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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

#171

Post by ferguess_k »

btown wrote: post #169
ferguess_k wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's what I think too, but meh I'm not super interested in that I guess, as it definitely rings the death bell. But I agree that's definitely the future. And people are going to be trained to accommodate AI instead of the other way around -- it's much easier!

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

#172

Post by pm90 »

hintymad wrote: post #163

Just 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?

Theoretically, yes, if AWS were really focused on they could probably deliver something like databricks; all the components are off the shelf, and a significant number of databricks clusters are on aws anyway. The question though is why; they’re already driving a lot of traffic to AWS and managing all the end customer stuff. The benefit of killing databricks is less than letting it live and grow and buy more from AWS.

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

#173

Post by hintymad »

pm90 wrote: post #172
hintymad wrote: post #163

Just 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?

Theoretically, yes, if AWS were really focused on they could probably deliver something like databricks; all the components are off the shelf, and a significant number of databricks clusters are on aws anyway. The question though is why; they’re already driving a lot of traffic to AWS and managing all the end customer stuff. The benefit of killing databricks is less than letting it live and grow and buy more from AWS…

Good point. I had the assumption that AWS EMR and Redshift had incentives to compete with Databricks. Another assumption was that someone in the AWS will eventually be ambitious enough to add offerings similar to Databrick's, like how AWS added MKS and OpenSearch. Both assumptions can well be wrong, though.

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

#175

Post by apwell23 »

yahoozoo wrote: post #170
apwell23 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

lot of usage has moved to snowflake. I know snowflake cannot do everything spark does but a huge number of workloads on spark can be moved to snowflake ( which has superior ux)

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

#176

Post by anktor »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

It's been mentioned but I want to add that the original idea of the post (mid size VPS hosting apache spark) might be missing that spark is ideal for distributed and resilient work (if a node fails the framework is able to avoid losing that work).

If you don't need this features, specially the distributed one, going tall (single instance with high capacity, replicate when necessary) or going simpler (multiple servers but without spark coordinating the work) could be good options depending on your/the team's knowledge

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

#177

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

ygouzerh wrote: post #107
jakozaur wrote: post #93

It 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?

Man I am not kidding but atleast this company has some returns but yes to me also its definitely risky, but it still has some decent intrinsic value as compared to companies whose sole objective is to trade within (MNC's should be illegal)

Also, maybe I just want to talk about it, but whenever I hear about ponzi pyramid, I think about cryptocoins like bitcoin and then remember about the people paying 2$ to buy 1$ worth of btc in american institutional markets.

My rant about crypto is unwarranted but I want to still share it. Stablecoins are really really cool but any native coins/tokens are literally ponzi pyramids / scams.

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

#178

Post by e40 »

rescripting wrote: post #86
e40 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! We did some simple testing on their platform to integrate it into our product for a customer. In a few days of light work rang up a huge bill. Many multiples of what we spend on OpenAI, which gets heavy use.

Its unfair to compare Databricks to OpenAI because they're at very different points in the enshittification[1] process. OpenAI is still early, burning VC money to acquire customers by operating at a loss. This makes it appear cheap. DataBricks is further along, attempting to claw back the value they provided to customers by raising prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

That may be, but our use of DB was 1/1000 of what we do in a month with OpenAI and the bill we racked up was $3,000 in 1 day. We talked with them and because we freaked out and deleted the widget (whatever the connectors are called) they didn't have logs for what we did, so they couldn't refund anything (they were willing). The fact that they couldn't find anything because we deleted whatever it was, that was weird, because they could certainly bill us. We're never using them again.

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

#180

Post by EdwardDiego »

Temporary_31337 wrote: post #147
EdwardDiego wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Them and Snowflake have been in an acquisition race, gobbling up data engineering startups like Pac-Man. That costs a fair bit of dosh.

What's the end game? What are investors expecting and how are they expecting the company to get $100b in profits and over what period of time?

Being the dominant player, I presume, starve out the rest by being _the_ way to do your big data.
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