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 15 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
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.”
Dell treats Starburst's OEM product as a fully comped first-party product
“It is a Dell product, you know, for all their sellers. It's a first-party product. They're getting comped in full. You know, it is treated as a Dell product in every way.”
Justin Borgman: Data lakehouses are the future of data architecture
“That performance gap is de minimis at this point, and that really has changed the game, and I think now lake houses are the future.”
Borgman: Enterprises will never store all data in a single repository
“We do think data lakes are where you're going to want to store as much data as you can, just because the economics will drive that, but you'll never store everything”
Borgman: Enterprise partnerships must be driven by product or sales
“I think of the partnerships organization, at least in this context, as the facilitators of the relationship, but the real Impetus. The real motivation has to, I think, come from product. It could come from sales.”
Borgman: Starburst is hardcore enterprise software, not a PLG motion
“We're hardcore enterprise software. You know, we're not a PLG motion.”
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…”
Starburst maintains the Apache license for Trino without adding restrictive licensing
“We don't, and that's something that at least philosophically my co-founders have been pretty, I guess, consistent on is a desire to continue to use the Apache license, which gives widespread flexibility and freedom to users of the technology, and so we haven't…”
Borgman: Starburst Data is entirely bootstrapped and profitable from day one
“We haven't raised any venture capital thus far. And in fact, we're actually profitable, and we've been running profitably from day one,”
Justin Borgman: Specialized data tools lead to silos and vendor lock-in
“Over time, that creates a lot of data silos, and in particular, as you create these data silos, you're confronted with vendor lock-in, particularly if you're using proprietary databases or storage as your underlying infrastructure for these different use cases…”
Borgman: Starburst's Dell OEM partnership took two years to launch
“Yeah, we're probably now starting year three, and I would say it was two years to get it really out the door as a skew that they could sell.”
Starburst was bootstrapped and profitable for its first two years
“We were bootstrapped the first two years, and we were running a nice little profitable business.”