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by osigurdson 639 days ago
InfluxDB always seemed like it was run by children who are good at raising VC money.
3 comments

Being familiar with both KDB and somewhat so with InfluxDB .. it strikes me as a challenging space. I suspect there just isn't much money in it.

Oddly InfluxDB has raised amounts of VC money approaching KDB parent companies current market cap. I know VC raised and market cap are not directly comparable, but what is the hoped-for enterprise value at exit of NewCo if the IncumbentCo is worth Z?

My take is that orgs with real revenue-generating time series data challenges, budget and dev staff to cook up solutions have long ago bought KDB licenses or rolled their own in-house column store.

Orgs using time series DBs for telemetry/observability/etc type of "back office" problems (where you are willing to downsample/conflate/offload history) either don't want to pay a dime, or want a fully formed SaaS solution with pretty GUI, alerting, etc like a DataDog they will like $10M/year to.

Not a lot of middle ground oddly.

Eventually one of their rewrites will find product market fit.
Agreed, after trying to buy a commercial license from them I was left… wanting to avoid the company entirely.