lock-in
“It's really been a white fight for workflows versus a fight for like contracts. Cause in the past it was like, okay, you sign a ten million dollar contract for Teradata. You're kind of stuck with it, right? Like there's no choice now for the next three to five…”
Benaich: Databricks will likely become the primary enabler for open-source AI
“Probably Databricks, and Databricks and Snowflake, probably more Databricks will be like this like enabler of open source.”
Handy: Cloud platforms care about compute consumption, not partner revenue
“My read is that people like us, people like Fivetran, while we are critical to their success as platforms, because we drive a ton of consumption. They don't actually really care about the dollars that we make as businesses. Cause they're so tiny relative to th…”
Van de Maele: Cloud hyperscalers fail to connect metadata to business context
“The hyperscalers, they're great at kind of managing within their ecosystem, right? If you're purely technical metadata within BigQuery or Snowflake or Databricks and so on. But then how do you tie it to the business? That's not something that they do.”
Turck: Snowflake and Databricks architectures are converging into direct competitors
“And the story of the last few years has been the great convergence of those two stacks. And in particular data breaks has worked on making their data lake more structured and look more like a data warehouse. And Snowflake is still in the early days of taking t…”
Ghodsi: Databricks' early reliance on product-led growth was a mistake
“On the channel side, the mistake with it is we really early on, we're really big believers in this product led growth. We said, you know, we're going to build this beautiful simplified product that we now have. We put it online and it's going to be cloud based…”
Ghodsi: Databricks hires executive leaders who build, not just maintain
“What are the things we look for? We look for people who have seen build. So the joke I say is, do you have a driver's license? And people will say, I have it. Are you good at driving your car? Yes, I'm very good at it. Why are you asking? Can you build a car w…”
Ghodsi: Databricks will open-source lower-stack layers and build proprietary software above
“We're definitely going to continue to move up the stack and then commoditize the stuff that's below by open sourcing it and just releasing it to the market and making it the standard and then moving up the stack with innovations.”
Ali Ghodsi: Databricks will be IPO ready in 2021
“We're going to be IPO ready this year and have marched towards that and are pretty far along in terms of sort of the readiness of the business everywhere.”
Douetteau: Databricks is mostly focused on data infrastructure and placement
“Companies such as the Databricks of the world are mostly about infrastructure and actually helping you put data In a given location.”
Borgman: Databricks and Snowflake operate strictly as cloud-only data platforms
“Databricks and Snowflake are cloud only, so if you happen to have data on-prem we're pretty much your only bet, and you know, it just so happens that that turns out to be most of the Fortune 500 almost the entirety of the financial Social services sector in pa…”
Borgman: Databricks and Snowflake expand into adjacent markets to justify valuations
“You have a couple giant players in Databricks and Snowflake that are now looking for adjacent markets to continue to grow their TAM and justify their valuations and drive their revenue into the future. And, ah, and that's leading to more overlaps into boxes th…”
Databricks SQL product line hit $200M in revenue and is doubling
“Databricks, the SQL products, two hundred million in revenue doubling.”
ADP uses Databricks for its data layer and Snowflake for analytics workloads
“We use Databricks as our, as that data layer, and we use Snowflake to do very specialized analytical database workloads that it's very, very good at.”
Cloud data warehouses enabled modern multi-tool data architectures
“Architectures like this really have only become possible with the rise of folks like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, and this idea that as a data practitioner, I can have infinite compute at the kind of tips of my fingers without having to go outsid…”
Databricks splits R&D into enterprise stability and new innovation teams
“All of engineering and product is separated into two different pieces. One that focuses on the things that enterprises need, large enterprises, encryption, security, authentication, stability, and so on. And another piece that focuses on these innovations.”
Ghodsi: Half of Databricks' leads come from free Community Edition
“Half of our leads comes from that.”
Apache Arrow strictly complements rather than competes with Databricks
“It's neither it's neither a competitor or a replacement, so it's strictly a complimentary technology.”
Stoica: Apache Spark has exceeded 500 active open-source contributors
“We exceeded 500 contributors. It is the most active big data project right now, Spark.”
Stoica: Databricks still provides the majority of Apache Spark open-source contributions
“A lot of contributions, still the majority of contributions comes from Databricks.”
Moses cites 2022 revenues for BigQuery, Snowflake, and Databricks
“So you're seeing companies like BigQuery with 1.5 billion dollars in revenue, Snowflake with a billion dollars in revenue Databricks with eight hundred million in accelerating.”
Ghodsi: Databricks re-wrote Apache Spark's execution engine in C++
“Two or three years ago, we set out to re-implement all Spark in C++ in what we call the really, really fast, what's called MPP engine, Massive Apparel Processing Engine.”
DoorDash runs Databricks on AWS S3 and ingests data from Snowflake
“We run a Databricks on S-III, but we pull data into Databricks from Snowflake, so we have a connection between the two.”
Horowitz invested in Databricks the day it incorporated
“When Databricks came to me, like I invested the day they incorporated the company”