THE DATA PENDULUM SWINGS TO CONSOLIDATION

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

The “modern data stack” once promised freedom through specialization, i.e, tools like Fivetran for ingestion and dbt for transformation. However, with compute giants Snowflake and Databricks now controlling 72% of the market's revenue, gravity is pulling everything back together. Their scale lets them eat margin across the stack. The Fivetran–dbt merger shows how survival now means scale, two startups combining to stand a chance as data recenters around the giants.