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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Related, maybe tangentially; I'm seeing lots and lots of startups whose basis seems to be "we build X <tool/SDK/API> technology as a service." Data management or transformation stuff. Packages for doing X in the cloud. Analytical libraries. Not products, but infrastructure.

On one level I'm very pleased to see this stuff funded, because it wasn't really 10-15 years ago.

On the other hand, what worries me here is that this stuff is entirely secondary and subservient to other services, its potential revenue completely depends on the success of businesses further up the food chain. And if things start to really slow down, I worry these will be the first to suffer and a lot of these startups (which seem to be hiring for a lot of the interesting work) will shutdown.

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Personally, I feel like there are too many dollars and startups in this space now.

I feel like the risk profile is such that I'd never buy most of the products being built. I don't want core business infrastructure sitting in the cloud of a startup which might not exist tomorrow due to missing a VC round or an agile pivot. I also don't want an integration of 50 different cloud services.

I'm glad to use established open-source technologies. I'll also use AWS or similar big players if open source doesn't exist. However, most of the niche proprietary startups just don't make much sense here to me. I'd invest a lot of money and take on a lot of risk.

I do feel like there is big money in value-adds: hosting open-source solutions, consulting, etc. A lot of non-tech companies are struggling with data, ML, and visualizations.

There's a feedback loop here. Once these startups start shutting down, the above problem will be recognized, cascading their collapse.

Yeah I think there's wisdom to what you're saying.

I do think there was a deficit before that this wave of stuff is working to remedy. In the mid-2000s, companies like Google and Amazon had a competitive advantage because they had the inhouse talent and $$ to build e.g. Bigtable, MapReduce, Dremel, Borg, etc. before anybody else had those tools. Then there was an awkward few years (early - mid 2010s) where everyone and their dog was trying to clone those in the open source space. And now we're in a situation where there's startups whose whole business model is structured around providing "big data" or "data transformation" etc. tools etc. They look like compelling places to work, on account of the interesting work they do, but I worry about their viability.

Enterprise SaaS has peaked.

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