I'm having a hard time understanding what exactly differentiates Confluent from its competitors, aside from being cloud agnostic? Apache Kafka is open source and there are competitors like Segment or MuleSoft (recently acquired by Salesforce) that seem to be doing the exact same thing. How can you tell that Confluent's product/service is better than the competition?
Trying to understand your thought processes here and learn from you.
Thanks a lot, Dillon & Thank you for this little insight into Confluent - keep up the good work :)
Competition risks are difficult to fully comprehend in software sometimes. I think primarily of DataBricks vs Snowflake in the sense where one product provides overlap of another product. Another I think about is Cloudflare vs ZScaler in "zero trust" architecture. The technical details are usually best known by CIO's and my focus is different.
In this particular instance, I know that Confluent will always have competitive risks (both direct and indirect because I know Kafka is not the only code of its kind) when it comes to event streaming but what interests me the most was how the founder(s) of Confluent created Kafka at LinkedIn. Leadership is always important and can be thesis changing for me.
As a finance focused investor, I know that I may not always understand the technical details but focus on the business model, the challenge they are solving for their customers and the financial results that support the thesis. Typically the financials will waiver when competitive problems get higher. An example I can think of where I made a change was Monday.com $MNDY. I noticed in their last quarter that they were guiding for lower revenue growth but increased their sales and marketing expense. I knew they had a lot of competitors and alternatives so the increased S&M expense meant they likely had to spend more to continue gaining market share. I decided to part ways with the position. I could see me doing something similar with Confluent if financial results begin to waiver.
Thank you so much for the question and I hope my thoughts help. I do understand I may not be as knowledgable about technology as Muji (a Twitter guy who is very technical) might be but the process has helped me avoid mistakes.
Wow - thank you very much for this detailed answer to my question. Your answer makes totally sense to me, as it will always be difficult for outsiders to judge the products of B2B software vendors. Thanks also for the example with Monday!
I'm having a hard time understanding what exactly differentiates Confluent from its competitors, aside from being cloud agnostic? Apache Kafka is open source and there are competitors like Segment or MuleSoft (recently acquired by Salesforce) that seem to be doing the exact same thing. How can you tell that Confluent's product/service is better than the competition?
Trying to understand your thought processes here and learn from you.
Thanks a lot, Dillon & Thank you for this little insight into Confluent - keep up the good work :)
Competition risks are difficult to fully comprehend in software sometimes. I think primarily of DataBricks vs Snowflake in the sense where one product provides overlap of another product. Another I think about is Cloudflare vs ZScaler in "zero trust" architecture. The technical details are usually best known by CIO's and my focus is different.
In this particular instance, I know that Confluent will always have competitive risks (both direct and indirect because I know Kafka is not the only code of its kind) when it comes to event streaming but what interests me the most was how the founder(s) of Confluent created Kafka at LinkedIn. Leadership is always important and can be thesis changing for me.
As a finance focused investor, I know that I may not always understand the technical details but focus on the business model, the challenge they are solving for their customers and the financial results that support the thesis. Typically the financials will waiver when competitive problems get higher. An example I can think of where I made a change was Monday.com $MNDY. I noticed in their last quarter that they were guiding for lower revenue growth but increased their sales and marketing expense. I knew they had a lot of competitors and alternatives so the increased S&M expense meant they likely had to spend more to continue gaining market share. I decided to part ways with the position. I could see me doing something similar with Confluent if financial results begin to waiver.
Thank you so much for the question and I hope my thoughts help. I do understand I may not be as knowledgable about technology as Muji (a Twitter guy who is very technical) might be but the process has helped me avoid mistakes.
Keep in touch!
Wow - thank you very much for this detailed answer to my question. Your answer makes totally sense to me, as it will always be difficult for outsiders to judge the products of B2B software vendors. Thanks also for the example with Monday!