series k
What do they when they run out of alphabets?
Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
161–170 of 214 posts
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#162I can’t help feeling it is the first major misstep from databricks , they are raising the money for their hosted Postgres and ai platform. Ai is not far away from dropping to the “trough of disillusionment” and I can’t see why databricks even needs Postgres. Hopefully I’m wrong as I’m a big fan of databricks.
The first major misstep? Brother they already raised A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. At what point do you end the suffering?
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#163Just curious, wouldn't it get harder for companies like Databricks or Clickhouse to compete against AWS in the long run? They have better products, for sure. Yet over time, the product gap between what they offer and what AWS offers will narrow, and as a result the cost will be what matters most to the customers. And how can they compete on cost given that they run on AWS?
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#164series k What do they when they run out of alphabets?
We'll transition to using a UUID v4
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#165It doesn't look like a typical round for raising capital for investments. Instead: 1. Liquidity: Early investors could sell to late-stage investors, since they are not IPO. Their previous round looked like that. 2. Markup: The previous investors can increase their valuation by doing a round again. It also provides a paper valuation for acquiring new companies. That combined with preferred stock (always get 1x back) m…
So if I understand well, investors are not really investing for the company results, but more on the hope that people will continue to invest in the company? In a kind of a ... ponzi pyramid?
> So if I understand well, investors are not really investing for the company results
I don't know where you got that idea. Investors are putting their money into this company because they like the results and believe it's a better investment that their alternatives.
Any time you sell shares you generate some signal about what a company is worth. You can claim the company is worth a $100B all day long, but until you can sell a significant number of fractional shares of the company at that valuation it's just talk.
> In a kind of a ... ponzi pyramid?
A ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme implies that the company is lying about their results and books. Classic ponzi schemes might not have any real assets at all. The operators lie about the company and rely on incoming cash from new investors to pay out claims from past investors.
There's no ponzi here unless you believe Databricks is completely falsifying their operations and results. If any of those investors took their shares to the secondary market there would be plenty of other investors interested in buying them because they represent shares in the real company.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#166Unfortunately what I see is companies, especially smaller companies who originally got into Databricks because they hired people with Databricks/Spark experience, are trying to get away from the platform because it is too expensive -- and with that kind of money it is just easier to use Snowflake.
... which is also not cheap
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#167I always struggled to understand how do you make a company adopt a platform like databricks to « manage data » isnt managing data a minefield with plenty of open source pieces of software that serve different purposes ? who is the typical databricks customer?
you kill off all open source pieces, in turn compliance is happy, and a CTO is happy because he has a maintenance contract and can blame other people if stuff goes wrong. It's a way to get those pesky Python people to shut up Oh, and a CTO is always valued more if he manages a 5 million Databricks budget, where he can prove his worth by showing a 5% discount het negotiated very well, than a 1 million whatever-else bu…
makes for good boilerplate conversation while playing golf too
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#168Unfortunately what I see is companies, especially smaller companies who originally got into Databricks because they hired people with Databricks/Spark experience, are trying to get away from the platform because it is too expensive -- and with that kind of money it is just easier to use Snowflake.
... which is also not cheap
Yeah but looks like it is more "managed" and analysts especially prefer writing SQL over Python.
Honestly, as a Data engineer on the DWH side, I figured that my career is going to come to an end in a few years. AI + Cloud managed DWH are going to make all technical issues trivial, and I'm not someone who is interested in business context. Not sure where to move though.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
... which is also not cheap
Yeah but looks like it is more "managed" and analysts especially prefer writing SQL over Python. Honestly, as a Data engineer on the DWH side, I figured that my career is going to come to an end in a few years. AI + Cloud managed DWH are going to make all technical issues trivial, and I'm not someone who is interested in business context. Not sure where to move though.
I'm really surprised to hear this. If anything, I'd expect that every company transitioning from
> "we want to store/retrieve thin event logs and clickstreams"
to
> "we need to store/retrieve/join thick prose from customer interactions/reviews at every layer of the stack to give our LLMs the right context"
would create a significant need for data engineering for bespoke/enterprise/retail-monster use cases. (And data analysis too, until LLMs get better at tabular data.)
Are you seeing that this transformation need is actually being sufficiently covered by cloud providers, on the ground?
Or that people aren't seeing the problem this way, and are just doing prompt engineering with minimal RAG on static help-center datasets? That seems suboptimal, to say the least.
Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
#170Looks like someone is thinking “hey let’s wave our hands in the air and talk about AI and someone will write us a cheque!” as a way to kick the can down the road that this far into it they’re still not selling a product that’s making money. Looks a bit desperate TBH.
yep i still don't understand how hosting notebooks and spark ( which btw is ancient big data tech) is worth 100B. whats so hard about this. i don't get it.
What do most people use now in place of Spark?