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A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

reuters.com

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Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#21

Post by ants_everywhere »

drob518 wrote: post #17
RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #3

This smells like self-dealing on the part of A16z.

That was the first thought I had, too. When the dot-com bubble burst, every VC was slapping companies together to try to forestall the black mark of having a “failure” and balance sheet write off that they would have to show the LPs (investors) in the next LP meeting. It got so bad that someone described it as “tying together two rocks and seeing if they will float.” Needless to say, most didn’t. So, this makes me wo…

is this why Reddit and Infogami merged?

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#22

Post by mritchie712 »

It's the right move if they want to IPO.

The "modern data stack" market excluding of data warehouse / data lake is pretty small. Fivetran is biggest one and still under $500M in revenue, so they're acquiring other parts and starting to offer their own datalake (managed Iceberg).

Snowflake started offering fivetran-like connectors a couple years ago and I expect they'll double down there. Same with Databricks. Microsoft has Fabric now, but the reviews have been terrible (my experience included).

I think they'll each ultimately have a full data stack.

If you don't want to wait, we built a modern-data-stack-in-a-box at Definite (https://www.definite.app/).

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#23

Post by stretchwithme »

drob518 wrote: post #17
RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #3

This smells like self-dealing on the part of A16z.

That was the first thought I had, too. When the dot-com bubble burst, every VC was slapping companies together to try to forestall the black mark of having a “failure” and balance sheet write off that they would have to show the LPs (investors) in the next LP meeting. It got so bad that someone described it as “tying together two rocks and seeing if they will float.” Needless to say, most didn’t. So, this makes me wo…

That happened at a company I was at 8 years ago. It acquired a company also owned by the major investor. Layoffs started with a month. They whole thing shut down within 6 months.

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#25

Post by gregw2 »

Interesting. It makes sense with Fivetran and dbt being so complimentary, ingestion (Fivetran) vs transformation (DBT).

But I still feel like I'm missing, in DBT, capabilities for DB DDL/DML deployment (which I've done from Liquibase in DBT) for a fully CICD modern data stack. Preconditions, post-conditions, only-deploy-changed-code capabilities... Am I missing something in DBT?

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#26

Post by clkao »

gregw2 wrote: post #25

Interesting. It makes sense with Fivetran and dbt being so complimentary, ingestion (Fivetran) vs transformation (DBT). But I still feel like I'm missing, in DBT, capabilities for DB DDL/DML deployment (which I've done from Liquibase in DBT) for a fully CICD modern data stack. Preconditions, post-conditions, only-deploy-changed-code capabilities... Am I missing something in DBT?

There's the slim ci best practice and ways to deploying only what's changed in dbt, but these require some config and underlying knowledge.

Verifying schema changes pre-production is only part of the issues, figuring out the actual data changes caused by code logic changes is trickier.

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#28

Post by knes »

Fivetran acquired Census (reverse-etl) & Tobiko (dbt alternative).

I wonder who's next to really consolidate their platform play and compete with the old legacy MDM provider like Informatica. Data Observability or Catalog like Monte Carlo and Atlan. The whole Modern Data Stack has either died, acquired or merged by now. Wonder what's missing for Fivetran to IPO too.

I also wonder what this merge means for Airbyte who raised 150m at 1.5b in 2023.

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#29

Post by mfdupuis »

knes wrote: post #28

Fivetran acquired Census (reverse-etl) & Tobiko (dbt alternative). I wonder who's next to really consolidate their platform play and compete with the old legacy MDM provider like Informatica. Data Observability or Catalog like Monte Carlo and Atlan. The whole Modern Data Stack has either died, acquired or merged by now. Wonder what's missing for Fivetran to IPO too. I also wonder what this merge means for Airbyte who…

Observability is a good guess, but I'd venture to guess that the conversations going on internally are about how to capture value across the entire stack. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear about them acquiring either a database/warehouse company and/or an analytics solution. Or vice versa, them getting acquired by a bigger player that wants to offer more connectors and data modeling functionality.

Re: A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal

#30

Post by karakanb »

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of a dbt alternative, Bruin. (https://github.com/bruin-data/bruin)

I think consolidation in the space has been coming for quite some time now and this merger only confirms what us, along with many others, have been saying: the data tooling is in a miserable state and we had to glue together a bunch of different tools that don't work with each other.

At this point, I think it is quite obvious that Fivetran is going for Snowflake/Databricks's market share. They own the ingestion for many companies already, and they will offer a managed data lake product in order to compete with the data giants. By owning the means of bringing the data in (Fivetran) as well as the transformation layer (dbt/sqlmesh) they will aim to get ahead of Snowflakes of the world.

I think it'll be a win for the data community if they maintain and continue investing into the existing tooling, as they are running in quite a few places already, especially dbt core running in a self-managed way. I certainly hope they won't try to squeeze revenue for the sake of it from their combined users.

It's an interesting time to be in the space, and it feels great to be one of the few independent players in the market.

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