Ankur Goyal: preference

Transcript context

…a lot. I mean, sometimes I... Non-ironically. Not a vector database. I'll talk about this in a second, but I think I love the Odyssey. I'm not Odysseus, I don't think I'm cool enough, but I sort of romanticize going back to the farm. Maybe just like, Alanna and I move to the woods someday and I just sit in a cabin and write C++ or Rust code on my MacBook Pro and build a database or whatever. So that's sort of what I drool and dream about. I think practically speaking, I am very passionate about this variant-type issue that we've talked about because I now work in observability, where that is a cornerstone to the problem. And I mean, I've been ranting to Nikita and other people that I enjoy interacting with in the database universe about this, and my conclusion is that this is a very real problem for a very small number of companies. And that is why Datadog, Splunk, Honeycomb, et cetera, et cetera, built their own database technology, which is in some ways, it's sad because all of the technology is a remix of pieces of Snowflake and Redshift and Postgres and other things, Redis, whatever, that solve all of the technical problems. And I feel like if you gave me access to all the codebases and locked me in a room for a week or something, I feel like I could remix it into any database technology that would solve any problem. Back to our HTAP thing, it's kind of the same idea. But because of how databases are packaged, which is for a specific set of customers that have a particular set of use cases and a particular flavor of wallet, the technology ends up being inaccessible for these use cases like observability that don't fit a template that you can just sell and resell. I think there are a lot of these little opportunities, and maybe some of them will be big opportunities, maybe they'll all be little opportunities forever, but there's probably a set of such things, the variant type being the most extreme right now, that are high frustration for me and low value for database companies that are all interesting things for me to work on. Well, maybe someone listening is also excited and maybe they can come to you for advice and funding. Maybe I need to refine my question. What AI company or product would you work on if you're not working on…

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