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 18 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
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: 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: 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…”
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.”
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 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”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”