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Maybe I'm missing something, but revenue per employee doesn't seem to be rising, which is what I would expect to see out of a successful startup that has found
by solresol 6y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but revenue per employee doesn't seem to be rising, which is what I would expect to see out of a successful startup that has found product market fit and is beginning to gain economies of scale. All I see is a capital raise 2x the previous raise each year, with no sign of profit and only a proportional increase in revenue.
I can build a business like that: sell Hadoop consulting services at a loss, below the market price. Win lots of business by being really cheap; grow as fast as your cashflow allows, which will require annual investment rounds of ever increasing size.
When I look at Google Trends, Hadoop's long-term trajectory looks like "dead by 2024". Do we expect that Databricks will be able to justify a $8B capital raising if Hadoop doesn't really exist? If not, what's the path to profitability?
(Not trying to say anything bad about Databricks or their management, I'm just genuinely wondering what's going on.)
- dataisamazing 6y agoFor what it’s worth, we work with them and thus have been following closely. Databricks’ value add is that are end to end for interfaces to use your data. From ingest to exploration to DS/ML. 1. Your metrics are wrong about revenue/employee. We’ve heard they’re growing well by all standard SaaS company metrics 2. Hadoop consulting business is just a completely incorrect description of the platform. Hadoop is dying because of companies like Databricks, and all that needs to exist to justify their valuation is people bringing them large data workloads. Their biggest problem is release maturity. Between Azure being down and them being down, stuff is down too often