> Most experienced devtool investors know that devtool markets usually come in threes: three parts of a stool that individually make sense, but collectively start jostling for the limited budget (and funding) available in their larger category (and will eventually be guided by their market to build or buy each others’ features in the process)
> For frontend/JAMstack devs, this was a three way battle between startups building metaframeworks, cloud infra, and content management systems, and various combinations of each. Arguably round 1 won by Nextjs/Vercel and Contentful. In data engineering, a similar battle ensued between data catalogs, semantic layers, and business intelligence, though we are still in very early days of category collapse. Even in fintech, you see Deel/Rippling/Ramp/Brex building each other’s features as fast as they can between the trio of contractor, payroll, and corporate spending products.
> Most experienced devtool investors know that devtool markets usually come in threes: three parts of a stool that individually make sense, but collectively start jostling for the limited budget (and funding) available in their larger category (and will eventually be guided by their market to build or buy each others’ features in the process)
> For frontend/JAMstack devs, this was a three way battle between startups building metaframeworks, cloud infra, and content management systems, and various combinations of each. Arguably round 1 won by Nextjs/Vercel and Contentful. In data engineering, a similar battle ensued between data catalogs, semantic layers, and business intelligence, though we are still in very early days of category collapse. Even in fintech, you see Deel/Rippling/Ramp/Brex building each other’s features as fast as they can between the trio of contractor, payroll, and corporate spending products.