In other words, to build a great data business, today’s startups don’t have to come up with particularly novel ideas or get a bunch of bets about the market right. They just have to rebuild what’s already there, but more deliberately and on more certain ground than the original pioneers could.6 (View Highlight)
Omni and SQLMesh are two companies that seem to be doing exactly that. Omni is, almost literally, a Looker rerun, with several of the same founders and investors. Though there are minor structural differences between the products, Omni’s primary pitch is about improved usability. It’s mostly the same thing, just polished and built for 2022 instead of 2012. Similarly, SQLMesh aggressively markets itself as a renovated dbt that’s fundamentally the same product—in-warehouse SQL-based transformations with a web IDE—but built with the advantages of knowing what people liked about dbt, and what they struggled with. (View Highlight)
