How do investors feel about that though? I worked for a company that had raised several rounds from institutional money over a decade, and then it spun out one of its technology products into a new company with some select employees and a new cap table, and it was promptly acquired by a unicorn (8-12mos), leaving the other employees left behind to develop another product, with a good chance of this happening again, and the investors holding a piece of a what was essentially a farm team development shop.
Congratulations on this seed round, it's just exciting to see GitLab doing something this cool. This other pattern probably isn't a factor here, but I'd be interested in how you pitch spinoffs to investors.
Maybe swap some of their current equity for shares of the spinoff startup? It's interesting because I can think of a bunch of companies that have become too big to do anything new, and packaging this could be a real play.
Please let me (Meltano CEO) know how we could make that more obvious!
"ELT for the DataOps era
Meltano is open source, self-hosted, CLI-first, debuggable, and extensible."
That doesn't tell me what Meltano is.
I happen to recognise "ELT" as "Extract, load, transform" but I imagine a lot of people would have to look up the acronym.
I hadn't seen the term DataOps before, despite working in this area. DevOps for Data? But the definition of DevOps itself is still pretty vague!
I know how hard it is to explain what a product like this does - I'm definitely not there with my own https://datasette.io/ project yet - but what you've got right now could definitely do with some improvement.
Here's my attempt for Meltano, based on a very loose understanding of what it is:
"Meltano is an open-source tool for building automated pipelines for extracting and converting data. Pipelines are defined using version-controlled code, and the framework can be extended using plugins written in Python."
This really isn't very good, but it does fill in the questions that I had when I first visited https://meltano.com/
I was also confused as to what Meltano actually is or does, but everyone here seems to be so excited and genuinely happy for you and that made me super curious. It must have taken me several minutes of roaming around the website and docs before I finally figured it out though!
The main problem, I believe, is that there is too much copy that describes how the product will make its users feel etc. and far too little that tells us about its technical capabilities and its use cases. That notwithstanding, the copy is beautifully written and it has a very nice and smooth flow.
Being a developer myself and have seen/operated similar systems before made it not too bad to connect the dots. But that could just as well be exactly what you expect from your target audience!
ELT isn't explained, and probably a few other terms as well. It's just not clear what either the value or purpose is.
In my opinion, that is.
