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Dolt is Git for data

(www.dolthub.com)
358 points timsehn | 3 comments | 30 Mar 20 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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peteforde ◴[31 Mar 20 03:02 UTC] No.22734564[source]▶
Only 39 days since the last "GitHub for data" was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375774

I'll say what I said in February: I started a company with the same premise 9 years ago, during the prime "big data" hype cycle. We burned through a lot of investor money only to realize that there was not a market opportunity to capture. That is, many people thought it was cool - we even did co-sponsored data contests with The Economist - but at the end of the day, we couldn't find anyone with an urgent problem that they were willing to pay to solve.

I wish these folks luck! Perhaps things have changed; we were part of a flock of 5 or 10 similar projects and I'm pretty sure the only one still around today is Kaggle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4

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drewmol ◴[31 Mar 20 04:51 UTC] No.22735019[source]▶
Do you consider your effort a mistake looking back? Were you able to pay yourself fairly or was it a losing investment?
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1. peteforde ◴[31 Mar 20 06:23 UTC] No.22735330[source]▶
The answer to that can only be nuanced.

On one hand, startups are as exciting as bank heists. You put together an amazing team, do your homework as best you can, then get killed trying to execute your perfect plan. I'm proud of what we built and we all learned a lot the hard way.

On the down-side, building a company is emotionally, physically, mentally exhausting. It wasn't really a matter of whether I could pay myself fairly; I drew a typical programmer salary along with everyone else.

However, the important detail is that you're spending someone else's money and every penny of it represents someone you respect putting their trust in you, and you feel the weight of that every day.

Ultimately, I don't exactly regret it but I certainly wish that we weren't so convincing that we convinced ourselves of a market opportunity that we couldn't access or didn't exist at all. There was so much heat for "data" in 2011 it really seemed like we just had to show up with an amazing product.

We were wrong.

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2. dan00 ◴[31 Mar 20 07:45 UTC] No.22735638[source]▶
> Ultimately, I don't exactly regret it but I certainly wish that we weren't so convincing that we convinced ourselves of a market opportunity that we couldn't access or didn't exist at all.

How should you really know this without trying? If you aren't convinced, where should the motivation come from?

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3. peteforde ◴[31 Mar 20 10:56 UTC] No.22736438[source]▶
Actually, I do have a pretty good answer to this.

Every business has about 100 questions where if you know the answer to those questions, you are quite likely to be successful. The hard part is knowing which questions need to be asked of each business.

To be clear: my co-founders and I were all seasoned, multi-startup people. We had extremely high-calibre investors with finely tuned bullshit meters. In the end, our own pitching skill undid us because I think less-convincing founders would have undergone 25% more scrutiny and that would have required us to demonstrate that we had signed LOIs from 3-5 real customers before starting.

There was a subconscious misdirection around the fact that we didn't actually have anyone beating down our door. We let the excitement for "data", our personalities and our track records carry the moment.

Of course founders have to drink their own Kool-Aid to some extent or they won't make it. But there's real power and value in the customer development mindset. People want this? Prove it.