[jgraettinger1]

The market is gobsmackingly huge, it's just the go-to-market entry points which are narrow.

In my opinion, the key is to find a value prop and positioning which lets prospects try your service while spending a minimum of their own risk capital / reputation points within their own org.

That makes it hard to go after core storage, because it's such a widely used, fundamental, and reliable part of most every company's infrastructure. You and I may agree that conventions of incremental files in S3 are a less-than-ideal primitive for representing streams, but plenty of companies are doing it this way just fine and don't feel that it's broken.

WarpStream, on the other hand, leaned in to the perceived complexity of running Kafka and the share of users who wanted a Kafka solution with the operational profile of using S3. Internal champions can sell trying their service because the prospect's existing thing is already understood to be a pain in the butt.

For what it's worth, if I were entering the space anew today I'd be thinking carefully about the Iceberg standard and what I might be able to do with it.

[shikhar]

Fair :) Yes, we are pretty hyped about the possibilities with Iceberg, especially now with S3 Table buckets.