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by shikhar
545 days ago
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(S2 Founder) Congrats on the success with Estuary! You are not the first person to tell me there is no/tiny market for this. Clearly _you_ thought there was something to it, when you looked to HN for validation. We may do a lot more on top of S2, like offering Kafka compatibility, but the core primitive matters. I have wanted it. It gets reinvented in all kinds of contexts and reused sub-optimally in the form of systems that have lost their soul, and that was enough for me to have this conviction and become a founder. ED: I appreciate where you are coming from, and understand the challenges ahead. Thank you for the advice. |
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In my opinion, the key is to find a value prop and positioning which lets prospects try your service while spending a minimum of their own risk capital / reputation points within their own org.
That makes it hard to go after core storage, because it's such a widely used, fundamental, and reliable part of most every company's infrastructure. You and I may agree that conventions of incremental files in S3 are a less-than-ideal primitive for representing streams, but plenty of companies are doing it this way just fine and don't feel that it's broken.
WarpStream, on the other hand, leaned in to the perceived complexity of running Kafka and the share of users who wanted a Kafka solution with the operational profile of using S3. Internal champions can sell trying their service because the prospect's existing thing is already understood to be a pain in the butt.
For what it's worth, if I were entering the space anew today I'd be thinking carefully about the Iceberg standard and what I might be able to do with it.