I recently wrapped up 4 years at a Big Company. During that time, I switched teams once, I transitioned from an Individual Contributor (IC) to an Engineering Manager (EM), the company name changed from Square to Block, and the number of employees increased from something like 5,000 to 15,000. Those numbers may seem small potatoes compared to many other Big Companies. For me, having only worked (full-time) at $\le$ Series C startups prior to joining Square, this was a 1 or 2 order of magnitude...| www.ethanrosenthal.com
A very silly blog post came out a couple months ago about The Unbundling of Airflow. I didn’t fully read the article, but I saw its title and skimmed it enough to think that it might’ve been too thin of an argument to hold water but just thick enough to clickbait the VC world with the word “unbundling” while simultaneously Cunningham’s Law-ing the data world. There was certainly a Twitter discourse.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
Features stores are now becoming a thing. Google Cloud is supporting Feast, an open source feature store, AWS announced the SageMaker Feature Store in December 2020, and tecton.ai raised a $35 Million Series B in the same month. While it’s going to be a while, I think that feature stores will do to machine learning what data warehouses did to analytics. Just as any department can now calculate metrics and setup dashboards thanks to a centralized data warehouse empowering “self-service ana...| www.ethanrosenthal.com