Benn Stancil on benn.substack

On Dataform, cool. But also, like, it seems like there's something off about the idea that Dataform had PMF that dbt never did, when dbt is the one that dominated the market. Dataform may have been a more polished product, and had a crisper experience, or whatever, but something about dbt fit the market far, far better. I don't think it's just the community either, since most of the community came from people who really liked the product. I have some thoughts about this Cascade narrative, and don't think I entirely agree (something like this was the rough plan for the post for the this week, but we'll see what actually happens). The short version is I think this sentence doesn't come close to holding up: For the last two decades, the “business intelligence” space has been slowly trending from monolithic, vertically-integrated tools (Cognos, Microstrategy) to more lightweight, audience-specific apps that can work on a variety of data stores (Hex, Sigma, Metabase). Hex, Sigma, and Metabase all make, what, about $50m total? That may turn into some mega- trend, but to assume that it will is just getting fooled by hype. In the type since those companies have been around, Looker's added ~$500m in revenue. Plus, PowerBI is actually younger than, say Metabase. There's not some obvious fragmentation trend here; there are people trying to fragment it, and having mild success that may well stall.