Over a decade after the idea of “big data'' was first born, data has become the central nervous system for decision-making in organizations of all sizes. But the modern data stack is evolving and which infrastructure trends and technologies will ultimately win out remains to be decided. In this podcast, originally recorded as part of Fivetran's Modern Data Stack conference, five leaders in data infrastructure debate that question: a16z general partner and pioneer of software defined networking Martin Casado, former CEO of Snowflake Bob Muglia; Michelle Ufford, founder and CEO of Noteable; Tristan Handy, founder of Fishtown Analytics and leader of the open source project dbt; and Fivetran founder George Fraser. The conversation covers the future of data lakes, the new use cases for the modern data stack, data mesh and whether decentralization of teams and tools is the future, and how low we actually need to go with latency. And while the topic of debate is the modern data stack, the themes and differing perspectives strike at the heart of an even bigger: how does technology evolve in complex enterprise environments?  We're re-running this episode as part of a special report on Future.com, the Data50: the World's Top Data Startups, which covers the bellwether private companies across the most exciting categories in data, from AI/ML to observability and more. 

In his book (and podcast), Brian McCullough chronicles the history and evolution of the internet -- from college kids in a basement and the dot-com boom, to the applications built on top of it and the entrepreneurs behind them. General partner Chris Dixon chats with McCullough about How the Internet Happened -- and more broadly, about how tech adoption and innovation happens. They discuss lessons learned, how innovation doesn’t happen in a straight line, and what the past can tell us about the next phase of the internet and technology.