flâneur

How the next iconic data infrastructure company will be born in the AI era

nextbigteng.substack.com · 755 words · saved by 1 readers

“Infrastructure inspires applications” but “applications inspire infrastructure” as well — reflections on how these interconnected innovation loops may play out during the AI revolution

The emergence of generational data infrastructure companies often aligns with major platform or paradigm shifts. This is intuitive since such technological sea changes can serve as a catalyst to unlock R&D breakthroughs, leading to the birth of category-defining powerhouses. Snowflake, a ~$62Bn market cap public company, is one such example. Fueled by the rise of cloud, Snowflake’s founders built a cloud-native data warehouse from scratch with groundbreaking architecture that separated storage and compute. Databricks (with a Series J valuation of $62Bn) is another illustration of this…

related reading