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Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

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Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#181

Post by poisonwomb »

retinaros wrote: post #19

I 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?

I think the governance stuff might push it over the top for a lot of organisations; it's pretty well integrated with IAM providers not only for structured/modelled data but also workspaces for the data sciencey stuff. Pretty much everything has permissions associated with it. When you have a big data engineering/science push off the back of the AI hype I think it appeals to the cheque writers to have something centralised and controlled.

Aside from that I do get the feeling that most small and medium sized companies have been oversold on it - they don't really have enough data to leverage a lot of the features and they don't really have the skill a lot of the time to avoid shooting themselves in the foot. It's possible for a reporting analyst upskilling to learn the programming skill to not create a tangled web of christmas lights but not probable in most situations. There seems to be a whole cottage industry of consultancies now that purport to get you up and running with limited actual success.

At least it's an incentive for companies to get their data in order and standardise on one place and a set of processes.

In terms of actual development the notebook IDE feels like big old turd to use tho and it feels slow in general if you're at all used to local dev. People do kinda like these web based tools tho. Can't trust people all the time! There's VS code and PyCharm extensions but my team work mainly with notebooks at the moment for good or ill and the experience there is absolute flaky dogshit.

I think it's possible to make some good stuff with it and it's paying my bills at the moment, but I think a lot of the adoption may be doomed to failure lol

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#182

Post by karmajunkie »

whalesalad wrote: post #162
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #6

I 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?

My personal theory of startups starts with "Series F is for F*cked", I have no idea what it takes to get to a Series K...

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#183

Post by lamp_book »

karmajunkie wrote: post #182
whalesalad wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My personal theory of startups starts with "Series F is for F*cked", I have no idea what it takes to get to a Series K...

Anyone investing is in a k hole

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#184

Post by [deleted] »

whalesalad wrote: post #162
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #6

I 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?

[deleted]

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#185

Post by naijaboiler »

constGard wrote: post #123
djrj477dhsnv wrote: post #92

How is this company worth even 1% of that? Their product looks like basic wrappers for managing postgres instances and dashboards. Why would anyone with even minimal technical expertise pay for a generic service like that?

A lot of people purchasing their products have a vague understanding of the problem they're trying to solve and an even worse grasp of how dbx solves it for them. I'm living this first hand.

we have databricks at my company 50m ARR, 150 employee. With 0 full time Data Engineer (1 data scientist + 1 db admin manages everything on there as part time jobs). We are able to have data from like 100 transactional database tables, Zendesk, all our logs, every single event from eveery user in our mobile application, banking data all in 1 place. We are a 2-sided marketplace, we can easily get 360 degree data on our B2B customers, B2C customers, measure employee producting.

My team of 3 data scientists are able to support a a culture of experimentation, data-informed decision making and support the entire org, and we are still growing 15% YoY.

And we do all that 30k annual spend on databricks. That's less than 1/5 the cost of 1 software engineer. Excellent value for money if you ask me.

i struggle to imagine how else we can engineer a hub for all of our data and manage permissions appropriately at less tooling and engineering cost

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#186

Post by naijaboiler »

troyvit wrote: post #140
dh2022 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they raise money if they do not need? Raising money dilutes existing shareholders - who are probably not too happy about it.

I worked at a place once where the CEO basically said that it's a lot easier to raise money when you don't need it than to raise it when you do. The US economy is looking pretty weird with a bunch of conflicting predictors. Maybe they're buffering for a recession.

Its always true. Whether you are a start up or an individual. People throw money at you when you least need it. But when you do need it, they give all types of hassle

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#187

Post by naijaboiler »

retinaros wrote: post #19

I 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?

we have databricks at my company 50m ARR, 150 employee thats still growing at 15% YoY.. With 0 full time Data Engineer (1 data scientist + 1 db admin manages everything on there as part time jobs). We are able to have data from like 100 transactional database tables, Zendesk, all our logs of every API call, every single event from every user in our mobile and web applications, banking data, calendar data, goole play store data, apple store data, all in 1 place. We are a 2-sided marketplace, we can easily get 360 degree data on our B2B customers, B2C customers, measure employee productivity across all departments.

My team of 3 data scientists are able to support a culture of experimentation, data-informed decision making accross the entire org.

And we do all that 30k annual spend on databricks. That's less than 1/5 the cost of 1 software engineer. Excellent value for money if you ask me.

I really struggle to imagine being able to that any cheaper. How else we can engineer a hub for all of our data and manage appropriate access, run complex calculations in seconds, join data from so many disparate sources, at a total cost (tool + labor) <80k/yr. I double dare you to suggest or find me a cheaper option for our use case.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#188

Post by naijaboiler »

djrj477dhsnv wrote: post #103
benrutter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the main offering of databricks- you get a "data platforn in a box" and navigating the forest of piecemeal solutions is replaced with telling your data science and analytics teams to "use databricks". It's easy to look on knowing lots about data tools and say "this could be better done with open source tools for a fraction of the cost", but if you're not a big tech company, hiring a team to manage your…

What exactly is a "data platform"? We have a large postgres server running on a dedicated server that handles millions of users, billions of record updates and inserts per day, and when I want to run an analysis I just open up psql. I wrote some dashboards and alerting in python that took a few hours to spin up. If we ever ran into load issues, we'd just set up some basic replication. It's all very simple and can eas…

we have databricks at my company 50m ARR, 150 employee thats still growing at 15% YoY. With 0 full time Data Engineer (1 data scientist + 1 db admin both co-manage everything on there as part-time jobs. They have their full-time role). We are able to have data from like 100 transactional database tables, Zendesk, all our logs of every API call, every single event from every user in our mobile and web applications, banking data, calendar data, goole play store data, apple store data, all in 1 place. We are a 2-sided marketplace, we can easily get 360 degree view of our B2B customers, B2C customers, measure employee productivity across all departments. It's that deep data understanding of our customers that powers our growth

My team of 3 data scientists are able to support a culture of experimentation, data-informed decision making accross the entire org.

And we do all that 30k annual spend on databricks. That's less than 1/5 the cost of 1 software engineer. Excellent value for money if you ask me.

I really struggle to imagine being able to that any cheaper. How else we can engineer a data hub for all of our data and manage appropriate access & permissions, run complex calculations in seconds (yes we have replaced overnight complex calculation done by engineering teams), join data from so many disparate sources, at a total cost (tool + labor) <80k/yr. I double dare you to suggest or find me a cheaper option for our use case.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#190

Post by lucketone »

naijaboiler wrote: post #185
constGard wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people purchasing their products have a vague understanding of the problem they're trying to solve and an even worse grasp of how dbx solves it for them. I'm living this first hand.

we have databricks at my company 50m ARR, 150 employee. With 0 full time Data Engineer (1 data scientist + 1 db admin manages everything on there as part time jobs). We are able to have data from like 100 transactional database tables, Zendesk, all our logs, every single event from eveery user in our mobile application, banking data all in 1 place. We are a 2-sided marketplace, we can easily get 360 degree data on ou…

Do you use any payed support from databricks?
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