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Comment by ternaryoperator | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. It's astonishing, to me at least, that a company that was on the vanguard of both the cloud and big data was so incapable of figuring out a way to make real money off either one. Their sale today, despite the buyer premium, is well below their IPO price.

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One thing to note, and this was seen with the Skype purchase, typically contracts as part of a private equity deal limit stock issued to lower level employees but also generally have an aggressive clawback clause.

I'm too lazy to find the best reference, but this is one re: Skype - https://www.businessinsider.com/skype-scandal-silver-lake-20...

The Skype one sounds like it wasn't such a weird deal. Those that got fired were rumoured to not get their options but in reality they did. Only someone that decided to quit voluntarily 13 months in didn't get an equity deal on the exit that happened later. And this wasn't a secret clause somewhere, those were the terms he had from the beginning.

Is this surprising? I wouldn't be surprised if the value in cloud accretes almost exclusively to the big cloud companies. Exit strategies for these kind of enterprises should primarily be "get acquired by X cloud provider".

Sounds like businesses can't compete running on or off these platforms. Which could stifle competition. Why start a business if one of the few, enormous players can just step in and crush it with network effects or preferential pricing.

they got outspent.

they raised a bunch, built a market... then Amazon and Google came for them. Impala was great - I was a big advocate, but then I worked on BQ for a bit, and now Omni.... Cloudera cannot compete.

The only stumble I can identify is that they didn't support Spark. They backed the Hadoop side too hard and left Spark open to Databricks. They should have signed those guys before any other investors got in (told Matie and co "go get offers, we will add 30%).

WDYM? They were the Hadoop company. You can't just become the Spark company, the philosophies of the products are very different. This comment is pretty silly.

The "only" stumble I can identify is that they're selling a last-generation solution and most companies see Hadoop as tech debt nowadays. Which is to say, it's a systemic issue with their entire product, not a tiny mistake. This is like Mesos vs Kubernetes. One got squashed.

Spark's initial path to success was "a faster way to process your data in HDFS". Cloudera was selling users Spark before DataBricks was even founded. The idea was that Hadoop was an ecosystem of tools for processing data built on commodity storage and compute hardware, for when your data was too big and expensive to transfer to the cloud.

Over time it became increasingly popular to use cloud storage instead of running HDFS. This really destroyed Cloudera's moat, because there was no operational overhead to putting your data in S3 or GCS. You just needed to run some stateless compute, and if you fucked up it didn't matter. Nowadays your "data lake" is a bunch of files in commodity storage someone else runs.

Yes I agree. It isn't really that Spark killed Hadoop but S3/GCS made managing Hadoops clusters pointless. Spark plays well with the storage ecosystem so it's thriving now. But my whole point is that it seems unlikely to me that Cloudera would just become a compute company if they had invested more into Spark. The core thing they were selling became less and less important over time. That was the problem

Yeah, branding themselves as the "Hadoop company" made it difficult to get on board with Spark, etc. If they had branded themselves as the "big data company," it would have been far easier to move with the market.

There is probably a business-school case study there for branding yourself with the problem area rather than a single solution, esp. in fast-moving domains such as tech.

They just proved the hard way, that there is no one size fits all data infrastructure based on Hadoop that makes sense financially. Most of the value comes from deep understanding of data access patterns and having the right solution.

It seems to read similar to a leveraged buyout. Easier to do things when the company doesnt have to show its books.

Also interesting is that these are market areas that AWS is starting to expand into.

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