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 13 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
Centralizing enterprise data in one warehouse will never solve all data problems
“Data repositories, data warehouses, they all argue that just move all of your data in one place, and it's going to solve all of your problems. We've been hearing that promise for the last 25 years, and it's never solved all of our problems, and it never will.”
Van de Maele: Digitally native companies often lack orderly data
“You'd be surprised that some of those digitally native companies, very data first companies, you would think they have all of the data in order as definitely far from the truth.”
Van de Maele: Legacy data incumbents missed the cloud transition
“The second one is what I call the incumbents that I think have kind of missed the boat to the clouds. And I think you're going to be struggled there to kind of provide that experience.”
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.”
Van de Maele: Effective data governance requires a business workflow engine
“I think a core part of all of this is this kind of understanding that actually you need a workflow engine, like a business process engine to help people kind of work together effectively.”
Van de Maele: Metadata management must serve as data's system of record
“We believe kind of a new approach is, is required where where the metadata management kind of foundation You really built a kind of a, almost what we call a system of engagement of system of record for data.”
Van de Maele: Collibra had zero customers for two years before pivoting
“We want to do data integration better. We tried for two years had zero customers. And so that's when we kind of pivoted into kind of data governance.”
Van de Maele: Early-stage startup operators fail in structured corporate leadership roles
“Put it, put a pirate on Navy ship. That's not going to work. Put a Navy captain on a pirate ship. That's not going to work either”
Collibra replaced its entire original leadership team within three years
“And I remember the first leadership team I've built, I thought these are all amazing people and they all are amazing people. And I thought that was going to be your leadership team for the next foreseeable future. And two years, two or three years later, it wa…”
Van de Maele: Organizational scaling should mimic software API and SLA architecture
“Just like to have APIs and SLAs and a product, you need to do the same thing on the company level, right? You have to modularize, you have the components, you have to kind of org chart.”
Van de Maele hired Collibra executives without meeting them in person
“I had a few new executives as part of the executive team without having seen them in person ever.”
Van de Maele: Data quality discipline originated from marketing mailings
“Originally it kind of, it came from how do we make sure that our marketing database that we send email mailings to the addresses are correct. That's where data quality came from, 20 years ago.”
Van de Maele: Collibra manages metadata without moving or storing customer data
“We don't move any data. So we have kind of connectors. We tie into all of your kind of data systems on-prem and the cloud. We capture all of that metadata. Table, schema, columns, files, and so forth. That's kind of how we built that metadata graph, but we're …”