Data platform blueprint for start-ups

I love the story of the German mobile gaming company Kolibri because they embraced what staying nimble really means for a data platform.

And that’s duct tape.

When they started out with their data journey in 2016, they didn’t have anyone in data. They just had a Marketing Manager who used SaaS tools for all data needs.

In 2017, they added some R Scripts and a lot of duct tape to glue together data to get a complete picture of their users. Not a data engineer, but the manager himself coded stuff together.

In 2018, they added an analyst and one single data engineer to integrate the data together inside Databricks. One person running the complete data stack for multiple parties to use requires even more duct tape.

Staying nimble means building less and using lots of duct tape.