all great points. the community growth stuff is the standard open source playbook. wondering - do you have opinions on what part of the data stack should be open source or does it not matter to you in the grand scheme of things?
Ya part of me wants to believe a marketplace could work - but the long tail problem exists and the quality / consistency problem also exists. (For example - I have had the quality / consistency problem with Shopify apps.) And honestly - I’m not too mad about it. Good for Fivetran for executing on a “boring” problem in an quality way.
I’m glad you brought up Airbyte. When I first heard of Airbyte I was soo excited. I thought the concept was great - a continuation of singer.io open source goodness but with a UI and taking things to the next level. Companies everywhere could create and share integrations to common sources and Airbyte could become a defacto standard. Then I tried to implement Airbyte in production. I knew the orchestration part would take some effort but what I didn’t expect was problems with a number of very common connectors. I was very disappointed. Then I thought to myself.. but this company is worth billions... how is this possible. Well - I think you spelled it out nicely. I’m still hopefully for Airbyte and haven’t used their hosted solution - so maybe they will get things buttoned up soon. HOWEVER this quote from Tristan Handy’s Becoming Pangea post (where he quotes fivetran CEO George Fraser) I think is true. “Building high quality connectors is hard, and there are a LOT of them to build and maintain. Customers highly value the quality dimension—everything needs to just work. So what you need is a huge customer base to amortize the creation and maintenance costs of these connectors over. If you have a huge customer base that is well-monetized, you can spend more on the connectors and they will therefore be of higher quality.” I hope Airbyte can get that quality elevated and provide some healthy competition for the ETL space.
" Martin Casado, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, ... and that, “Workday, Salesforce, Adobe—they’re going to be reimplemented as apps on top of the data layer.”"
What the hell does that even mean?
Every single computing application ever uses data. Data is the stuff that is computed on. A computer and software is nothing without data.
The series E(verything is fine)
all great points. the community growth stuff is the standard open source playbook. wondering - do you have opinions on what part of the data stack should be open source or does it not matter to you in the grand scheme of things?
Ya part of me wants to believe a marketplace could work - but the long tail problem exists and the quality / consistency problem also exists. (For example - I have had the quality / consistency problem with Shopify apps.) And honestly - I’m not too mad about it. Good for Fivetran for executing on a “boring” problem in an quality way.
I’m glad you brought up Airbyte. When I first heard of Airbyte I was soo excited. I thought the concept was great - a continuation of singer.io open source goodness but with a UI and taking things to the next level. Companies everywhere could create and share integrations to common sources and Airbyte could become a defacto standard. Then I tried to implement Airbyte in production. I knew the orchestration part would take some effort but what I didn’t expect was problems with a number of very common connectors. I was very disappointed. Then I thought to myself.. but this company is worth billions... how is this possible. Well - I think you spelled it out nicely. I’m still hopefully for Airbyte and haven’t used their hosted solution - so maybe they will get things buttoned up soon. HOWEVER this quote from Tristan Handy’s Becoming Pangea post (where he quotes fivetran CEO George Fraser) I think is true. “Building high quality connectors is hard, and there are a LOT of them to build and maintain. Customers highly value the quality dimension—everything needs to just work. So what you need is a huge customer base to amortize the creation and maintenance costs of these connectors over. If you have a huge customer base that is well-monetized, you can spend more on the connectors and they will therefore be of higher quality.” I hope Airbyte can get that quality elevated and provide some healthy competition for the ETL space.
Love it.... are 2023 valuations a dead cat bounce?
" Martin Casado, an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, ... and that, “Workday, Salesforce, Adobe—they’re going to be reimplemented as apps on top of the data layer.”"
What the hell does that even mean?
Every single computing application ever uses data. Data is the stuff that is computed on. A computer and software is nothing without data.
VCs are more silly than not.