14 thoughts on the economics of the open-source data space and how to become the next MongoDB or Databricks — The data space is booming, with companies like mongoDB (valued at 18 billion USD), databricks (30 billion), or Confluent, and many others. The startup space is overflowing with money and lots of founders want a share of the pie. But in my opinion, the data space is set up to…

The four skills that make great web3 founders also make great data founders: unlearning, pie making, systems thinking & community leading — Web3 founders work their products & early start-ups very differently than others, and data founders should too. The data space is becoming increasingly complex and adopts more and more openness, just as much as with open-source, as they do with user communities. In some parts, 50–80% of start-ups bet on…

How to write policies that are automatable, implement them and grow your rate of computational governance as your company matures — In this article, I’ll explain a simple framework that will help you working on the “computational” parts of your data governance inside a Data Mesh. We will: Explain what “computational” means, but do not cover “federated computational governance” in all details. For that you can check out Zhamaks original article…

Reverse ETL is just another buzzword, and yet the idea behind it has been a game changer for me as a data engineer & data product manager for making users more data-driven. Reverse ETL means taking data from your centralized data warehouse or data lake and pushing it out into…

How to build a data mesh platform inside Databricks — Databricks enables teams to build data mesh platforms with extreme speed, and low maintenance needs. But building a databricks-based data mesh platform comes with unexpected downsides as well. In this article, I’ll outline a possible setup using an imaginary team structure and help you…

I’m Sven, and this is part of the Thoughtful Friday. My super secret newsletter I usually only send out to people on the list. But this piece got some great responses and I figured there’s no harm in putting it into the open. Thoughtful Friday, the email that helps you…

A 3 step tutorial teaching you the three main concepts of the data-oriented approach to Python — Have you heard of the data-oriented approach to programming? If not, well, now you have. This tutorial is here to get you excited about it, in Python. We’re going to do something very simple: 1. We will take a look at a common iris classification problem, which I already “solved”…

How the “value perspective” on data teaches you three major lessons and be applied to 8 different data-heavy product examples. — The Ishango bone is one of the earliest counting sticks found on earth. The use of that 25,000-year-old, 10 cm long piece of bone with equal distant markings on it is disputed. But whatever the reasoning behind using it, the idea of counting sticks in general, wasn’t invented to be…

A dead-simple 3-step blueprint for start-ups to get data-driven right through the data mesh — The word “data mesh” is the top trend inside the data industry. Common wisdom currently seems to be that it’s something for big companies. But that’s wrong IMHO. Even better, start-ups have the unique chance to leverage the data mesh from the very beginning of their existence to become more…