why IBM bought Confluent

An insightful, casual conversation I had with a past Confluent colleague of mine - Justin Manchester.Justin was employee number 47 in Confluent, where he worked as many things (as one does in startups) but most lately a Technical Support Engineer diving into customers' problems using Kafka. In this episode, he shares his thoughts about the IBM acquisition through a lens that I haven't seen explored yet - Mainframes and Data Gravity (lock in).

---------------------------------------TIMELINE:0:00 - Mainframe Opening3:24 - Justin's Background10:49 - Data Gravity (why mainframe migration fails)14:37 - Joining Confluent as Employee #4718:58 - Kafka as a forward cache (RBC bank example)28:47 - Why is IBM interested in Confluent?45:09 - How IBM may monetize & pay back its acquisition (bundling)1:03:53 - AI Washing and the ZIRP Hangover in the tech space1:18:27 - Confluent's failed bets1:26:04 - What happens to Confluent post-IBM: Flink, WarpStream, etc1:34:23 - Why every data company is chasing the next 10x (to their detriment)---------------------------------------TRANSCRIPT:Feed this to our chatbot of choice to get an interactive summary:https://gist.github.com/stanislavkozlovski/3cd41999066e3316819885f20f7963ae---------------------------------------WHERE TO FIND JUSTIN:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-manchester-48400858/