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Learning Track: Analyzing Software Companies

There are 35+ public companies – and countless more large privates – that build highly technical products. What do they actually do? What makes one database different from the next?

Analytics and AI

Companies that help organizations analyze and build models with their data

The larger your organization is, the more valuable data you probably have to work with. Companies in this section help organizations get the most out of their data. Historically, analytics has referred more to the ongoing analysis of data by data teams, while ML and AI is more about building models that can operate as products.

Private (Established)

Databricks is apparently worth $100B. What do they even do?
What we should really be asking is “What does Databricks not do?”
What does OpenAI do?
OpenAI is the most popular provider of generative AI models like GPT-4.

Public

Communication and Automation

Companies that help organizations automate plus communicate with their customers

This is sort of a catch-all category, but the unifying theme is automation. Companies in this category help organizations automate their work, from building integrations to sending email and SMS.

Public

What does Twilio do?
Twilio makes a suite of products that helps you communicate with your customers via SMS, video, calls, and more.
What does UIPath do?
UIPath helps people automate rote manual tasks like updating spreadsheets and creating documents.

Private (Emerging)

What does Zapier do?
Zapier is a tool that helps business people make custom integrations between their favorite tools, without needing to write any code.

Data Stores

Companies that sell places to store your data

There are at least 300+ databases out there, and they all do something slightly different. From Postgres to Elastic to Cassandra, there are virtually unlimited ways to store and query your data; and most companies will use several of them in tandem. Companies in this category sell databases, for everything from production applications to data warehouses and log search.

→ Read overview
Why do developers choose different types of databases?
An intro to how companies like Elastic, MongoDB, Snowflake, Confluent and AWS compete.

Public

What does Elastic do?
Elasticsearch is a popular open source database for storing and searching unstructured data.
What does MongoDB do?
MongoDB is a highly popular unstructured, NoSQL document database for powering your applications.
What's Kafka and what does Confluent do?
Apache Kafka is a framework for streaming real time data, and Confluent offers Kafka as a managed service.

Private (Emerging)

What Does Algolia do?
Algolia provides a set of tools that helps engineers build search functionality into their apps.

DevOps

Companies that help developers deploy their software

Building software is only part of the battle - you need to distribute it to your customers, and it needs to work for them, all the time. DevOps has as many definitions as letters, but the main gist is the process of getting software out there so your customers can use it. Companies in this section help developers do that, from API management to containers and artifacts.

Private (Established)

What does Hashicorp do?
Hashicorp sells software that helps developers manage their cloud infrastructure via code-based configuration.
What's Docker, and what are containers?Free
Containers helps developers run code in isolated boxes so it works the same every time.

Public

What does JFrog do?
JFrog provides a bunch of products and services around DevOps, i.e. taking your software and deploying it to the world.
What does GitLab do?
A complete platform for building and deploying software.

Private (Emerging)

What does Postman do?
Postman is a suite of tools that helps developers build, test, and use internal and external API endpoints.

Fintech

Companies that help developers move money around

The banking system is obscure enough to make software engineering look easy. Companies in this section help developers move money around: accepting payments, creating subscriptions, and connecting to bank accounts.

Private (Established)

What does Plaid do?Free
Plaid acts as an intermediary between apps (like Venmo) and your bank so that you can log in and share data securely.
What does Stripe do?
Stripe sells payments infrastructure for internet businesses: primarily, they help you bill your customers, process payments, and work with your payment data.

Infrastructure and Cloud

Companies that help developers build and run applications

Back in the day, most companies built and ran their own data centers. Today, almost everything happens in the cloud. Companies in this section help developers run and manage the infrastructure they need to build their apps, from clouds to frontend-as-a-service.

→ Read overview
Breakdown: the cloud infrastructure market
How developers decide which *type* of infrastructure to use, and which (usually giant) cloud provider to buy it from.

Public

AWS for the rest of us
A not developer's guide to AWS.
What does DigitalOcean do?
DigitalOcean is an independent infrastructure as a service provider; you can think of them as AWS or GCP, but for the people.
What does Cloudflare do?
Cloudflare provides networking tools that help companies distribute their apps globally and securely.

Private (Established)

What does Heroku do?
Heroku was and is one of the first cloud platforms as a service (PaaS).

Private (Emerging)

What does Vercel do?Free
Vercel builds a frontend-as-a-service product – they make it easy for engineers to deploy and run the user facing parts of their applications.

Monitoring and Observability

Companies that help developers monitor and improve their applications

The saying goes that you can't improve what you can't measure. And for developers, this is certainly the case: monitoring your infrastructure and apps helps you make them faster and more reliable. Companies in this section give developers visibility into their apps, from APM to logs.

→ Read overview
The market for observability tooling
Welcome to the wild world of observability tooling. 20+ legitimate, mature vendor options across open source vs closed source.

Public

What does Datadog do?
Datadog is monitoring software - developers use it to get operational visibility into their servers and applications.
What does Splunk do?
Splunk is a tool for storing and searching logs, specifically focused on security.
What does New Relic do?
New Relic is observability software: teams use it to monitor the performance of their apps and infrastructure.

Private (Emerging)

What Does Sentry do?
Sentry is an error-tracking and performance-monitoring platform to help developers diagnose and fix issues in their code.

Security

Companies that help developers make their apps more secure

It has never been more important to lock down your code and your apps: vulnerabilities abound and security incidents cost organizations billions every year. Companies in this section help developers secure their apps, from the code they write to their authentication infrastructure.

Private (Established)

What does Snyk do?
Snyk helps developers make sure that the code they're writing is secure.

Public

What does Okta do?
Okta is an enterprise-focused identity provider: they take care of managing usernames, passwords, and permissions.

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Explore learning tracks

Learning Track: Analyzing Software Companies

Analytics and AI

Private (Established)

Public

Private (Emerging)

Communication and Automation

Public

Private (Emerging)

Data Stores

Public

Private (Emerging)

DevOps

Private (Established)

Public

Private (Emerging)

Fintech

Private (Established)

Infrastructure and Cloud

Public

Private (Established)

Private (Emerging)

Monitoring and Observability

Public

Private (Emerging)

Security

Private (Established)

Public

Analytics and AI

Communication and Automation

Data Stores

DevOps

Fintech

Infrastructure and Cloud

Monitoring and Observability

Security

Analytics and AI

Communication and Automation

Data Stores

DevOps

Fintech

Infrastructure and Cloud

Monitoring and Observability

Security

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