We Don't Need More Tools

Over the weekend, I had some time reviewing (this reddit thread)[https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/n2n21n/monthly_shameless_self_promotion_thread_202105/] where many have been posting about their side or main projects and startups. Coming from computer engineering background myself, and falling in the same thought trap over and over again, I see many people are developing new tools that are marginally better than what is currently in the market. I think, we already have enough tools and they are so many big companies that are offering them with a generous free quota that we seldom can reap a profit, unless we reach a certain scale. Or in other words, tooling market is saturated. We already have good cloud providers, we already have good open source database, and so on.

There is a good talk by (Chamath Palihapitiya)[https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk] in which he talk about building something that will solve a real world problem. I’m not that perfectionist to say we should find the next cure for a rare cancer, just saying don’t shoot yourself in the foot and fall into trap of believing building an engineering tool is going to give us enough profit to sustain our biz. Please take a look at (Datadog’s revenue statement)[https://investors.datadoghq.com/static-files/9d3083a2-f95f-48be-a413-c35d154a3046], they were loosing money for the second year. I know you say Datadog is in growth phase, I would say it’s good to see some profit.

This post wouldn’t apply to you if you are well-driven and have good amount of followers, amazing access to tech and money, and ambition to make next billion dollar company; else, it will be a rough ride.