Confluent Inc.

What say you?

Yeah, no, we had that conversation about this and even just noticed just what yesterday that IBM is buying Confluent, which is the Kafka folks.

In fact, just a funny story.

When I was at, I sold the company to Docker and they bounced around because I was, you know, I was this sort of anomaly.

I was the founder and they finally put me in BD.

And at the time, this is during the Docker rocket ship, the only people who were more arrogant and than the Docker founders or the Confluent people.

Because everybody wanted Kafka at that point.

But yeah, no, it's funny.

Yeah, no, we had that conversation about this.

And even I just noticed just, what, yesterday that IBM is buying Confluent, which is the Kafka folks.

In fact, just a funny story.

When I was at, I sold the company to Docker.

I was the founder.

And they finally put me in BD.

And at the time, this is during the Docker rocket ship, the only people who were more arrogant than the Docker founders or the Confluent people.

Because everybody wanted Conf at that point.

Uh, but I think, uh, it, it gives us basically a deadline, right? It doesn't mean that we're screwed.

Like, we've seen, like, a social response actually pretty neutral around MotherDuck because we do have example where, you know, like Confluent was selling Kafka and, um, you know, AWS has been selling, uh, uh, I would say PubSub event for years.

Uh, Google has a Kafka equivalent.

There is so many, you know, vendors, uh, selling-

... and for Spark.

There is good and bad example.

Spark, uh, you know, Databricks was really successful actually, and Confluent pretty well, uh, being acquired after by IBM.

Uh, Redis, that's another story that actually didn't go really well.

Yeah

... you know, I just noticed just, what, yesterday that, uh, IBM's buying Confluent, which is the Kafka folks.

That...

Just funny story.

I was the founder, and they finally put me in PD.

And at the time, this is during the Docker rocket ship.

The, uh, the only people who were more arrogant than, um, than the Docker founders were the Confluent people, you know? [laughs] 'Cause they, they...

E- everybody wanted Kafka at that point.

We talked about unstructured data and structured data, but again, the problem with data in motion, data at rest has never been kind of fully satisfied.

And that's why we went and acquired Confluent, and to say that, look, is it, is it the case? Confluent has some really, really fantastic pieces of technology.

So I would say these are my...

These are kind of the three pillars.

And all the kind of basic brass tacks around it.

But it's, it's kind of a real, real payoff- For, for our customers.

On the, on the last category with respect to streaming and, and combination, we also have a lot of tract-traction because, because the streaming business that Confluent had was, was north of a billion.

And, and that by itself has a lot of, lot of traction.

I'm still around there.

And running that for about 12 years, we ended up having some clients, literally Confluent, Superhuman, Replit, and got into that world.

And essentially like a year ago, pretty much, we figured out, hey, there is like a whole new world is emerging.

Let's have a say in that world.