Gurjeet Singh says "big data" is a meaningless buzzword that startups slap on anything with large files to impress investors. The real opportunity is building autonomous systems that process data streams without human intervention, not just throwing around a term database vendors invented to sell software.
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So big data has gotten a lot of hype and Ayasdi clearly fits into that sector in some way. So what's wrong with the term big data? Or is there something wrong with the terms big data? And how do you describe that market?
Yeah, so big data in my mind is a meaningless term. I'll give you an example. I met someone at a party recently and this guy was building a small business in which they would approach big companies and make product videos. And he was trying to raise financing. And so he was picking my brain as to how do you go about it. And he said, I have an idea, I think I should spin it as a big data company and then I'd be able to raise financing. And so I said, how is this a big data company? He said, well, video files, they are pretty large. I think this whole big data thing is at a stage where you go to an investor and you just whisper big data and they might give you some money. So it's a meaningless term. Right? I think the more the far reaching impact of this movement, I don't think there's a name for it yet, is pretty large actually. And I draw my inspiration from science fiction. I grew up reading a lot of science fiction. And if you read enough science fiction, you see two types of futures that our species seems to have imagined. There is the one type of future in which everyone kills themselves and either the technology runs amok or people are just not that great. And then that's not very interesting. There's this other type of future in which it's a post abundance world in which you have free time and a lot of work is taken care of by machines and people basically just contemplate the universe in that future. You don't see people writing SQL queries or you don't see people using business intelligence software. You see a world in which autonomous systems deal with large streams of data and inform your life to make it a better. To make it better. And I believe that's what we can achieve with data. I don't believe that big data in itself actually is trying to achieve it. Big data is just database people trying to sell more database software.
