Reflections from the Iceberg Meetup

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last month, I spoke at the Iceberg meetup at Snowflake HQ. Public speaking has never been my favorite, and knowing Snowflake CEO Sridhar and Tabular CEO Ryan were in the audience did not help.

It was day 18 of starting Mooncake Labs, and I spoke about a general indexing framework for Iceberg. You can find the details here. Here were some of my learnings:

1. Great products are a reflection of its community.

I spent the last decade building a proprietary database. Every time a feature request came in, engineering and product leaders would spend hours prioritizing its impact. Almost every time, it boiled down to one question: How much ARR? I watched my best engineers spend months building awkward hooks and extensions that did not fit the bigger picture. I often thought, Just ask the customer to make a PR :) The end product of this type of prioritization process tends to look like:

community on Mooncake

Reflections from the Iceberg Meetup

1. Great products are a reflection of its community.