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Datadog acquires Quickwit

quickwit.io

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Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#91

Post by Rastonbury »

propter_hoc wrote: post #59

> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round. Rhetorically, why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they…

You're a founder who raised seed and now appear to be hitting PMF and making repeatable sales, won't you raise A to scale?

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#92

Post by hobs »

philippemnoel wrote: post #90
Hixon10 wrote: post #4

It's a bit sad that many modern databases were recently acquired. They had the potential to bring a lot of innovations. 1. https://www.warpstream.com/ 2. https://www.orioledb.com/ 3. https://quickwit.io/

Acquisitions don't necessarily mean the end of innovation. Sometimes, it allows them to take innovations they've worked hard on for years and expand the reach to a significantly larger audience :) I have met the founders of all 3 of these companies and can assure you they all care tremendously about bringing their work to the world. ParadeDB is independent and without plans to sell anytime soon, though :)

Not hating on Quickwit, but almost never does an acquisition in the modern era mean continual innovation, most companies are now suborned to a greater purpose, and its almost never going to drive them to build the best thing they already have ended their lifecycle - nobody is going to buy them from DD and their quality/dev process will dominate, and that is of a decent size corporation.

It also looks like most of DD's observability acquisitions are either integrated directly (seemingly with a full rewrite) or look a lot like aquihires for senior folks, so I wouldn't hold my breath here.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#93

Post by hobs »

everfrustrated wrote: post #50
dirtshell wrote: post #42

Do any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and grepping.

Easily the best product in its category. The value is in APM/tracing - if you're just using it for logs you're missing a lot. If you're used to traditional Enterprise pricing it's fairly priced for the value you get but anybody coming from self-funded or VC it's very expensive. If you're already using Splunk you can afford it. One of its best features is it's consumption priced not by seats so easy to open up for all…

Which just meant that when the business had sticker shock they just disabled all the useful features of DD which consumed so much.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#94

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

acaloiar wrote: post #43

The clock begins counting down to Datadog figuring out how to charge per node, cpu, container, RAM (KB), and unicode characters indexed.

They already do. For example, for containers you have 5 per host included in the Pro plan (I have more in my hobby projects...) and then you pay extra for each. Their pricing model is quite complex and with time you start to wonder if all these nice features are really worth that high prices.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#95

Post by quicksilver03 »

the_duke wrote: post #65
dangoodmanUT wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love quickwit, unfortunately datadog has a history of murdering open source (e.g. vector.io halting development and never fixing gross bugs)

Yeah, a Vector dev that is now at Datadog told me that Vector is essentially deprecated.

I'm using Vector for my own infrastructure and at work, at the time it seemed the best option to ship logs to various destinations. Are there any alternatives?

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#96

Post by maccard »

propter_hoc wrote: post #59

> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round. Rhetorically, why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they…

> why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech.

Remember that this is a decision you make when you accept the seed money, not when it comes to looking for further money. If you want to build a profitable growing company, bc funding is not the path to that.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#97

Post by maccard »

bomewish wrote: post #82
propter_hoc wrote: post #59

> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round. Rhetorically, why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they…

Practically, what happens if the founders don’t want to play ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.

It’s going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which you likely won’t have a majority on) will reject it. VC’s don’t care about recouping money, they’d rather you fired everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens. It’s not about money it’s about reputation.

If you suggest something they don’t like, they’ll stall until you run out of money, or force you out.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#98

Post by sealeck »

maxwellg wrote: post #23

> Mezmo recently put in production Quickwit to serve thousands of customers and petabytes of logs, drastically reducing infrastructure cost and complexity while delivering the same user experience. I can't imagine they feel great about Quickwit getting bought by a competitor after that.

Either they did it on their own, in which case that's open source for you, or they have some kind of contract with quickwit, in which case I'd be really surprised if they don't have some clauses which handle this.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#99

Post by propter_hoc »

Rastonbury wrote: post #91
propter_hoc wrote: post #59

> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round. Rhetorically, why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they…

You're a founder who raised seed and now appear to be hitting PMF and making repeatable sales, won't you raise A to scale?

Is that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically?

Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital constrained without raising additional rounds.

So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events." But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my previous experience.

Re: Datadog acquires Quickwit

#100

Post by aseipp »

mindcrash wrote: post #18
aseipp wrote: post #9

Well, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on": > We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit wi…

"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?" They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hope…

Yes, I've been using Vector since very early on, long before Datadog acquired it, and Datadog have continued ongoing maintenance and feature additions at a slow-but-steady pace, which I think is good. Like Quickwit, Vector is very stable and already quite complete. So I'm not too unhappy.

But Vector is something that complements Datadog's offering very well, so I think that makes sense for them to be good stewards of it. Quickwit is something that somewhat actively competes against them, which is a big difference. I suspect that unlike Vector, Quickwit is probably going to stop seeing any development in pretty short order, unless the devs now can consciously go out of their way to dedicate extra hours to it.

To be clear, I think that the relicense is great, and I think it's very possible that Quickwit will be picked up/forked by someone and maintenance will continue, because it's very good, and I'd really love to see someone do metrics for it as well. So, I'm not all gloomy or anything like that.

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