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Comment by carlineng | Hacker News Reader

MotherDuck has been making the rounds with a big funding announcement [1], and a lot of posts like this one. As a life-long data industry person, I agree with nearly all of what Jordan and Ryan are saying. It all tracks with my personal experience on both the customer and vendor side of "Big Data".

That being said, what's the product? The website says "Commercializing DuckDB", but that doesn't give much of an idea of what they're offering. DuckDB is already super easy to use out of the box, so what's their value-add? It's still a super young company, so I'm sure all that is being figured out as we speak, but if any MotherDuckers are on here, I'd love to hear more about the actual thing that you're building.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/15/motherduck-secures-investm...

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We're being a bit hand-wavy with the offering while we're in "build" mode, because we don't want to sell vaporware. DuckDB is easy to use out of the box, but so is Postgres, and there are plenty of folks building interesting cloud services using Postgres, from Aurora to Neon. And as many people will point out, DuckDB is not a data platform on its own.

For a preview of what we're doing, on the technical side, a couple of our engineers gave a talk at DuckCon last week in Brussels, it is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNNaG7e8_n8

(for context I'm the author of this blog post and co-founder of MotherDuck)

Deliberately speculating so someone will correct it: I'd guess they'll make a bunch of enterprise tools to do things like: enable access and synch the data in a way which complies with various policy, encrypt/tokenize/hide certain columns etc, monitor queries, ensure data is encrypted at rest, stuff like that.

Assuming the above it true: I'll bet the reason they aren't so loud about exactly what they are doing is they want to get a head start on it. In theory anyone can build this stuff around DuckDB. From a marketing perspective the clever thing to do would be drive up usage of DuckDB while they build out all this functionality and then the minute corporates start seeing problems with their people using it (compliance etc), they have the solutions.

I'd wager you're right. All the "boring" stuff that's actually very complicated/difficult, and without which no large enterprise will adopt a technology.

Especially since enterprise companies hate the idea of shifting large amounts of highly sensitive company data onto commonly lost and misplaced work laptops.

If you're going to do that you better have your security and governance on point.

Shoot me a note and I'm happy to fill you in!

(PM at MotherDuck)

Is there a reason you can't post it here?

Would love to! How do I get in touch? My contact info is in my profile.

done!

If you are willing to fill me in, I'd love to hear what you guys are up to. My username is my gmail username too.

> DuckDB is already super easy to use out of the box, so what's their value-add?

I think this is analytics equivalent of edge computing. Instead of one big-cluster cruching numbers.

1. User requests bunch of analytics

2. Server assembles a duckdb file

3. Sends this down to users laptop

4. User runs local queries on the duckfile

5. Go to step 1 for more analytics

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