Lauren Balik Profile Banner
Lauren Balik Profile
Lauren Balik

@laurenbalik

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Following
1,021
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Data Wrangler. Investor. Bearish on most things. Human capital, infrastructure, SaaS. Writing things here:

NY or LA
Joined December 2022
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
Funniest thing about Reddit IPO is that Reddit is a porn site. There’s more porn on Reddit than on many dedicated porn sites. A lot of folks are complaining about stock comp and sharing anecdotes on poor B2B and B2C ad results vs. other platforms. All fluff. It’s a sin stock.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
Ryobi and Milwaukee are both garbage brands manufactured by Techtronic. Milwaukee is an OG lithium-ion scam in the power tool space. Ryobi power tools are produced under license by Techtronic. Home Depot $HD has the exclusive right to distribute Ryobi in the US. However, Home
@AdamSinger
Adam Singer
5 months
Will not explain
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Work. It's called work. It's what everyone does who is not in the "move money around for a fee" class and it's how most businesses are built.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
I've seen much of what hedge funds and the sell-side buy wrt data on internet companies and it's mostly bad. The best way to understand internet company usage patterns is looking at what female enterprise sales reps are wearing over time. Earlier this week, I went to a new(?)
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@TwannsWorld
Twann
1 month
Crazy how much data you can use for internet companies software kinda sucks
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
90% of B2B Y Combinator companies have 50% of their revenue coming from other Y Combinator companies.
@paulg
Paul Graham
6 months
92% of grades in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classes at Yale are A or A-, vs 55% in Mathematics. The math majors must just not be as smart. (Table via @sfmcguire79 .)
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
17 days
Didn't you go to prison for money laundering?
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@mukund
Mukund Mohan
17 days
@laurenbalik Zoom out 5+ years and you will get the answer. Most people who focus on these details are the same people who said iPhone version 1 had a poor Stereo Bluetooth support (actual review) Look for the forest from the trees
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
Oh boy, this one hit a nerve with a few people (mostly operators, VPs of Eng types) messaging me. VCs dictating what software/infra their portfolio companies choose is absolutely a major thing. This is one of the better examples of the Silicon Valley Ponzi. Here's how the game
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
Far too many engineers are looking at the Instacart S-1/Snowflake ~$51M annual payment as a technical problem. 👎 For example, here's a Reddit thread on what I and others have been discussing, on r/dataenginering or, this thread
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
This VC ho deleted her Tweet after I ratio'd her but the image will live on.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Work. It's called work. It's what everyone does who is not in the "move money around for a fee" class and it's how most businesses are built.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
@sv_techie I am addicted to scams, pyramid schemes, and frauds. The Ryobi aftermarket is fascinating. It's a rabbit hole.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
Far too many engineers are looking at the Instacart S-1/Snowflake ~$51M annual payment as a technical problem. 👎 For example, here's a Reddit thread on what I and others have been discussing, on r/dataenginering or, this thread
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
The usage of dbt+Snowflake in spilling to disk in running dbt models at Instacart is bananas. 🍌🍌 *This is very expensive, and unnecessary **Instacart is throwing cash at the problem, which they can do because the wheelbarrow of VC money, but this will get you fired in a
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
16 days
ClickHouse is very good. It has the power to disrupt much of the SIEM/cyber space, not to mention many Snowflake $SNOW and AWS Redshift use cases. It's honestly the biggest disruptor in cyber in years. There is no reason ClickHouse shouldn't be the default for any cyber company
@ludwigABAP
ludwig
18 days
Clickhouse is goated Open source, "cheap" to run on prem (or start w/ cloud), can easily do 100k inserts per second (which we'll need), ~90% data compression (5.6 GB received, stored into 377MB)
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Don't use Snowflake or MongoDB. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock since you're working from home anyway. Build a data stack only in Excel. Don't use any Sequoia or Amplify Partners or Andreessen Horowitz products. Write a blog about how you built a data stack with no
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
14 days
Cava $CAVA is the worst food health/safety of any fast casual chain among its peer set. -On a per order basis, Cava receives more complaints across restaurant review sites/social media about raw meat and food sickness issues than any of its peers -In most geographies Cavas
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@diehardRedsFan9
Gerald
14 days
@notmrmanziel @laurenbalik can’t short the 👑
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Well, you can also do "alt data" back at Eight Sleep. For example: 1. Eight Sleep uses Shopify. A Shopify store's order numbers increase sequentially, starting at 1001 and going up. These can be appended or prefixed, but it's still going to go up sequentially 1 by 1. 2. Eight
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@pitdesi
Sheel Mohnot
6 months
Many replies and QT’s to this call this a violation of privacy and I truly do not understand the objections- the data is cool and aggregated/anon, what’s the harm?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Snowflake $SNOW is trading up again after hours, basically a meme at this point, on news of new CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy's acquisition of ~$5M in Snowflake stock. Snowflake has a whole internal group dedicated to bothering me and my family -- it started 2+ years ago when I started
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
Most of my business personality is shaped by the fact that my high school business teacher, Mr. Lynch, was the CFO of Microstrategy $MSTR who ran the revenue restatement at that company which kicked off the broader dotcom bust in March, 2000. Mr. Lynch is probably the person
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
A tale of two acquisitions: Snowflake $SNOW acquiring Neeva vs. Databricks acquiring MosaicML. Today, with Databricks' announcement of DBRX, the organization moves forward with delivery of what is currently the world's most powerful open source AI model (per benchmarks). At
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
I'm short Klaviyo $KVYO. I have found strong evidence suggesting that in the two fiscal quarters leading up to $KVYO IPO, organizations such as Retention dot com used payday loan ads to resell legally dubious audiences to pump $KVYO revenue.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
@KoalemosCap Double D means "due diligence"
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Databricks, Azure Snowflake, Google Cloud
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 year
Are you curious what firms have been charging for "data and analytics engineering" consulting? In today's Data Scam Lessons with Lauren™ we're evaluating what consultancies charge to make dashboards and do some data modeling exercises for ~3 month "Modern Data" starter
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
One thing that's very clear: A lot of tech people (developers, product mgrs., solutions engineers) are becoming more interested in learning basic corporate finance. I've been pretty bullish on this trend. People want to learn the "why" and the "how" but don't get these
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
What many casual $SNOW investors/watchers are learning is how screwball NRR has always been, and how close it is to falling off a cliff. For example, this dropoff Instacart is reporting in their own S-1 isn't even fully reflected in $SNOW NRR yet as NRR is a lagging indicator.
@modestproposal1
modest proposal
9 months
Lots to chew on in Instacart S-1, but was curious what people make of this. Their Snowflake bill was $13M, $28M, $51M in 2020/21/22. 2023 bill will be $15M. Is that just "optimization"? Did they migrate? Is that indicative of the magnitude of optimizations? What's the read here?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
The usage of dbt+Snowflake in spilling to disk in running dbt models at Instacart is bananas. 🍌🍌 *This is very expensive, and unnecessary **Instacart is throwing cash at the problem, which they can do because the wheelbarrow of VC money, but this will get you fired in a
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
What many casual $SNOW investors/watchers are learning is how screwball NRR has always been, and how close it is to falling off a cliff. For example, this dropoff Instacart is reporting in their own S-1 isn't even fully reflected in $SNOW NRR yet as NRR is a lagging indicator.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
4 months
Of Cava's $CAVA 11 Manhattan, NY locations, 3 have Department of Health ratings of B or C, with 1 "Not Yet Graded" restaurant earning what would have been a B on an initial inspection, though they get a re-inspection. Of Brooklyn's 2 Cava locations, 1 is a C. Comparatively,
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
This Lacework "deal" at ~$200M down from an over $8B valuation is one of the best short cases for Snowflake $SNOW. Here are the two main questions that actually matter for Lacework: 1) What is Lacework's total spend on Snowflake per year? As in, how much do they spend, per
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
Lacework is just a thin wrapper on re-sold Snowflake $SNOW compute resources, ya dummies.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
21 days
"Klaviyo Investor Relations" vs. "Klaviyo" $KVYO lmfao
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
14 days
Once again for those in the cheap seats: Cava $CAVA is not a Chipotle $CMG other than both are fast casual slop-in-a-bowl-or-in-a-carb-wrapper businesses. Chipotle had to fire all their original management 2016-2018 to make these returns, and that’s because the original
@diehardRedsFan9
Gerald
14 days
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Gosh I love this so much.
@arny_trezzi
Arny Trezzi
2 months
" $SNOW wasn't doing any AI. It's just a warehouse company for questions about the past." @databricks CEO is brutal 🤣
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
20 days
Who has the actual best takes on all of FinTwit? Who generally knows what they are talking about and shares good info? I'm getting shown more nonsense lately and a notable increase in pyramid schemes. Top 5 accounts. Ideas-focused. Memes okay, but not a meme-focused account.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
8 months
Upon researching GitLab Inc. $GTLB accounting practices following KPMG's adverse opinion, I found this "DevSecOps" company has some of the most egregious security and customer data issues I have ever seen, all on the public internet. I am short $GTLB.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
I found a payday loan scam a few months ago, and in tracking it down I've found it leads down a rabbit hole that materially affects the revenue and regulatory compliance of a publicly technology company with a $5B+ market cap. I believe this publicly-traded technology company
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Many have asked. GitLab $GTLB is an accounting disaster ready to burst like a tick on your dog that's gorged on too much blood. Their auditor KPMG won't pass them w/ unqualified opinion (the gold standard). KPMG issued an adverse opinion on GitLab's financial controls on the
@007musk
SSindia
6 months
@laurenbalik are you still holding your short position against $GTLB?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
Data companies in for a big 2024: 1) Estuary. Estuary dot dev. Easiest CDC on the market to start using w/o overhead of Debezium. Fair pricing. No Monthly Rows or anything like that. Founders have previous exit. 2) Brim Data. Treat data types as a first-class citizen. Stop
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
Ingestion, queries, etc are very slow in a "warehouse-native" world. COGS for anything built on "warehouse-native" is too high for customers. The problem is "warehouse-native" usually means Snowflake (or Google's BigQuery) and they will rip your eyes out if you're doing anything
@BucknSF
Buck
7 months
Is there any chance warehouse native is future for product analytics and observability? In that world aren’t ddog and AMPL fucked?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
It's amazing how smart I am.
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
10 months
You gotta love ❄️ $SNOW ❄️ cratering, but it should be obvious. Too many bad things have been happening lately. -A drunken $NVDA CEO Jensen Huang on stage at Snowflake Summit making fun of Dead-Man-Walking 🏴‍☠️Frank Slootman, who is burning out NRR and will likely take a bullet in
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
14 days
Alright, I'm hosting a 🕵️Cava Store Visit Field Trip🔎 in Manhattan on Tuesday, May 14, starting at noon and going on until I feel like it, probably 3pm. I'm happy to show any 24 year-olds out there how to properly do a channel check. Tell your PMs and MDs Lauren's taking you
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
I already do this to an extent - I have a database full of VCs where I score them on how degenerate they are. eg. their X and other social media posts are always "Sent from San Francisco" for over half the days in a year yet they have public voter registration records in other
@orrdavid
David Orr
2 months
Today posted about 2 fund managers I would get long and 2 that I would get short. Maybe this is a serious idea? I could look for the dumbest people on fintwit, hire them to run a small portfolio and then just short all of their picks?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
@ryxcommar my mother in law is their accountant; they are broke
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
There isn't enough free float opened up in recent tech IPOs. When companies IPO with a low free float, it protects VCs and company executives at the cost of new equity investors, and can often make the stock price volatile. For some context here, most IPOs have tended to open
@altcap
Brad Gerstner
7 months
Lots of debate when VC / IPO markets will “open” - but they are wide open today. The restraint to deals are inflated price expectations by Boards incorrectly anchored to a zero rate world. Get fit, get sober, and get liquid. Price clears all markets.🚀💪
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
Most of the overcorrection in Confluent $CFLT is due to the fact that most equities folks have no idea what Kafka is. Also most data engineers at this point have no idea what Kafka is.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
Mascot Theory Matters Today's announcement of $NVDA's investment, along with Capital One, into Databricks speaks less to Databricks and more to $SNOW. -Capital One is historically the largest account of $SNOW. Capital One accounted for 17% and 11% of $SNOW revenue in the two
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
10 months
You gotta love ❄️ $SNOW ❄️ cratering, but it should be obvious. Too many bad things have been happening lately. -A drunken $NVDA CEO Jensen Huang on stage at Snowflake Summit making fun of Dead-Man-Walking 🏴‍☠️Frank Slootman, who is burning out NRR and will likely take a bullet in
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
Biggest lifestyle brands/cults in data/cloud/dev: 1) dbt Labs 2) Snowflake $SNOW 3) Salesforce $CRM Developer community 4) PMP (Project Management Institute) 5) Tableau 6) GitLab $GTLB 7) React 8) Heroku 9) CFA Institute 10) AWS Certification
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
8 months
Hightouch is just blindly copying Rudderstack. Hightouch is so shameless they have thousands of diff lines changing 'rudder' to 'hightouch' and similar sitting in some loose repo on the public internet. Incredible.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
Happy New Year. I would like to apologize to all of X. In late 2022 (~1 yr ago) I was offered the opportunity to interview for a Twitter (now X) data executive role by Andreessen Horowitz VCs who sought to bribe me off so that I'd stop writing blog posts about dumb a16z data
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
Let's do an ⚡️Alt Data⚡️ lesson investigating Snowflake $SNOW claims now that Lacework is back in the news. My goal here with this X post is to teach you how to do quick content scans of company claims and how to do basic sizing with Fermi estimation. I'm way deeper. I'll give
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
This Lacework "deal" at ~$200M down from an over $8B valuation is one of the best short cases for Snowflake $SNOW. Here are the two main questions that actually matter for Lacework: 1) What is Lacework's total spend on Snowflake per year? As in, how much do they spend, per
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
From 2019-2023 I ran a data analytics consulting firm, Upright Analytics. My firm is named "Upright" Analytics because I always want to do the right thing and be upright in a sea of IT con artists selling weird compute toys. My firm's name is the direct result of the behaviors
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
I've been shorting this clown's investments for years and doing very well. This picture tells you all you need to know about Sunil's VC firm Amplify Partners. My favorite gem of his is Fastly $FSLY which is just an outright pyramid scheme with fictitious revenue and issues with
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@dhaliwas
Sunil Dhaliwal
6 months
Some things never change Happy Thanksgiving!
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Farmers markets are full of many great scams, for both raw produce vendors and prepared meal vendors -Inventory is highly perishable, basically unauditable at a unit level -For raw produce vendors, they only typically have to produce at the farm a portion of what they retail as
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
24 days
The only public companies I've been excited about in the general software/TMT arena and taken meaningful positions long in the last year or so have been Oracle $ORCL, Informatica $INFA, and Alteryx $AYX. Some Cloudflare $NET in the past but they're all over the place, figured if
@aanalystbro
alpha neutral and beta neutral
24 days
@laurenbalik Just wondering but what are your longs?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Whenever I hear this my #1 advice to someone is to embrace that you are a Sociopath and get in front of other Sociopaths as quickly as possible, and filter out the Clueless. You are going to deal with a lot of Clueless per Sociopaths in your tech career social climb trying to
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@TheEthanDing
ethan ding 📊
2 months
nothing gives me the ick as much as hearing another person say "i'm looking for pm or strategy roles" as an early career person this is problematic, because i was that person... i may still be that person...
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
Some of my points to add on Carta are below. I've been deep on this, for years. I believe Carta is a national security risk, and a threat. We're going deep into how gross/funny this startup world is. You may not like it. We will do it anyway. Turn back now if you don't like
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Lauren's Medium blog is the most popular blog right now among : • L/S fund managers • reformed Snowflake $SNOW analytics engineers • out-of-work Chiefs of Staff • Paid Data Influencers • Cava $CAVA food poisoning victims 🦅🇺🇸
@jms_dot_py
Justin Seitz
2 months
@laurenbalik Ommmmmmmmmg! A manager sent me your Medium and I am now your biggest fan ever!
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Klaviyo $KVYO has a number of problems. 1) I wrote up a piece in December about how a chunk of their growth leading right up to IPO is all garbage revenue from low value, questionable revenue streams from sketchy partners like Retention dot com which has a broken business model.
@sv_techie
SV_Techie
2 months
@BallinFil @laurenbalik Lauren and Ballin Could you please share what is the bear thesis behind it?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
What stage of the cycle are we in? We're in the stage where Data/Amphetamine Influencer Zach Wilson is "roasting" the resume of an immigrant who won a math award while Zach was busy smoking meth. Raise the interest rates further. $SNOW Snowflake.
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@EcZachly
Zach Wilson
2 months
I'm starting a resume roast series to help increase transparency in how people get hired at all levels! It's supposed to be a series that is 1ish minute videos that are a combination of funny and informative! First up, a cybersecurity engineer! #dataengineering
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Very cool stuff. The days of High-Cardinality-as-a-Service are coming to an end. $DDOG
@ClickHouseDB
ClickHouse
2 months
💰$26 million per month! That’s how much it would cost to store the logs for ClickHouse Cloud in Datadog. So we built our own logging platform using #ClickHouse and @grafana . Learn how we did it in our latest blog post.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
This is incredible. If you think "Buy Now, Pay Later" is bad, company Revenue Roll is offering "Advertise Now, Pay Later" loans to Shopify $SHOP and Klaviyo $KVYO users. Step 1: Sign up for a line of credit with Revenue Roll. Step 2: Use the credit line on ad networks to pull
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
🚨The further you get into Klaviyo $KVYO "list pumper" softwares like Retention dot com, GoBot, Revenue Roll, which all blow up list sizes and increase $KVYO revenue, the worse it gets.🚨 Here is Revenue Roll's website. In addition to "turning anonymous web traffic into email
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
25 days
Here's a lesson for all the Fastly $FSLY bagholders who got their eyes ripped out today (again). 😭 -I know what I am talking about. -Fastly $FSLY has never been a real company. In fact, it's a "layer on top" of Equinix $EQIX in many cases -- the Fastly POPs are just Equinix
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
Fastly $FSLY is so funny. They've had extremely limited customer growth in the last 2 years and that's because the offerings don't stand for themselves; revenue is heavily skewed toward insider and sweetheart deals. More "event-driven" investors should understand fundamentals
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 year
I've been on Twitter ~7 weeks. Are there any sophisticated people talking about data/analytics/ML on here? Or is it just a network graph cluster of ~40 people trying to sell crap to/get installs from ~500 people via shitposting? Genuine question - would love to follow/meet.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
11 months
Yo @ryxcommar I found another ex-Carvana/Alameda Research data scientist. Homie has 500 rows of data per month coming in, 200k rows overall, wants to get discounts on B2B Data Software to take total B2B Data Software spend under $5000 a month.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
What is most frustrating about this fired Cloudflare $NET lady is that this behavior on her part is the kind of crap that's spread around as "empowerment" or "female empowerment" when all it really is is narcissistic influencing. If you look at her work history, she was recently
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
Very bullish on Cloudflare $NET and the growth of the R2 offering. Cleaning out employees who post private corporate information on TikTok is a step in the right direction. How can you trust salespeople to respect their contracts and privacy with your org if these salespeople
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Why CDC (Change Data Capture) Matters: a Data Influencer Neon Lights Thread 🧵 Today, we are going to chat about why CDC data pipelines are important + the dangers of using quick start data integration solutions like Stitch (Singer project) and Fivetran. -Pour a coffee ☕️ or
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 year
San Francisco isn't coming back
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅 Too many goofballs are celebrating Oracle $ORCL decline. Great opportunity to pick up long positions as it clears tomorrow. Equity analysts and hedge funds know NOTHING about the Bandwidth Alliance, which while seemingly is a Cloudflare $NET play is all
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
10 months
Data teams are Clueless. They sit between Losers and Sociopaths. 1 yr ago I wrote this. It's become popular with many data leaders. I've presented on it a few times. dbt Labs now charging on # of SQL models is rent capture on Clueless bloat.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
The competition is lame. Eg. there's a company called MotherDuck that makes Motherfuck jokes, runs group of fans they call MotherDuckers, etc. Pun-based GTM does not win, though it can get you Github stars/traction to a Series A. Does not play well with big spending,
@BucknSF
Buck
9 months
Will be interesting to see if the “era of optimization” breeds more sustainable competitive headwinds for some of these vendors. For example, current environment creating some oxygen for price aggressive Datadog competitors. Obv happening in data land as well.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
We're on CNBC, baby!
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
The going high bid for my VC/fund manager degenerate database is approaching $900k. One idiot got mad because he was shocked how much I had on him and his wife. I asked him if he'd pay $1M just to have this control and not see it in someone else's hands. Look, I am 33 years old
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
I already do this to an extent - I have a database full of VCs where I score them on how degenerate they are. eg. their X and other social media posts are always "Sent from San Francisco" for over half the days in a year yet they have public voter registration records in other
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Happy Easter to all of my haters, of whom there are many. For the second straight year my firm Upright Analytics has been included in the Machine Learning, AI, and Data Landscape. A big thank you to my clients, my partners, and the FirstMark team. 🦅🇺🇸💪
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@mattturck
Matt Turck
2 months
It's out! After hundreds of hours of work, excited to publish the TENTH annual MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) Landscape. 🔥🔥🔥 The OG of data/AI market maps is back, bigger than ever lol + 24 themes we're thinking about in 2024 w/ @AmanKabeer11
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
Is Snowflake $SNOW pumper company Lacework even real? Are there real and meaningful customer use cases? Let's look at some more ⚡️Alt Data⚡️ to help figure out what's really going on. Now every company out there in the cloud/data/cyber/dev world in the past few years has made
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
Let's do an ⚡️Alt Data⚡️ lesson investigating Snowflake $SNOW claims now that Lacework is back in the news. My goal here with this X post is to teach you how to do quick content scans of company claims and how to do basic sizing with Fermi estimation. I'm way deeper. I'll give
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Eight Sleep has gone too far?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
4 months
Tired: Netflix and Chill Wired: Clickhouse and Rill Expired: Monte Carlo, dbt, Snowflake, Monte Carlo again, Hightouch, Costumed Mascots, Data Influencers
@tbragin
Tanya Bragin
4 months
. @RillData operational BI vision really resonates with me: beautiful, immersive, SQL-driven BI-as-code. 😍 Sneak peek into a PR in the works. On the picture: instant queries on a dataset of 480,933,298,381 (half a trillion) records in @ClickHouseDB 🚀
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
When you + 20 other analytics engineers build 10000 dbt “models” on Snowflake, and it takes 5 hours to compute this on a Snowflake XL warehouse, 4x a day, because your boss the Sr. Manager, Analytics Engineering wants to put “managed team of 20” on his resume.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
10 months
You gotta love ❄️ $SNOW ❄️ cratering, but it should be obvious. Too many bad things have been happening lately. -A drunken $NVDA CEO Jensen Huang on stage at Snowflake Summit making fun of Dead-Man-Walking 🏴‍☠️Frank Slootman, who is burning out NRR and will likely take a bullet in
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 year
I worked in kitchens when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck. Almost every chef, sous chef, cook I've worked with is orders of magnitude more talented at their craft than data engineers. Most data engineers making $200K a year throw tantrums when variance is
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
11 months
Many Data/DevTools types don't know this, but much of the industry is kept together by Chinese hedge funds. Yes! Really! In China and other places dominated by the Yuan, there are real estate developments to nowhere. You may have heard of this "ghost town" phenomenon. It's the
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
IITs produce some of the smartest people in the tech industry. It drives me nuts when Americans "punch down" on people from another part of the world, where some worked their asses off to even get to the starting line.
@datartisans
Chris
2 months
@laurenbalik Agreed. IIT grads have been great problem solvers!
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
4 months
Chipotle $CMG has been one of my favorite stocks for a long time. I rode it up for a long time. Everything about $CMG is pure nonsense, but the market loves nonsense. Now, the jig is up. In my own research, I've found a lot of nonsense moving through $CMG. -Increasing amount
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
4 months
I'm short Cava $CAVA. I believe Cava is primed for a major public health crisis and that expansion into heavily pro-union geographies has not been considered by investors.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
While everyone has their underwear in a bunch over Palantir $PLTR GitLab $GTLB is quietly ready to tank. I've gone very in depth through their SEC filings and through their public tickets (many of which they've now made private after I started poking around and writing Open
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Why CDC (Change Data Capture) Matters: a Data Influencer Neon Lights Thread 🧵 Today, we are going to chat about why CDC data pipelines are important + the dangers of using quick start data integration solutions like Stitch (Singer project) and Fivetran. -Pour a coffee ☕️ or
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
Every day Paid Data Influencers get better and better. It's the #1 way to predict company valuations, private and public, 6-12 months out. I saw a new Paid Data Influencer gem today. Where does one get SQL SELECT FROM WHERE statement neon lights? Data Influencers 'R Us? It's
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
The Great NRR Squeeze Continues Back in May I wrote up a blog post about Snowflake's $SNOW NRR Squeeze. This squeeze is orchestrated through partners like dbt Labs and Fivetran, especially focused on wringing every incremental consumption penny out of customers. Now, Fivetran,
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 year
Ignore the pomp and circumstance in $SNOW's print. The only thing that matters is how NRR decelerates. -1.7% -3.5% -4.2% -4.6% This is why it's important to analyze the role of Snowflake's primary compute generating outside partner: dbt Labs 🧵
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
9 months
Everything about this Snowflake/Instacart thing is so gosh darn funny. It just gets better and better. "No, wait," says guy at Altimeter, where like half their public equity positions are in $SNOW. "NRR at Instacart will do just fine. Consumption is trending along just fine."
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@_clarktang
Clark Tang
9 months
Live from Stifel conf Mike clarified Instacart discl. was cash pmnts - consumption last yr was $28m, & will be $24-25m this yr & up q/q Optimized, but not quite as apocalyptic as Twitter was worried abt & this is w/ removing Snowflake for their catalogue use case
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Today, while strolling around the Boston area, I was twice recognized and asked if I am Lauren Balik. One person knew me from various podcasts/data stuff and the other knew me because of my Open Letter to GitLab $GTLB about their security and accounting issues.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
5 months
Friday night means sipping some whiskey 🥃 and diving into 🕵️‍♀️ data warehouse market research... 🚨 Don't believe everything Data Influencers post online 🚨 Let's look at a recent post from Data Influencer Jwala Vedantam and break down the problems with how numbers are
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
10 days
It's gonna reka da stock price of Snowflake $SNOW. More AI spaghetti thrown at the wall. They have the most bizarre, convoluted corp dev/M&A I've seen and it's been like this for years. Snowflake's never really been able to meaningfully sell into a buyer persona outside IT.
@MRatable
MrRatable
10 days
@laurenbalik can you explain to me what a Reka AI is
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
What a silly take...here are 3 cases of "data grab" apps. It's just what the business models are or become. 1. Drizly Drizly's unit economics don't work w/o selling data as a revenue stream and they had a limited window of regulatory capture. The bet was that they would take
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@nikitabier
Nikita Bier
6 months
@ToliverOVA Show me who the buyer is, what they can use it for without engagement, and any transactions that have ever happened. You will be hard pressed to find any app that was a “data grab”
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
8 months
The funniest thing about $GTLB is after not passing KPMG audit with an unq. opinion (the standard) a $GTLB employee was bothering the Head of Accounting about getting company policy changed from 6'4" to 6'2" height req. for flight upgrade. He linked articles. He was denied. ☹️
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
8 months
Upon researching GitLab Inc. $GTLB accounting practices following KPMG's adverse opinion, I found this "DevSecOps" company has some of the most egregious security and customer data issues I have ever seen, all on the public internet. I am short $GTLB.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
The battle of Chipotle $CMG vs. Snowflake $SNOW has only gotten better and better. I've been on both all year, trading $SNOW on the short and $CMG on the long side. -Both trade at high multiples. -Both are middle products -- there are better discount options and better luxury
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
10 months
💪💪💪 The battle of Chipotle $CMG vs. Snowflake $SNOW is heating up, baby! 🔥🔥🔥 Even with: 1) A farcically sandbagged guidance 2) dbt analytics engineers going ham on pumping Snowflake NRR with 5000+ dbt models and data observability tools doing full table scans all day,
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 year
Want real-time analytics? Curious why your team of 5 dbt analytics engineers, 2 data scientists, 2 data engineers, and 3 BI analysts have dozens of hanging dashboards and out of date data on your BI reports that's only as recent as of 24 hours ago? Never fear! 😱😱😱 Here are
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Listen to calls (or download transcripts) for publicly traded companies in your industry. It's one of the highest leverage/low lift ways to learn about where the wind is blowing in your industry. You can find these materials on the investor portals on company websites. 🫡
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
Here's a great example of American university elitism, from my own life. I went to the University of Virginia, graduated 2013 with degrees in Economics and History. I got in on my own merits. No backroom deals. No gifts. One of my classmates who lived in my dorm complex was
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
1 month
I live several blocks from this. My (Jewish) partner is a Barnard grad and currently a Columbia grad student. There is, right now, this second, a police helicopter circling Columbia University. I'm sitting on my deck drinking coffee and making my Will Stancil @whstancil data API
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
6 months
Money.
@stevegraham
Stevie Graham
6 months
@laurenbalik What have you made?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
7 months
I keep all receipts. 🌈🌈🌈 You have to in the sea of tech nonsense, especially in the data & analytics space. Gani here decided to get fresh. He didn't like me short on Snowflake $SNOW and long on Informatica $INFA and thinks I have that backward. ...Yet $INFA crushed their
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@gnsmsk
Gani Simsek
7 months
@laurenbalik Short $SNOW and long $INFA? 😂 Those should be swapped. Snowflake is on its way to be the next Amazon, Apple, or Tesla of this era. These are the companies that are doing the right thing for the customer and look what they have become. Snowflake is doing the same.
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
The Mark Porter Eskimo Short Plays Out to Completion Tomorrow with $MDB Earnings The data world has never been dumber. My biggest trade here is "The Eskimo Short" which sounds like the name of a bad John Grisham novel. Here's The Eskimo Short and how it plays out. I generally
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Probably the most disturbing thing about Zach Wilson is his claim of running a one million dollar+ ARR business. What exactly is recurring revenue about selling one-time bootcamps? This isn't recurring revenue. The fact that this guy claims to be some tech guru and doesn't know
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
The Snowflake $SNOW lawsuits are starting now. Yikes. Wait until the lawyers learn about ex-Palantir $PLTR employees Barry McCardel (Hex) and Sarah Catanzaro (Amplify VC) and the games they've played running circular revenue through Snowflake through a
@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
3 months
How does Snowflake $SNOW make money? My phone's been ringing off the hook the last few days. Check out today's latest pyramid scheme missive, sent out to 1000's of downline Snowflake credit burners/RPO fillers, from a major $SNOW credit distributor.👇
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Great question. You can look up letters or correspondence between public (or about to go public) companies and the SEC on the SEC EDGAR's text search. Many of these back-and-forth communications are tagged as correspondences or uploads on EDGAR. I wish it were a tad cleaner,
@invest091
Amateur Investor
2 months
@laurenbalik Totally! Dumb question, but how would one find the SEC's correspondence you linked to with Doximity upon the S-1 filing? I can find the S-1 filing after searching their company name, but the email correspondence isn’t easily searchable. Or maybe it’s on Doximity’s IR page?
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@laurenbalik
Lauren Balik
2 months
Huge day for alt data.👇 In Notion's Privacy Policy they mention that if they de-identify and/or aggregate the data you put in Notion, your data is not subject to their (already very one-sided) Privacy Policy and they have pretty much unlimited rights to do whatever they want
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@benln
Ben Lang
2 months
The internet asked for it. Here’s the next iteration of my Notion template for couples.
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