great article, Ben - but when i saw the reference to Transform, I was hoping to get your thoughts on the acquisition and what it means for dbt -- they were pretty far along with a "semantic layer" so I'm guessing alot of that gets scrapped now to make room for Transform's tech. Is that a good thing? (at least it supports joins!)
Thought-provoking as always. My first reaction is that “self-authorship is a luxury of the rich.” It could well be that in this stage of the market, the only rational strategy for a venture-backed data startup is to blindly pursue customers and hope for the best. The outcome is likely to be poor, but at least we as an ecosystem keep random-searching the space of customer desire.
At customer capture is still preferable to vendor capture, like we had in the 1990s with Microsoft and Oracle. :-)
Still, I’d like to believe your article is timely, in that NOW is precisely when we should stop desperately raiding garbage cans for food and start fencing in our own farms.
Perhaps 2023 is the year we finally have enough data -- and self-awareness -- to pick the exact right problem to fall in love with, and bet our startup on.
great article, Ben - but when i saw the reference to Transform, I was hoping to get your thoughts on the acquisition and what it means for dbt -- they were pretty far along with a "semantic layer" so I'm guessing alot of that gets scrapped now to make room for Transform's tech. Is that a good thing? (at least it supports joins!)
Thought-provoking as always. My first reaction is that “self-authorship is a luxury of the rich.” It could well be that in this stage of the market, the only rational strategy for a venture-backed data startup is to blindly pursue customers and hope for the best. The outcome is likely to be poor, but at least we as an ecosystem keep random-searching the space of customer desire.
At customer capture is still preferable to vendor capture, like we had in the 1990s with Microsoft and Oracle. :-)
Still, I’d like to believe your article is timely, in that NOW is precisely when we should stop desperately raiding garbage cans for food and start fencing in our own farms.
Perhaps 2023 is the year we finally have enough data -- and self-awareness -- to pick the exact right problem to fall in love with, and bet our startup on.
Maybe even mine. Thanks.