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Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

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Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#101

Post by shemtovo »

pplonski86 wrote: post #45
devdimi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lot of reasons: -Europe is fragmented market. It is not given that German software will be gladly accepted and used in France, Italy or UK and vice versa. There are barriers there that does not exist in the US. -The capital market and the stock market are not as developed as in USA in terms of market participants and available funds. Going public is unlikely event. If it happens, it would not get a lot of p…

Could you give example of Europe based tech companies that went public in US?

Elastic

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#102

Post by moosey »

ionised wrote: post #41
nraynaud wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that ship has sailed, Europeans see what SV has become and are thankful that they failed in replicating the model.

I certainly am. I don't want a European Google or Facebook popping up. I want the existing Google and Facebook to go away.

I desperately want Europe to replace most services I'm using, because I prefer their regulatory environment. Primary examples would be gmail and google (I'm using qwant and it doesn't compare, but I use it before I switch to google). I do not use facebook anymore, and although I have a twitter account I do not use it.

Based on my daughters phone usage, I don't think that facebook is the thing anyways. It's all private chat rooms with her friends, which seems like a much healthier online interaction than what FB is. I just want to see that kind of thing primarily incubated and hosted in the European regulatory environment, because I don't trust the U.S. one where I live.

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#103

Post by badestrand »

oblio wrote: post #35
rapsey wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funding options in Europe are abysmal compared to US or even UK. EU response to this is various EU funding programs that are mostly throwing money away for little to no benefit. At least in the tech sector.

> EU response to this is various EU funding programs that are mostly throwing money away for little to no benefit. You're framing this as if it's the EU's job. It isn't. The only way the EU could compete if it would become a federal state, similar to the US. Right now the EU, despite being a single market in many respects is far from being a true digital single market. Individual states are actively fighting against…

> Right now the EU, despite being a single market in many respects is far from being a true digital single market

I think this is less about regulations and more about language. Most people in the EU simply don't speak english so you would have to have your marketing and sales in 20 languages which is simply not doable. A french startup just can't cold call a romanian company because they can not communicate. Yes, it gets better with each new generation but it will be decades before this is "solved".

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#104

Post by marcinzm »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #7

I wonder what it would take to create the set of conditions for another "Silicon Valley / SF Bay Area" to appear in Europe. It seems like inevitably, any tech companies that are successful always end up getting bought out and leave to the U.S. instead of staying. What are the primary issues? Lack of VC funding, culture, government policy? On the surface, it doesn't seem like there's anything particularly lacking, at…

The US lacks labor laws which means hiring people is a low risk activity since you can easily fire them. You can also work them for 60 hours a week and 52 weeks a year. The labor laws that do exist, for example in California, are about workers being able to switch companies versus them not losing their jobs.

That means you can quit your job, start a startup, hire people, shut down the startup and then find another job with ease. When you need to give two months notice to just leave a job that whole process slows down significantly.

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#105

Post by jamesblonde »

monstrado wrote: post #95
jamesblonde wrote: post #2

Great product. It should have happened last week, then we truly could have said that all Enterprise Apache Open Software products died of the AWS plague in 2018: Hadoop is gone with Cloudera/Hortonworks merging, Kafka with Confluent's new license covering their ecosystem of tooling. Databricks now have their own Spark runtime, which will get more TLC than Apache Spark. On top of Apache, Mongo, Neo4J, Redis Labs aband…

Curious where you get "Hadoop is gone" by two companies (who employ hundreds of open source contributors and committers) merging. I think it's in fact the complete opposite. I get the whole buy-in into the FUD that Cloudera ships proprietary software so they're evil, but the fact of the matter is their core system (CDH) is 100% open source. Impala, open source. Kudu, open source. Anything that is in CDH that isn't in…

Hadoop is not gone yet. But the intention is there. AWS EMR is killing them. Users/Companies just pick EMR by default, leaving few crumbs left for the now one company that develops the platform. The EMR team is what, a two pizza box team? Like you said, Cloudera pay for hundreds of top developers to develop a product that is repackaged by a two-pizza team whose company earns more than Cloudera on Hadoop. That situation will not continue, that is my prediction. And Hadoop will be the crossfire. My prediction is that Cloudera will release a new data platform in time that is not "hadoop", but they will leave Apache Hadoop in maintenance mode. It's the only logical way to address the AWS "problem".

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#106

Post by jamesblonde »

jamesblonde wrote: post #11
jlangenauer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is because I think there isn't such an obsession with becoming a billionaire here. If you're a founder, and someone offers you a deal which will personally see you net €10-20m after tax, why wouldn't you take it?

I agree. However, I know the Data Artisans founders personally. There like like 6 or 7 of them, and Prof Volker Merkl (main person behind the original project, Stratosphere). Then, they did two funding rounds. Nobody is coming out with near 10m euro. Half that, before tax, probably after a few years of golden handcuffs. So, my guess is 3m euro after 10+ years. Not bad, but you couldn't buy a good house in the valley…

Edit: Kostas announced on Twitter that Data Artisans recently also had an undisclosed Series B. So, the founders probably received a bit less that I wrote above. If the founders lost control of the board in the Series B, they may have received a good bit less than I wrote previously.

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#107

Post by majidazimi »

bogomipz wrote: post #93
ajaxaddicted wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you are financially secure, living in Germany makes no sense. Shitty weather, the insane apartment situation in any major city, shitty services(any company with Deutsche in front - Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Wohnen), the beurocratic burden in your day to day live - everything takes forever to get done here. Spain is not perfect, but oh my god is Germany overrated

>"the beurocratic burden in your day to day live" Could you elaborate on this? I'm genuinely curious what are some of those day to day bureaucratic burdens?

Here is an example:

I'm not citizen but working as a dev. I have an old passport which doesn't have bio-metric security features. However, I have a valid residence permit card (it already has bio-metric features). Revolut app which is UK based bank accepts my residence permit in identification process without checking my passport. Just scan it via the app itself and there you go. There is literally no bank in Germany (including N26) that accepts my residence permit card. I constantly have to fight with every company providing any online financial service, because their online video identification process (known as Post-Ident which is run by Deutsche Post) only scans bio-metric passports.

How come? If this thing (residence permit) is a valid ID document, then why is everyone asking for passport? My identity has already been approved by immigration office.

If residence permit is not a valid ID document, then why issue it at first place?

Re: Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M

#108

Post by monstrado »

jamesblonde wrote: post #105
monstrado wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious where you get "Hadoop is gone" by two companies (who employ hundreds of open source contributors and committers) merging. I think it's in fact the complete opposite. I get the whole buy-in into the FUD that Cloudera ships proprietary software so they're evil, but the fact of the matter is their core system (CDH) is 100% open source. Impala, open source. Kudu, open source. Anything that is in CDH that isn't in…

Hadoop is not gone yet. But the intention is there. AWS EMR is killing them. Users/Companies just pick EMR by default, leaving few crumbs left for the now one company that develops the platform. The EMR team is what, a two pizza box team? Like you said, Cloudera pay for hundreds of top developers to develop a product that is repackaged by a two-pizza team whose company earns more than Cloudera on Hadoop. That situati…

That's where we disagree. You're taking some pretty radical jumps to get to the conclusion you want. Let's assume for a second that you're right, and EMR somehow kills an entire company (who sells much more than just a Cloud offering). This has absolutely no bearing on the survival of an open source project. Yes, Cloudera employs developers who's sole job is to work on Hadoop, but there are a ton of people who work on and contribute to Hadoop outside of both Cloudera & Hortonworks (e.g. Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, ..., ..., ...)

It's equally outrageous to assume that the developers at these companies would somehow just completely lose all passion and willingness to carry the project forward if they lost their job. The reason a lot of people at Cloudera & Hortonworks are there is because they were contributing to the project long before they were employees.

Hadoop isn't going anywhere. It may become less relevant or more relevant based on how things play out and/or new projects coming to fruition, but the project will be around for a long time. Lastly, the project "Hadoop" is nothing like it was back 8 years ago. The project continues to evolve and projects born out of it are essentially tacked onto it (e.g. Flink, Spark, Kudu, HBase, Presto/Drill/Hive/Impala).

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