The Death of Big Data and Why It’s Time To Think Small | Jordan Tigani, CEO, MotherDuck

The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck

A founding engineer on Google BigQuery and now at the helm of MotherDuck, Jordan Tigani challenges the decade-long dominance of Big Data and introduces a compelling alternative that could change how companies handle data.

Jordan discusses why Big Data technologies are an overkill for most companies, how MotherDuck and DuckDB offer fast analytical queries, and lessons learned as a technical founder building his first startup.

Watch the episode with Tomasz Tunguz: https://youtu.be/gU6dGmZzmvI

Website - https://motherduck.com

Twitter - https://x.com/motherduck

Jordan Tigani

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordantigani

Twitter - https://x.com/jrdntgn

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(00:56) What is the Small Data?

(06:56) Marketing strategy of MotherDuck

(08:39) Processing Small Data with Big Data stack

(15:30) DuckDB

(17:21) Creation of DuckDB

(18:48) Founding story of MotherDuck

(24:08) MotherDuck's community

(25:25) MotherDuck of today ($100M raised)

(33:15) Why MotherDuck and DuckDB are so fast?

(39:08) The limitations and the future of MotherDuck's platform

(39:49) Small Models

(42:37) Small Data and the Modern Data Stack

(46:47) Making things simpler with a shift from Big Data to Small Data

(50:04) Jordan Tigani's entrepreneurial journey

(58:31) Outro