Benn Stancil on benn.substack

Eh, I don't know if there's really some VC angle for pushing that narrative; honestly, it mostly just strikes me as lazy. It's a lot easier to write posts about how bad this extreme thing is than to talk about nuance. So my guess is the "angle" is really, "I want to become a VC influencer and I need to write content." On product, I never used Dataform, so I'll take your word for it on the experience. That said, I don't think the money had much do with it. Looking back, the acquisition got announced in early Dec of 2020, less than a month after dbt announced their series B. Acquisitions take some time from first conversation to announcement, so the deal was probably in the works either when dbt had only raised $13m in their A. Even if they had wind of the B when they started talking with Google, the B was only $30m, which isn't small, but hardly enough to corner an entire market. So I'd argue that datafold either sold because dbt already had the community traction *without* the money, or datafold's product simply didn't have that much appeal. (There's a third argument here that they sold because dbt cornered the *VCs market*, either because VCs didn't want to bet against it, or something more collude-y, where VCs already had a horse in the race. The former seems possible; the latter, eh, probably less.) On the ecosystem, in thinking a bit more about it, that seems like it depends mostly on the value of the underlying thing. Crypto was mostly a waste because the foundation didn't have much value. For data stuff, is that true? Perhaps more than we'd like to admit, but less so than crypto, I'd hope.