I’ve faced this challenge multiple times in my journey of building products and startups—having an early champion onboarded as a design partner while the team builds is critical to a startup’s success.
This is highly personal for me since I was part of the early Confluent growth story, having seen the company grow from about 150 folks to 1600+ headcount. I was amazed to see the quality of people who joined the company as each person was highly skilled, motivated and talented in their trades across all the functions of the organization.
I treasured the time the team spent at the happy hour every friday and no pay thursday lunch in Palo Alto, as we bonded and built friendships for life.
I understand that this is a difficult time for everyone involved, and I want to express my deepest compassion for those who have been affected by the layoffs, including everyone in the technology sector as a whole. Losing a job can be a traumatic experience, and my heart goes out to all of those who are facing this challenge.
I hope that you can find new opportunities quickly and that this difficult period in your life is as short as possible. Please know that you are in my thoughts and that I wish you all the best during this difficult time.
If you need to speak to someone about how to navigate this cycle, feel free to hit me up. I want to chat with everyone.
I have seen market cycles both good times and bad times. I still remember back in the day when my graduation ceremony coincided with the 2008 market crash. As a new graduate, it felt like the end of the world, however once I refocused my energies to dissect the situation, I found an abundance of opportunities in the downcycle. I realized there is an opportunity in every change and that each opportunity is different and unique in perspective.
I also wanted to add that we need to capture this energy, across the technology sector in general, to reconnect, chat, share ideas and be there for each other, be part of this giant pack, be part of the confluent mafia, that everyone who is still wearing the golden handcuff will be one day regretful. I hope you do realize that this is a pivotal moment that we get to be a part of, that is to re-evaluate our strenghts and re-align expectations to explore new opportunities and position ourselves for the next stage of growth story.
As per the reports, Venture capitalists are burdened with hundreds of billions of dollars that they can't invest in later-stage companies due to economic conditions. There has probably literally never been a better time in history to work on solving real-world problems.
The acceleration of these highly competent people hitting the labor market at the same time is going to create an burst of innovation. This will create an opportunity that will certainly be a prominent pillar in the next economic recovery.
I know some of us got more severance than others, and I know some of us are in more delicate circumstances than others, but let's take a minute to consider the possibilities with each other and at least have a little fun thinking out of the box about what the future could bring.
I hope the following verse from Bhagvad Gita will bring peace and strength to you in the current situation:
"The friction between our desire for the predictable and the mutability of life makes us feel a bit lost. Rather than rail against change, which the Gita says is inherent in all things, the key is to broaden our view by becoming less self-focused, less ruled by our ego. Change the inputs and you change the story. That shift occurs when we deepen our level of consciousness. The only place of unchanging truth, says the Gita, is internal, where we come into alignment with the Self."
Use all your power to free the senses from attachment and aversion alike, and live in the full wisdom of the Self.
—Bhagavad Gita, 2.68
Companies have built enormous batch processing systems to transform, format, and store data in systems that are ready to be queried by applications across their organizations. Batch processing is thus a result of the limitations of SQL since the data has to be queried repeatedly to keep it fresh.
What if the same data is processed in real-time as it flows in with applications instantly able to access, minus all the complexity of maintaining a batch processing pipeline? I believe this is going to be the promise of streaming database systems.
I think the company is working on solving the second piece of the puzzle.
The first piece is solved by solutions like Confluent Cloud and Apache MSK. Companies can now have a stream processing store on-demand using a credit card without managing self-hosted clusters in-house in production.
For the latter part, companies still need to hire a rare breed of engineers who are experts in distributed systems, database systems, stream processing, and infrastructure to do anything useful once the streaming stores are procured.
So far, this has been a luxury that only the likes of big technology conglomerates like Netflix, Uber, Lyft, etc. can hire an army of such engineers.
Deltastream, with its cloud-native distributed streaming database engine makes it available to any business to process streams of data from streaming data sources or traditional persistant data sources within minutes using a simple SQL interface.
This is an evolution of technology on how data is going to be managed henceforth. Remember what happened to systems like dBase, MSAccess once SQL came along.
Streaming SQL is going to do the same for SQL. SQL runs on past data, whereas Streaming SQL runs on data in flight as it flows. The result set of the queried data ends once SQL stops executing, but with Streaming SQL the query never stops exeucting, and the result set is returned as soon as new data flows in.