Running any sort of innovative data infrastructure startup (whether data prep, database, data pipeline, etc.) is now an exercise in futility. The big three clou

Running any sort of innovative data infrastructure startup (whether data prep, database, data pipeline, etc.) is now an exercise in futility. The big three cloud providers will embrace your innovation, extend your product, and extinguish your business. Given the market power of cloud providers, every infrastructure innovation now a "sustaining innovation" in Christensen's terminology. The key to success seems to be building a product for a niche the cloud providers think is too small, and then either maximizing your value within that niche so that if your market grows large enough for a cloud provider like AWS to come after you, you can pivot to providing customizations to your highest margin customers. MongoDB is a good example of this. On the other hand, none of the major cloud providers seem capable of moving up the value chain to the application level, so if I were starting a company today I would focus on leveraging my infrastructure-level innovation to create a vertical opportunity in a high margin market instead of seeking to build a horizontal platform (IoT platform for example).