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Just did a funding round. In a sign of the times clickhouse used to be an interesting DB product, but is now a "database software that companies can use as they

• embedding-shape 8mo ago
  Investors are finicky creatures, if you've been relying on VC-funding since before, it's hard to stop until you are really successful, and if everyone starts to only look at shiny AI stuff and you still need investors, you end up with not much choice. I wish there was less of it, we'd have better software then, but :/
  • esafak 8mo ago
    Would we? You can look at places with less funding and see how many software companies get off the ground.
    • embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > You can look at places with less funding Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out. I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".
      • esafak 8mo ago
        FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.
        • hrimfaxi 8mo ago
          What gave you that idea?
          • esafak 8mo ago
            Because Silicon Valley, which contributes the majority of the code, is venture backed. For example, 84% of the Linux kernel's development is corporate: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-foundation-growth-statistics/#:~:text=Corporate https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-foundation-growth-... I don't know why people are so upset here.
        • weiliddat 8mo ago
          That sounds like more sign of recent times. FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...
          • rhplus 8mo ago
            Sure, those projects were un(der)funded in the 80s and 90s but the reason we talk about them today is because of the huge amount of investment - both direct and in kind - that VC backed companies have managed to give to many of them. I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies. Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.
          • jedberg 8mo ago
            Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies. Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff. And we weren't unique, this happened a lot.
    • CodingJeebus 8mo ago
      I sometimes wonder if the VC ecosystem creates its own confirmation bias by making it easy to see and aggregate companies it incubates. Whenever I look for jobs, I'm always surprised to find companies that have taken no VC funding and don't try particularly hard to market to the industry as a whole, preferring instead to stay relatively under the radar. They tend to have more grounded financials (read: paths to profitability) and while the pay packages aren't quite aligned with the top end of the market, they also tend to manage headcount more responsibly than FAANG. I work with a fairly niche stack and I'm constantly finding new companies that I've never heard of and don't raise VC rounds. Long way of saying that just because they're not easy to find doesn't mean they don't exist.
  • shimman 8mo ago
    What but? If this is the "best" that VC can do with the money, the US government should simply tax it away from them. Absolutely worse way to allocate resources and develop a robust forward looking tech industry, you're just chasing the shiny while fucking over the commons.
    • embedding-shape 8mo ago
      Maybe my point wasn't clear, I agree with you. It's a bad way of allocating resources, and we'd had better software had we been without it.
• steveBK123 8mo ago
  I think it’s hard to make money as a pure play DB vendor and has been for a decade or two. So they all inevitably pivot into some service specific to whatever the hot use case of the moment is… Cybersecurity. Observability. Crypto. AI.
• debarshri 8mo ago
  The fundraising market is very interesting right now. You have to have some AI and agenr narrative without which you do not look very forward looking. You might be a database company with million in revenue but if you do not have a AI narrative you would not be perceived as forward looking as compared to a startup thats burning through millions in token with no path to profitability. It has become table stakes and the new reality for startups.
  • data-ottawa 8mo ago
    This has made buying products hard. What do you do? “We power your agents” okay… but what do you do? How do you do that? Every DB, storage system, and analytics tool website is like this lately.
• nikcub 8mo ago
  Clickhouse are on a bit of a roll. acquired peerdb and are doing a hosted postgres product[0] Acquired hyperdx[1] for their clickstack[2] observability platform and adding langfuse to a bunch of other llm related acquisitions and products They're really building out a snowflake / databricks alternative [0] https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres https://clickhouse.com/cloud/postgres [1] https://clickhouse.com/docs/cloud/manage/hyperdx https://clickhouse.com/docs/cloud/manage/hyperdx [2] https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability https://clickhouse.com/use-cases/observability