Big data is a word we’ve heard thrown around for the better part of a decade. This week’s guest is Muji of hhhypergrowth. Muji is a technologist, software developer, and investor who has spent over two decades in the trenches, helping IT departments implement software and new systems. Given the recent IPO of the data company, Snowflake, this episode attempts to review the history of big data. The evolution of big data has gone from on-premise to in the cloud solutions. Snowflake being one of the most noticeable cloud companies in 2020. In this episode, Muji–who has written an in-depth dissection of Snowflake, its technology, its positioning, and how it compares to competitors–shares the history of how we got to this point, and what he thinks makes Snowflake special. Tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Muji shares a bit about his background in data and how he has watched it evolve.
• The challenge today is corralling the different apps and data sources companies use.
• How companies used to gather and refine data before Snowflake – it was a manual process.
• Who provided the software in the 90s, 2000s – Oracle, SAP, IMB, Microsoft were big players.
• Cloud provides nearly unlimited scale capabilities on both storage and compute, which unleashed a new wave of data and analytical tools.
• Why a software like Hadoop wasn’t as successful as Snowflake – it was too complicated.
• The demise of Cloudera and Hortonworks was the success of cloud over on-prem solutions.
• How Snowflake managed to scale so successfully, from leveraging the cloud to being vendor-neutral and a turnkey service.
• Snowflake beat Amazon at its own game by building a turnkey solution on great architecture.
• How Snowflake empowers their customers with a multi-cloud strategy and variable pricing.
• Snowflake’s three layers – a storage tier, scalable compute, and shared services layer.
• The frenemies relationship in today’s cloud economy and how Amazon benefits either way.
• How Muji picks and chooses who to invest in, such as current execution and scalability.
• Muji talks about the rise of analytics and how Alteryx is making analytics simpler and easier.
• Snowflake and Alteryx and their respective focuses on extract, transform, and load section.
• Where Muji thinks Snowflake is headed – he sees them expanding into the analytics space.
• Making analytics easier and allowing users to do more with it is the key to unlocking value.
• Rationalizing what he’s willing to pay – Muji says traditional valuation metrics aren’t important.
• Other companies Muji is paying attention to in the software space, like JFrog and Asana.
• Muji’s plan for his blog, hhhypergrowth – he wants to help average investors who don't have the insights understand these platforms better.

Tweetables:

“It’s going to be interesting to see services crop up around making the most of that data, and performing analytics over it, and gaining insights, without the customers having to do it themselves. You don't have to hire an entire team of data scientists anymore.” — @hhhypergrowth [0:33:41]

“I think that's where it's all going. It's making analytics easier, making regular business users, who have the operational awareness of what it is they're seeking. I know I want to look at my data in a certain way. Have those users be able to do more with analytics is going to be the key to unlocking a lot of value.” — @hhhypergrowth [0:44:03]

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