Business - Neil Carson

Tesla, BYD and the EV market

The global EV market is moving at a million miles an hour. From trips to Australia and China and discussions with a significant Tesla investor, I’ve been fascinated by what's going on.

Business

Taiwan: The kitchen making tasty chips

China will only reclaim Taiwan by force if their leader goes mad. Sometimes that happens to lifelong leaders and dictators (sometimes I worry about my own sanity).

Cloud

SaaS: How AWS Graviton moves money from Snowflake customers' wallets to shareholders' pockets

...a 76% product gross margin - up from 70% just over a year earlier. Furthermore, they announced approval for a $2bn stock buyback programme. Much of the savings from Graviton isn't resulting in lower prices for Snowflake customers and instead is going to stock buybacks

Data Warehouse

Being outcompeted by suppliers

It's long-term trouble to be running a business where your competitors control the cost of your product. This didn't end well at my previous employer, and won't end well at some cloud data warehouse companies either.

Snowflake

Comparing to Big Dog Snowflake

It's impossible not to be impressed by the stunning success of Big Dog Snowflake, but it sucks to be compared to them all the time. However there are recent signs that Big Dog is starting to lose its bark, and there's some howling.

Business

Why I love a good crisis

I've recently been doing some soul searching about some of the things I like and dislike the most about my job. In addition to the usual stuff — happy employees, ecstatic customers, winning deals, increasing valuations, congratulatory board meetings, funding rounds and all the usual — there's a

Yellowbrick

Learning from my hiring mistakes

I've made more than my fair share of hiring mistakes in some areas, and this post tries to dissect why.

Yellowbrick

Why success doesn't feel good

As we try to climb the mountain that goes up and to the right, we sometimes hit potholes in the road. Combined with social media's continual assertion that everyone else is doing better, this makes us feel unnecessarily bad.