A16Z-backed data firms Fivetran, dbt Labs to merge in all-stock deal • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by globular-toast » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 8:06 AM UTC

vovavili wrote: post #37

globular-toast wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem specifically? Are you banking on some future features? Can't fix the bugs yourself? Worried it won't be compatible with future data warehouses? I know people don't like it these days, but you can just continue to run old software.

dbt in particular is effectively useless without maintained and up-to-date connectors to your particular database.

Do your database vendors often do breaking changes to their protocols? dbt just generates SQL and that's not going anywhere.

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

#42

Post by mwexler » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 12:24 PM UTC

taude wrote: post #35

karakanb wrote: post #30

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…

With Snowflake's new OpenFlow offering based on Apache Nifi, Snowflake will be able to become Fivetran faster than Fivetran can become Snowflake/Databricks, though.... Thoughts?

Fivetran has 2 pieces: data movement and integration/access (via linking to APIs, etc.) Sure, there's Airbyte and others, but no one has as complete a catalog of integration plugs as Fivetran.

Yes, OpenFlow may be able to replace the data movement part (though prefect, airflow, yadda yadda all tried to be the one ring), but it's a pretty small bunch who support all connections.

It's not the only part of the business, but it's an important one. Just like Plaid's approach became the standard to code against in accessing financial services, Fivetran has become the default in getting data out of tools you already pay for directly into a controlled space.

If they don't muck that up, they've got an embed in every large integration. No one is looking to OpenFlow for that.

Still won't become Snowflake or Databricks (and it's silly to try, imho), but they do have a good moat for a small castle.

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

#43

Post by czhu12 » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

tomwphillips wrote: post #40

Not that surprising. How many millions has been piled into dbt Labs? dbt Cloud is an uncompelling product. Fivetran is convenient but absurdly expensive. Now dbt core development is just another marketing cost for Fivetran. I'd really love to see everyone move on from the "modern data stack". dbt is a sticking plaster to a problem caused by orgs aggressively adopting SaaS products and choosing distributed software ar…

Would like to echo the absurdly expensive bit. They charged us over $140k / year to basically stream ~1TB of production data (50m rows) from our Postgres into a redshift database.

They were part of the reason I started https://canine.sh as a way to self host more things. Had we had the confidence to host Airbyte or kafka + debezium as an option, we wouldn't have to deal with the atrocious pricing.

Everytime I bring up self hosting, the response is always a rote response of: "Its way too hard", "What if it goes down?", "Just delegate it to the professionals". To me this just seems incredibly defeatist, and its the same set of rebukes regardless if the cloud version costs $100 or $100,000.

end of rant.

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

#44

Post by pawelduda » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

hisnameisjimmy wrote: post #31

pawelduda wrote: post #2

Thoughts on possible implications for users in foreseeable future? We built a lot using dbt and can't really think of going back or switching to alternatives

Full disclosure: I am a PM at Fivetran who is very excited about this. We are fully committed to open source dbt and don't want to build a 'walled garden'. Interoperability is one of the key value propositions of both Fivetran and dbt. While I'm biased, I think the main implications for users is that their favorite tooling will be with one vendor who cares about what makes them great. You can read a bit more here: ht…

Thanks!

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

#45

Post by RainyDayTmrw » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 1:35 AM UTC

swyx wrote: post #16

RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #3

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

those are heavy accusations to toss around and that the title would like you to conclude, but doesnt pass the basic smell check of fivetran's founders still having control of the company. dbt was the hottest company in the data world 3 years ago and is valuable.

I freely admit, this is "smell" based speculation.