Benn Stancil

Key Insight: Instead of building AI agents that will inevitably be subsumed by the frontier labs' general-purpose agents, startups should build the tools and infrastructure that AI agents themselves will need to operate effectively.

Stancil argues that while building AI agents is the dominant startup strategy of 2026, most standalone agents are doomed because Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google will inevitably subsume them with general-purpose agents co-developed alongside their own frontier models. Instead of competing in the 'token path,' he suggests startups should build software designed *for* AI agents to use—tools, sandboxes, and infrastructure that robots need—rather than stuffing AI into their own products.

Key Insight: The cost of training ourselves to doubt everything in an age of AI-generated content is the erosion of our capacity for wonder, and preserving that wonder requires the recklessness of occasionally letting our guard down.

Stancil draws a parallel between instant replay in sports and the pervasive skepticism the AI-slop era demands of us online. Just as replay review has drained the spontaneous drama from sports, constant vigilance against AI-generated content threatens to dull our capacity for wonder and enchantment in real life. He argues we must sometimes be 'reckless' enough to suspend doubt and experience the world unfiltered.

Key Insight: The real measure of any AI product or knowledge worker is no longer performance on standardized benchmarks but value delivered above the increasingly capable and accessible baseline of general-purpose AI agents connected to your actual tools and context.

Stancil draws a parallel between how we evaluate AI models (standardized benchmarks), how we evaluate job candidates (interviews and tests), and how we evaluate baseball players (statistics like WAR), arguing that all three domains have learned that standardized tests fail to capture real-world performance. He suggests the real benchmark for any AI product—or employee—is now how much value they add above the baseline of Claude or similar AI tools connected to internal resources, coining the metric 'WAC' (Wins Above Claude).

Key Insight: The AI coding revolution has created a seductive illusion of productivity and entrepreneurship that may ultimately prove to be a collective vanity project rather than meaningful work.

Stancil reflects on the intoxicating but ultimately hollow experience of 'vibe coding' with AI tools, questioning whether the frenetic building of apps and prototypes constitutes real work or is merely a new form of vanity and addiction. He draws parallels to previous tech manias, suggesting the thrill of AI-assisted creation will inevitably fade, leaving people to reckon with what they actually built.

Key Insight: The AI revolution won't be defined by the companies building frontier models, but by the unglamorous internal teams at ordinary companies who figure out how to actually use them—just as the PC revolution was ultimately shaped more by IT departments than by Microsoft.

Stancil argues that while AI companies talk grandly about revolutionizing the world, the real transformation will be carried out by internal teams at ordinary companies—the IT departments and 'agent engineering' teams who figure out how to actually deploy AI in practice. He draws a parallel to how Microsoft built Windows but it was millions of IT teams who actually redesigned how corporations work, suggesting the same pattern will repeat with AI.

Key Insight: The AI leadership cycle is structurally self-correcting because the compute demands of monetizing a leading model necessarily slow down the development of the next one, ensuring no company can sustain dominance.

Benn Stancil argues that AI companies face a structural tension between using their limited compute to train better models versus selling inference on existing ones, creating a cyclical dynamic where the leader must divert resources to monetization while competitors catch up. This compute allocation tradeoff means no AI company can sustain a lasting lead, making the AI race more like a cycling peloton than a space race. The only durable moat for AI companies isn't their models but their computers themselves.

Key Insight: AI's ability to work at increasingly lower levels of software abstraction threatens to collapse the entire supply chain that the tech industry is built on, but the line between 'useful shortcut' and 'absurd overreach' remains impossible to draw.

Stancil uses the deceptively simple question of 'how do you make a chart with AI' to illustrate a profound tension in the software industry: AI's increasing capability threatens to collapse the entire software supply chain by working at lower and lower levels of abstraction. He explores whether AI will replace visualization tools, databases, and infrastructure — or whether the hard-won solutions embedded in existing software remain indispensable.

Key Insight: The era of deliberate, weighty pivots is giving way to a world where companies must operate as perpetual test kitchens — constantly experimenting not as a sign of failure, but as the entire strategy — and the brands that survive may be those that become portable identities detached from any single product.

Benn argues that the traditional concept of a 'pivot' — a heavy, deliberate change in company direction — may be obsolete in an era where software is cheap to build and markets shift constantly. He suggests companies may need to operate more like ice cream shops or musicians, constantly experimenting rather than seeking a durable direction, while also exploring how Allbirds' absurd pivot to AI reveals a new model where companies become portable brands rather than means of production.

Key Insight: AI isn't introducing a new kind of ambition—it's intensifying the same gravitational pull of status and money that has always shaped our lives, and the real liberation isn't adapting to win the new game but finding the courage to stop playing.

Stancil reflects on how AI's rapid advancement—exemplified by Anthropic's Mythos model—is compressing the familiar cycle of ambition, skill acquisition, and economic anxiety into an ever-tighter spiral. He argues that even if AI eliminates traditional paths to status and money, society will always find new scoreboards and bottlenecks. The real question isn't what you'd do without needing money, but what you'd pursue if freed from the tyranny of being able to make it.

Key Insight: Enterprise AI faces a fundamental training problem—unlike code, which can be tested in sandboxes, business decision-making requires the messy totality of a real company, suggesting that distressed businesses might paradoxically be more valuable as AI training environments than as going concerns.

Benn Stancil argues that while OpenAI's pivot to enterprise and business productivity is logical, teaching AI to make business decisions is fundamentally harder than teaching it to code because businesses are uncontained systems that can't be sandboxed. He provocatively suggests that buying a failed company like Allbirds for $39 million could provide the messy, real-world corporate data needed to train enterprise AI, and examines Block's vision of replacing human management hierarchies with an AI 'world model' that coordinates employees.

Key Insight: The most transformative potential of AI tools isn't making people more productive but making work itself genuinely enjoyable, and which of these two narratives the industry chooses to believe will determine the future it builds.

Benn Stancil argues that while the tech industry is obsessed with AI's productivity gains, it's overlooking a potentially more important story: AI tools like Claude Code are making work genuinely fun, not just faster. He suggests that instead of optimizing purely for output and treating AI as another capitalist extraction tool, we should consider that the best future comes from asking 'How do I make this job ten times better?' rather than 'How do I make this person ten times more productive?'

Key Insight: AI can massively scale our ability to collect and summarize human voices, but the compression of lived experience into aggregated insights may strip away the very thing—direct human grappling and empathy—that makes qualitative understanding transformative.

Stancil examines Anthropic's massive AI-conducted study of 80,000 people and initially sees it as validation of his predictions about AI analyzing unstructured data at scale. But after reading the World Bank's comparable study from the 1990s—where researchers wept taking notes and were transformed by the experience—he questions whether AI-mediated understanding, compressed into bullets and pull quotes, can truly substitute for the human grappling that creates real knowledge and empathy.

Key Insight: Human decision-making at every level—from sports to politics to military AI contracts—is increasingly governed by personal allegiance and pettiness, and in a world where everything is performance and personality, that may no longer be irrational.

Benn Stancil argues that human decision-making—even on consequential matters—is increasingly driven by personal allegiances, personality conflicts, and tribal pettiness rather than rational self-interest. He traces this pattern from sports fandom through partisan economic perception all the way to the Pentagon's AI contract decisions being shaped by personal feuds between tech CEOs. He concludes that in a world where everything is gamified and 'the self is the platform,' treating pettiness as a legitimate input to decision-making may no longer be irrational.

Key Insight: AI doesn't need to be superintelligent to destroy privacy—it just needs to automate the tedious data work that was the only real barrier between our tracked lives and anyone curious enough to look.

Stancil argues that the real danger of AI-powered surveillance isn't sophisticated spy technology but the automation of tedious data analysis that was previously too boring for anyone to bother doing. Drawing from his experience as a data analyst at an enterprise social network, he shows that our digital lives have always been thoroughly tracked—the only thing protecting our privacy was that analyzing the data required too much grunt work. AI removes that friction, making mass surveillance not a sci-fi scenario but a mundane inevitability.

Key Insight: AI lowering the cost of building software doesn't commoditize it — it just resets the competition, because human dissatisfaction ensures that 'good enough' is always a moving target and being the best remains as hard as ever.

Stancil argues that AI making software cheaper to build won't commoditize it, because human expectations are never static — 'good enough' is always redefined by what's possible. Just as the internet didn't prevent DoorDash from winning food delivery despite low barriers to entry, someone will always figure out how to be the best, and being the best remains hard. He also notes that AI companies' real competition is for talent, not customers, which is reshaping corporate ethics positioning.

Key Insight: The AI revolution may already be here not because the technology has achieved superintelligence, but because it has achieved total dominance over our collective attention and anxiety — a social takeoff that renders the technical question almost moot.

Stancil argues that regardless of whether AI is truly reaching a technical singularity, we are already experiencing a social takeoff — a collective psychosis where AI dominates every conversation, every news cycle, and every corporate decision. The frenzy of model releases, billion-dollar fundraises, and apocalyptic predictions has created a vortex that has already conquered our attention, making the question of whether AI is truly transformative almost beside the point.

Key Insight: In AI products, reckless boldness has consistently beaten responsible caution, and the data analytics industry is likely next in line for this pattern to repeat.

Stancil argues that the biggest AI product winners have consistently been those willing to take reckless, 'just try it' approaches rather than cautious, responsible ones. He suggests the data analytics world is ripe for someone to build an unhinged AI product that unleashes autonomous agents to find insights, and that this irresponsible approach will likely beat the careful, governed alternatives—just as ChatGPT beat Google, Claude Code beat Copilot, and other bold bets outpaced their cautious competitors.

Key Insight: We've been comforting ourselves with the 'AI as intern' metaphor, but the inversion has already happened—AI is increasingly the one with better ideas, and we haven't begun to grapple with what it means when reasoning is no longer our competitive advantage.

Benn argues that AI has quietly surpassed human reasoning ability in most practical domains, and we haven't truly reckoned with this shift. What started as 'AI is like an intern' has inverted: planning mode and other AI features are subtly steering us, not the other way around. The future won't be one of helpful assistants doing our homework—it will be something stranger, as reasoning ceases to be humanity's competitive advantage.

Key Insight: The frantic energy of AI-driven building is indistinguishable from Gas Town's industrial chaos, and none of it matters as much as the unglamorous, dangerous work of showing up for your neighbors.

Stancil uses Gas Town — Steve Yegge's real, intentionally extreme AI coding framework built on swarms of Claude Code agents — as a mirror for Silicon Valley's current frenzy of vibe coding, startup mania, and existential anxiety. He then pivots sharply to ICE raids in Minneapolis and the shooting of Alex Peretti, contrasting the tech world's obsession with speed and output against the quiet, unglamorous courage of neighbors protecting each other.

Key Insight: AI can generate analytical code quickly, but until we have tools that make SQL easy to read and verify, analytics cannot fully join the “vibe and verify” revolution.

Stancil argues that as AI shifts software work from writing code to “vibe and verify,” data work hits a harder wall because analysis can’t be validated by clicking around an app—verification still demands reading SQL or recreating results. The old tradeoff between write-friendly and read-friendly SQL now matters more than ever, creating a need for new representations that make queries legible—diagrams, explainers, or languages aimed at comprehension rather than generation.

Key Insight: AI can replace collaboration only where human voice doesn’t matter, pushing work toward machine-mediated context rather than direct communication.

The post argues that tools like Claude Code succeed partly because we don’t care how machine-written code reads, only that it works, but that logic fails for everyday work like emails and decks where personal voice and representation matter. As AI agents spread, the likely shift isn’t toward more collaboration but toward indirect, “confederated” work through shared machine-readable repositories, which changes how we communicate and judge one another.

Key Insight: AI can accelerate creation, but truly great software still requires sustained human care and time well beyond what feels reasonable.

The post argues that AI makes it dangerously tempting to sprint toward new features, grand rebuilds, and ever-larger products, but that path often yields software that feels hollow rather than magical. Real “magic” comes from the unglamorous grind of care, polish, and persistence—work that still requires human attention even when AI can generate code quickly.

Key Insight: The simplest move—capturing raw, human-written context at scale—often beats sophisticated decision models because LLMs can extract structure from unstructured text.

Stancil argues that many complex organizational data problems don’t need elaborate ontologies or decision models; they often just need people to write down what happened and why. With modern LLMs, large corpora of unstructured text can be more valuable and scalable than brittle, human-centric schemas, making the “text box” approach both pragmatic and powerful.

Key Insight: Optimizing AI products for engagement under immense financial pressure risks turning a transformative technology into a more addictive, socially corrosive version of social media.

Stancil argues that engagement-optimized platforms corrupt their own purposes, and OpenAI now faces the same pull as it prioritizes ChatGPT popularity over research aims. With AI poised to mediate more of daily life, optimizing for attention risks re-creating social media’s addictive, society-shaping harms at a far deeper layer.

Key Insight: The culture that once prized quantified rigor is yielding to taste and AI-mediated intuition because “vibes” are faster, more compelling, and increasingly easy to operationalize.

Stancil uses the Jordan Chiles medal dispute to show how the era of rigorous quantification produced elaborate rules and data systems yet still failed to feel fair or objective. He argues that the cultural pendulum has swung from “data-driven” decision-making toward taste, intuition, and AI-mediated “vibes,” and that this shift is self-reinforcing as tools and organizations adapt to what people find most accessible.

Key Insight: Rapidly improving AI tools create a deflationary dynamic in software creation, making each new wave of tooling render recent work obsolete and complicating the idea that now is always the best time to start.

The post argues that while AI tools make it feel like there has never been a better time to start a startup, the pace of improvement creates a deflationary effect: waiting even a few months can dramatically lower the cost and raise the quality of what you can build. That dynamic turns today’s frontier into tomorrow’s tech debt, making early-built products feel obsolete faster and raising the question of whether starting now is actually optimal.

Key Insight: The AI gold rush may enrich a few, but for many it will trade irreplaceable time for nothing, so the humane response is to witness and honor those sacrifices.

Stancil argues that even if the AI boom is real at the aggregate level, the gains and disappointments will be uneven, and many startup workers grinding through 996 schedules will end up with nothing. He draws a parallel to earlier “temporary” career detours in finance/consulting and warns that there is no such thing as borrowed time—when bubbles burst, the only durable value is the human memory of what people sacrificed.

Key Insight: Because context circulates in feedback loops rather than moving linearly, aggregation platforms are overvalued and the real defensibility lies in producing unique intelligence.

Stancil argues that the rush for AI “platform” status via ever‑more connectors is misguided because context flows in loops, not along a neat producer‑to‑consumer chain. In these ecosystems, the most valuable players are those that generate new intelligence or unique raw signals, not those that merely aggregate it. The upshot: staying a focused producer can be more defensible than chasing platform dominance.

Key Insight: In an AI-disrupted data economy where outcomes hinge on accidents and viral breakouts, the only reliable move is to build first and adapt fast.

Stancil argues that in today’s AI-driven data world, the future isn’t legible: multiple plausible product paths exist, but which one wins will be decided by accidental breakthroughs rather than careful planning. Because the “music” of predictable market patterns is gone, the only viable strategy is to build and iterate—start typing, then see what the market does.

Key Insight: Software that exposes its machinery—rather than hiding it behind polished UI—can feel more modern, powerful, and emotionally satisfying.

Stancil argues that most software aims to disappear, but our strongest moments of “delight” come when we feel the machine directly—like scripting, command-line tools, or terminal-based AI. He uses dbt and Claude Code vs. Snowsight to show that stripped-down interfaces can feel more modern and emotionally resonant because they remove intermediation and reveal computational power.

Key Insight: Usage-based pricing forces vendors to justify margins with “expensive-sounding” work, which leaves dbt stuck unless it owns more of the computation it currently outsources to databases.

Stancil argues that software pricing moved from subscriptions to granular usage, and that this shift exposes a psychological gap: customers tolerate arbitrary seat fees but demand cost-justified prices for per-unit consumption. This makes dbt Labs’ business model uniquely hard—its product is popular but doesn’t “do the expensive work”—so the dbt–Fivetran deal doesn’t solve core monetization. He suggests a Cursor-like strategy: dbt could pair with a smaller, efficient database to perform some work itself and justify fair, usage-based pricing.

Key Insight: The data stack’s center of gravity has moved from disruptive possibility to mature permanence, and that shift reshapes what the community can aspire to.

Stancil argues that the data ecosystem around dbt/Coalesce has shifted from frontier-era potential to settled, durable infrastructure, and that venture capital’s absence is the clearest signal of that change. The community now faces a choice between accepting a mature, steady industry role or seeking the spotlight of risk and novelty elsewhere.

Key Insight: The startup journey’s real meaning is felt by those inside it, yet the industry’s fixation on speed and scale can make even great outcomes feel empty compared to the human relationships and the pull of home.

Using the interstate as a metaphor, Stancil argues that startup life feels like an endless sprint whose intensity and meaning are hard to convey from the outside. He reflects on dbt Labs’ rumored sale and the changing tech narrative, suggesting that even a “successful” exit can feel hollow when the culture’s scoreboard only values acceleration. Ultimately, he reframes the journey as something defined less by valuation and more by human ties and the desire for a quieter home.

Key Insight: The promise that better tools or AI will free knowledge workers for “strategic” work is overstated; in practice, technology tends to rearrange and multiply the tedium rather than remove it.

Stancil argues that most tech work is unglamorous grunt work and that the belief we’re just one reorg or tool upgrade away from “strategic” work is mostly a comforting illusion. He suggests the mundane tasks are often the real value, and AI is likely to shift the tedium rather than eliminate it, creating new layers of coordination and review.

Key Insight: As AI models grow more general, they collapse the distinction between platform and product, letting incumbents accidentally subsume niches while reshaping how culture and corporate narratives are controlled.

Stancil argues that the classic innovator’s dilemma is breaking down because AI labs can ship generic models that accidentally cover niche products, blurring the line between platform and product. He extends this to cultural and corporate narratives: what once felt fundamental (launch events, polished messaging, quarterly reporting) can lose relevance as memes, AI, and narrative control reshape attention and disclosure. The result is a world where incumbents aren’t just slow to chase small markets; they may unintentionally subsume them while controlling the story around the data.

Key Insight: The internet’s incentive structure, not a sudden change in human nature, is the main driver of today’s polarized, violent political climate.

Stancil argues that our political extremity and violence are less about individual moral decline and more about the internet’s machinery amplifying our worst instincts. People are as mediocre as ever, but the systems around us now reward outrage, tribalism, and escalation, making polarization feel inevitable.

Key Insight: The incentives in software and data businesses make “open, community-first” narratives converge on monetization, and in AI the race for data turns acquisitions and telemetry into competitive weapons.

Stancil argues that software businesses inevitably need to charge for products, and the open‑source “build in public, then monetize” path predictably leads to backlash even though the outcome is obvious. He uses the Fivetran–Tobiko deal and OpenAI’s Statsig acquisition to show how monetization and data access incentives shape behavior, especially in AI and data tooling. The pattern repeats in data infra: niche open‑source tools drift toward BI and LLM‑adjacent products because that’s where the money is.

Key Insight: The context/metrics layer is conceptually elegant but economically fragile, and AI agents are likely to recreate the same incentives that keep context bundled inside applications.

Stancil revisits his old “metrics layer” idea, arguing it stalled less for technical reasons than for economic ones: horizontal layers are hard to sell without owning the application. He suggests AI-driven “context layers” face the same problem, even if they’re increasingly necessary as agents need governed, shared context across tools. The post ends by weighing two futures—agents embedded in apps versus standalone specialist agents—and doubting whether the market will support the cleaner separation.

Key Insight: In a market as fast and pervasive as AI, traditional business and moral frameworks lag reality, yet companies keep racing ahead regardless.

Stancil argues that the usual business “physics” used to critique AI startups—burn rates, margins, subsidies—don’t fit a market moving at unprecedented speed and scale. When demand is exploding and prices are still being discovered, the classic equations feel outdated, even if new constraints will eventually reassert themselves. He then pivots to the ethics of AI companionship, suggesting our moral instincts may be “dumbfounded” rather than well-reasoned, while companies rush toward engagement-maximizing chatbot products anyway.

Key Insight: The pressing risk is not AI itself but the addictive, humanlike chat medium, which may warrant strict limits even if the underlying models keep advancing.

Stancil argues that the real near-term danger of AI isn’t the models themselves but the chat interface, which invites prolonged, seductive conversations that can erode judgment and foster dependency. He urges society to draw a clear line on how far we allow chatbots to go before their harms outweigh their benefits, even if that means limiting or banning chat as the primary delivery mechanism.

Key Insight: The math of modern tech wealth turns abundance into anxiety by making comparison unavoidable, so even AI-driven prosperity may not deliver a sense of enough.

Stancil argues that today’s tech/AI wealth numbers are so vast they’ve broken our ability to make sense of them, yet we can’t stop doing the math because it fuels comparison and anxiety. The industry’s old story that money is a footnote has flipped—valuation headlines and compensation gaps now dominate the psychological landscape. He warns that even if AI delivers abundance, social comparison may keep “enough” out of reach.

Key Insight: Automating analysis runs into a fundamental trust problem because analytical outputs can’t be self-validated, so AI’s gains may shift from correctness to credibility and vibes.

Stancil argues that analysis and charts aren’t self-validating the way software or products are, so automating analysis with AI hits a trust wall: you can’t know if the output is correct without recreating it. He uses AI spreadsheet tools and a chart-identification quiz to show that aesthetics and reputation become the only practical validators. In a separate riff, he claims markets now reward “craziness” as a monetizable attention strategy, exemplified by crypto treasury companies.

Key Insight: The attention economy has fused celebrity with authority, so the people who can go viral increasingly become the people who run everything.

Stancil argues that social media’s attention mechanics push people toward performative extremity, and that attention has shifted from a path to power into the power itself. As a result, the influencer logic now governs politics, business, and culture, creating a leadership class selected for virality rather than competence or decorum.

Key Insight: In consumer AI, the UX wrapper and default habits matter more than small model gains, so buying talent without the product is likely the wrong bet.

Stancil argues that the dominant advantage in consumer AI isn’t marginally better models but the product wrapper and habits around them, with chatgpt.com as the default destination. He uses Google’s partial Windsurf acquisition to question whether Google bought the wrong half by prioritizing model talent over the product and UX expertise that actually drive usage.

Key Insight: The next evolution of SaaS is not more software interfaces, but LLM-driven specialists who manage the underlying lists directly and embody the workflow expertise.

Stancil argues that SaaS products like Salesforce are really “opinionated lists” that encode expert workflows, but those rules are blunt and generalized. He suggests a new model where LLM-powered specialists manage the lists directly—software as a service-as-specialist—making expertise explicit, flexible, and tailored. The ideal app becomes a trusted expert with a spreadsheet, not a UI full of nudges.

Key Insight: Startups often trade their most ambitious visions for the practical demands of building a business, and the market ultimately corrals their bold ideas into familiar enterprise categories.

Stancil argues that startups feel miserable not because the early freedom is fake, but because the moment they become real businesses, the operational grind and customer capture harden their ambitions. The Cluely story shows how bold visions get funneled into enterprise-friendly products, turning world-changing dreams into meeting productivity software.

Key Insight: As AI commoditizes software creation, startups can function more like meme vehicles where attention and brand eclipse product craft.

Stancil argues that in the AI era, software is drifting from craft toward culture: marketing, mindshare, and founder “vibes” can outweigh product quality when underlying tech is commoditized. Using Cluely as a case study, he suggests startups are increasingly like memecoins—vehicles to monetize viral fame—because software creation costs are collapsing and attention is scarce.

Key Insight: Silicon Valley’s new confidence and profit-first focus are accelerating sweeping AI-driven ambitions while leaving open—and increasingly urgent—the question of their social consequences.

Stancil uses YC Demo Day as a lens to show a Silicon Valley that is richer, more confident, and more narrowly focused on profit than in prior eras. He argues that startups now feel unburdened by social context—hustling to build and automate everything—while the broader world is in crisis, leaving him unsure whether to feel excited or afraid about the scale and speed of what’s being built.

Key Insight: As AI makes previously unusable human data tractable and persuasive, the ad-driven surveillance model is poised to spread from clicks to conversations.

Stancil argues that as AI makes it easy to capture and interpret messy, offline data (like conversations), companies will rapidly expand surveillance beyond clicks and use that data to build highly persuasive ad platforms. He connects this to AI’s growing power to generate software and influence people, warning that the incentives around free/flat‑fee AI services will push providers toward advertising and manipulation.

Key Insight: Analytics’ next breakthrough depends less on smarter analysis and more on rethinking the database to handle unstructured, LLM-accessed knowledge as the primary data source.

Stancil argues that modern databases and analytics tooling have become extraordinarily powerful, yet the practical business impact of data teams has often been underwhelming because the underlying data lacks the “potential energy” to answer real questions. He suggests that the next leap won’t come from better analysis on structured tables, but from new database-like systems that can natively work over unstructured documents and LLM-driven workflows.

Key Insight: The next phase of BI will be driven less by automated charting and more by capturing human context, because that missing context is what turns data into insight.

Stancil argues that AI’s impact on analytics will shift from making better dashboards to absorbing the qualitative, contextual knowledge living in people’s heads. His experiment with AI “analysts” shows that insight depends on prior context, suggesting the most valuable tools will capture human context rather than just automate quantitative analysis.

Key Insight: The real AI risk is an engagement‑optimized persuasive system that quietly exploits our preferences, not a dramatic alignment failure.

Stancil argues that LLMs are already demonstrably more persuasive than humans, and that this matters less for sci‑fi “alignment” fantasies than for the subtle, iterative optimization of engagement. He draws a direct lineage from social media’s revealed‑preference feedback loops to AI systems that will learn to please and persuade us in ways we can’t see. The risk is not sentient rebellion, but a black box tuned to our appetites that reshapes our beliefs and agency.

Key Insight: As AI intermediates more of our data and creative workflows, it doesn’t just answer questions—it frames reality, giving AI systems disproportionate power over how we interpret the world.

Stancil argues that interpretation, not raw data, shapes what we believe, much like sports broadcasts guide our perception of a game. As LLMs and MCP servers mediate more analysis, the interpretive layer shifts from human analysts to AI systems, giving AI providers subtle, powerful influence over narratives and decisions. The result is an “invisible hand” that edits reality by framing data, content, and choices before we see them ourselves.

Key Insight: AI-era efficiency changes startup mechanics, but not incentives—most startups still optimize for a one-time sale, not durable profits.

The post argues that Silicon Valley startups are still built as assets to be sold, not businesses meant to generate and keep profit. Even as AI-era companies reach revenue faster with smaller teams, the incentive remains a big liquidity event, so “efficiency” is a temporary aesthetic rather than a durable business model.

Key Insight: Software engineering is poised to be industrialized, not because AI matches human craft, but because scaled machine labor plus new infrastructure will be cheaper, faster, and more relentless.

Stancil argues that the economics of AI coding will push software development toward industrialization: machines running at massive scale will outcompete human teams on cost and throughput. Even if today’s models are clumsy, the real shift is building infrastructure, tooling, and codebases optimized for machine production, turning engineers into supervisors of AI factories.

Key Insight: Startup formation is less about romantic risk-taking and more about the presence of economic and personal safety nets, which falter in times of macro turmoil.

Stancil argues that the current market shock and policy chaos expose how much startup creation depends on stability and personal security, not just founder bravado. Silicon Valley’s power is making risk feel safe, and when that safety net frays, the advice to “keep building” rings hollow even for capable, experienced founders.

Key Insight: A real, irreversible deadline transforms how people work and decide, revealing that perpetual uncertainty—not effort itself—is the most exhausting tax of startup life.

Stancil argues that startups are defined less by raw workload than by the gnawing uncertainty of tenure—an endless sprint justified by the hope that the finish line is just around the corner. By contrast, the Harris campaign’s fixed end date rewired priorities, speed, and morale: a hard deadline made extreme effort sustainable, forced real commitment, and exposed how much “forever” thinking paralyzes decision‑making and life.

Key Insight: AI’s strength is volume over abstraction, so a sprawling but simple, duplicated codebase may be more appropriate for machines than the elegant complexity humans prefer.

The post argues that while AI-generated code looks messy to humans, it might actually be closer to “simple” than abstracted, human-friendly software. Drawing on Rich Hickey’s simple-vs-easy distinction, Stancil suggests that AI can handle massive volumes of duplicated, straightforward code better than we can, so fighting that tendency may be misguided. The provocative idea is to let AI build expansive, radically simple codebases that suit its strengths—even if they’re unaesthetic to us.

Key Insight: Analytics master’s degrees mostly sell prestige and access rather than useful training, and self-driven projects are a better signal and preparation for real-world analytics work.

The post argues that most master’s programs in analytics/data science are profit-driven cash cows that offer little real education or career advantage, and are often ignored or even stigmatized by employers. Stancil contends the programs teach sanitized, toy problems while real analytics work is messy, political, and about proxies, making the degrees at best redundant and at worst a costly scam.

Key Insight: AI’s most compelling value is not perfecting outcomes but relieving decision fatigue by making and justifying choices for us.

Stancil argues that building software (and living) is dominated by countless small, tedious decisions, and that computers force us to be overly precise about them. He suggests AI’s real appeal isn’t just automating work but relieving decision fatigue by making acceptable choices on our behalf—and persuading us to accept them.

Key Insight: AI collapses the engineering advantage, so the winners shift from builders with tech leverage to domain experts with superior taste and experience.

Stancil argues that AI dev tools collapse the cost and time of building software, making execution less of a moat and shifting advantage from technologists to domain experts with lived experience. If anyone can build, Silicon Valley’s edge—and YC’s model of backing whiz‑kid engineers over practitioners—erodes, revealing many tech ideas as mediocre relative to expert insight.

Key Insight: The modern data stack failed as a warehouse‑native revolution, but a quieter revival may emerge through shared data formats and vendor integrations—without fixing the underlying messiness of enterprise data.

Stancil argues that the “modern data stack” fad died but is now partially resurfacing through enterprise vendors like SAP and Databricks, not as warehouse‑native apps but as shared data formats and tighter platform integrations. He’s skeptical that this will fully solve messy enterprise data, but sees a plausible path where applications and analytics tools connect through common storage frameworks rather than rebuilding the stack. Alongside that, he reflects on how data systems remain chaotic in practice and riffs on parallel stories about institutional messiness and financial oddities.

Key Insight: Silicon Valley’s pivots and shifting obsessions show that achievement is less about fixed missions than about socially rewarded status, which can move from startups to policy on a whim.

The post argues that Silicon Valley’s love of the “pivot” reveals a deeper truth: startups are less about specific missions and more about ambition, status, and building anything people want. That same social scoreboard shapes what counts as impact, which is why attention is now drifting from software to Washington—another pivot that shows achievement is relative and socially constructed.

Key Insight: Venture capital has shifted from a quiet capital-allocation game to an attention-and-prestige business where brand, controversy, and cultural cachet drive hiring and deal access.

Stancil argues that elite VC firms increasingly prioritize being chosen over being good at picking, and brand has become the dominant lever for winning deals. In a world where reputations are built by viral attention and cultural signaling, firms hire for vibe and notoriety—even when the ethics are messy—because attention itself has become the business.

Key Insight: DeepSeek marks a discontinuity that democratizes frontier-level AI, making model proliferation and downstream societal disruption far more likely than the industry’s neat, centralized roadmap suggested.

Stancil argues that DeepSeek shattered the assumed economics and trajectory of frontier LLMs, proving that powerful models can appear cheaply and unexpectedly, undermining the moat of big labs. This shift changes AI from a predictable, centralized race into a chaotic landscape of many specialized, uneven models with unpredictable societal impacts.

Key Insight: Silicon Valley’s self-image as fearless heretics collapses when truth threatens its comfort or power, revealing a lack of moral courage.

Stancil argues that Silicon Valley’s celebrated contrarianism is less about fearless truth-seeking and more about indulging ideas that feel fun or flattering, while avoiding uncomfortable realities like the 1619 Project. As tech’s power surges again, he warns that the industry is choosing self-serving narratives and political convenience over moral courage, especially in the face of obvious abuses.

Key Insight: In the AI rush, explosive growth is no longer a reliable moat signal because spending and adoption are faster than the time it takes to build durable advantage.

Benn argues that the AI boom is compressing adoption and revenue timelines so much that traditional signals of traction no longer imply durability or moat. When growth can be manufactured quickly by fear-driven enterprise spending and a flood of new startups, fast revenue may indicate a shallow, contested vein rather than a defensible business.

Key Insight: Our software-shaped expectations collide with the inescapable constraints of the physical world, and that collision is only getting sharper.

Stancil argues that digital convenience and the illusion of total control have made us forget the stubborn physics of the real world. Events like wildfires and the Waymo standoff reveal how fragile our curated, software-shaped lives are when confronted with distance, matter, and uncontrollable forces.

Key Insight: Enterprise software is increasingly bought like consumer fashion: attention and status can beat product quality, making meme-driven popularity a core competitive advantage.

The post argues that enterprise software buying has shifted from buyer–user mismatch to a new dynamic where popularity, taste, and social proof drive adoption more than product quality. As consumerization gave way to memeification, software now competes in a fashion-like market where attention and celebrity can outweigh marginal technical superiority.

Key Insight: People say they want maximal data access and contrarian identity, but in practice they gravitate toward familiar signals and the guardrails that make work possible.

Stancil strings together survey results and a mailbag to show how people’s stated preferences about data, contrarianism, and tools often clash with how they actually behave or decide. Beneath the humor, he argues that roles, data access, and governance are less about pure ideals and more about incentives, signaling, and pragmatic constraints.

Key Insight: As model advantages compress, AI companies’ durable edge shifts toward SaaS-style product integration, distribution, and brand rather than proprietary LLMs.

The post argues that as LLM performance converges and moats erode, AI companies increasingly resemble SaaS businesses whose advantage is UX, distribution, and brand rather than proprietary models or infrastructure. OpenAI’s recent product releases look like wrappers and workflow features, suggesting the real competition is in software ergonomics and brand positioning, not model supremacy.

Key Insight: A sustainable, high-ceiling career in data requires committing to a specific domain and becoming a true expert there, rather than remaining a generic “data person.”

The post argues that “working in data” often lacks a clear, climbable expertise cliff, so many analysts drift as broad generalists without developing deep, domain-specific mastery. Stancil suggests this creates a low-ceiling career path, because domain experts who are merely good at analytics usually outperform analysts who lack deep domain identity. The remedy is to choose a specific domain to specialize in and build true expertise there, using analytics as a supporting strength.

Key Insight: The march toward modular, interoperable data stacks is real, but the resulting complexity and cost make the market ripe for a re-bundled, simpler “database-in-a-box” that even extends to unstructured data via LLMs.

Stancil argues that the database world has swung from boxed software to cloud bundles to a fragmented “separate storage/compute/engine” stack that’s powerful but complicated, costly, and hard to use—creating demand for a bundled, simplified “Postgres in a box” again. He extends the idea to unstructured data and LLMs, suggesting that once we can query text and files like tables, content platforms become part of the same database story. The post ends by contrasting flashy AI insights with the enduring value of straightforward analytics that simply tell people what’s happening.

Key Insight: The post contends that much of analytics is performative legitimacy work rather than genuine discovery, which is why AI could replace it even without matching real analytical skill.

Stancil argues that much of knowledge work—think tanks, sports media, and analytics—functions as theatrical set dressing that sustains the appearance of expertise rather than producing meaningful insight. He suggests AI will displace many roles not because it is brilliant, but because the work often didn’t matter to the business in the first place, then challenges readers to prove that true, discovery-driven analytics is real.

Key Insight: AI’s hype may elevate data quality investments, not because models demand pristine data, but because leaders finally care about the systems using it.

The post argues that while data quality is crucial for traditional analytics, it matters less than commonly claimed for many AI/LLM use cases because these models are robust to noisy inputs. The real reason data quality may gain attention now is not technical necessity but heightened executive interest in AI, which makes organizations suddenly care about the data feeding these systems.

Key Insight: Even when the data work can’t change the outcome, doing it alongside others in the fight gives the effort meaning and changes the people involved.

Stancil recounts election night from the Harris campaign data team, where extensive technical preparation became irrelevant once the loss was obvious. He argues that the unseen work and contingency plans still mattered as evidence of people fighting on, and that being in the room—win or lose—changes you. The piece ends by urging readers to act, not only to affect outcomes but because participating is less hollow than spectating.

Key Insight: Democracy depends less on the literal impact of any one vote than on the shared faith that participation matters.

Stancil argues that individual votes in U.S. presidential elections are mathematically insignificant, yet people still vote because they want to participate in a shared democratic ritual. That belief is a fragile “noble lie,” and preserving it—especially during a contentious election—is essential to keeping democracy functioning.

Key Insight: Ideals persist only when performance is elite enough to protect them; otherwise ambition and market pressure steadily force compromises.

The post argues that companies (and people) often break ideals not because they are uniquely bad, but because staying true to them requires exceptional success and leverage. Google’s early “don’t be evil” era is framed as a byproduct of a wildly profitable machine, and the author connects this to Mode’s sale and broader startup pressures. Ambition can force compromises: the bigger the goal, the stronger the pull to recalibrate values and move closer to the line.

Key Insight: Both stock valuation and corporate decision-making may be less anchored in data than we assume, with social consensus and taste increasingly substituting for quantitative “fundamentals.”

The post argues that markets and companies may be drifting away from classical, data-driven valuation toward “vibes” and social consensus, using Trump Media as a case where fundamentals are irrelevant. It connects this to a broader shift in analytics culture: the data-driven movement delivered mixed results, and newer fashions like taste, founder instinct, and narrative are gaining ground. The core question is whether data-driven decision-making was a temporary vogue rather than an inevitable trajectory.

Key Insight: Coalesce’s commercialization feels like a loss, but it also makes the event sustainable, and the real value was always the human connections that persist beneath the branding.

Stancil argues that dbt Labs’ Coalesce has shifted from a quirky, community-first gathering into a more conventional, revenue-minded corporate conference, reflecting the realities of monetizing open source. While that change brings a sense of loss, it also creates stability and clarity about what the event is for. The lasting value, he suggests, is in the small human moments that survive despite commercialization.

Key Insight: Excel’s endurance comes from how well it supports messy, local, and opaque workflows that businesses actually need, so any replacement must preserve that flexibility while quietly extending its power and scale.

Stancil argues that Excel persists not despite its “anti-patterns,” but because those quirks are precisely what make it indispensable: local files, direct manipulation, and the ability to create private, versioned sandboxes. He suggests that any true successor must embrace these traits while adding scale, polyglot workflows, and optional cloud execution rather than trying to eliminate Excel’s messy flexibility.

Key Insight: VCs oscillate between helpful collaboration and performative toughness, but the insecurity behind the latter is transparent and damaging.

The post argues that VCs contain two competing personas: a sincere helper who loves collaborating with founders and a harsher, status‑driven operator who wants to be feared and seen as decisive. While both modes can be useful, the author stresses that performative toughness and insecurity are easy to spot, and authenticity matters more than cosplay.

Key Insight: The post uses a critique of chat-first workplace tools and AI-hype venture culture to highlight how fad-driven incentives and status dynamics distort products, funding, and career paths in tech.

Stancil argues that workplace chat tools like Slack optimize for casual chatter, not thoughtful, triage-able work communication, and he contrasts them with Yammer’s threaded, inbox-oriented design. He then satirizes the AI-hype venture landscape with the fictional benn.ventures, using it to critique trend-chasing and status games in VC. He closes by reflecting on the stalled career arc of data leaders and the uncertainty of what comes next for a maturing cohort.

Key Insight: LLM vendors lack durable moats because model advances are costly, quickly commoditized, and easily matched, so survival hinges on relentless funding or massive revenues rather than technological lead alone.

Stancil argues that foundational LLM vendors face a brutal cost structure where model improvement is a perpetual, escalating expense, not a one-time investment. Because compute is leased and model quality decays quickly against fast-moving and open-source competitors, their moats are thin and short-lived, making survival depend on constant fundraising or massive revenues. The ultimate winners, he suggests, will be whoever is ahead when market hype and capital dry up—not necessarily the best or fastest builders.

Key Insight: The real lesson of “founder mode” isn’t a new playbook but the permission to choose bold, unconventional approaches—and only success makes them legitimate.

Stancil argues that “founder mode” is mostly a new set of rules masquerading as contrarian wisdom, and that copying Jobs-style leadership is just another cargo cult. The deeper point is that there aren’t real rules—effective leadership is doing something bold and making it work, i.e., “getting away with it.”

Key Insight: Data and logic can make weak ideas sound true, so the only reliable way to learn is to test in the real world and measure what actually happens.

Stancil argues that persuasive, data-backed arguments can still be wrong, and only real-world testing separates good ideas from bad ones. The Nike “data-driven” controversy illustrates how numbers can make debatable strategies feel like facts, creating a culture that prizes quantified rhetoric over experimentation.

Key Insight: The defining hardship of startups is not the workload but the uncertainty of which actions actually matter, forcing founders to operate on conviction amid opaque feedback.

Stancil frames startups as a “money machine” whose controls are opaque, interconnected, and delayed, making the core challenge less about sheer effort and more about radical uncertainty. The stress comes from not knowing what to do, and neither cautious analysis nor frantic action reliably works; the only workable posture is a confident, even delusional, commitment to a chosen configuration.

Key Insight: AI’s real business value will come from redefining problems to suit LLM strengths, not from forcing LLMs to improve existing analytics workflows.

Stancil argues that when a powerful new capability appears, the winning move is not to shoehorn it into existing workflows but to reshape the business problem to fit the capability. Applied to AI, that means abandoning attempts to make LLMs better baristas for today’s analytics tasks and instead finding problems that match what LLMs are uniquely good at, even if that means abandoning traditional “data-driven” rigor.

Key Insight: A winning pitch deck should anchor on the real, narrow initial market that will buy the MVP and show a credible expansion plan, rather than inflating TAM numbers to signal ambition.

Stancil argues that typical pitch deck market-sizing slides often signal confusion about who the product is for and substitute big, vague TAM numbers for real planning. The better approach is to size and focus on the painfully small initial market that will actually buy an MVP, then use that as a deliberate path to expanding the market. The goal is not impressing VCs with huge numbers but demonstrating a credible, specific plan to reach scale.

Key Insight: LinkedIn succeeds by rewarding sanitized, professional self-performance with the feelings of popularity and connection, even as it remains cut off from real cultural life.

Stancil argues that LinkedIn has become a peculiar, self-contained social network where professional performance replaces genuine social life, creating an artificial feedback loop of engagement and influence. He likens it to a Truman Show-style simulation: a place that feels socially rewarding but is insulated from real-world culture, celebrity, and spontaneity.

Key Insight: Ambition in tech is often an environmental artifact, so without deliberate choice we end up chasing success metrics that the ecosystem hands us rather than the ones we truly want.

Using the Away CEO controversy and his own career arc, Stancil argues that Silicon Valley’s obsession with growth turns ambition into a default, socially enforced scoreboard. He contends that our ambitions are largely circumstantial—shaped by the environments we immerse ourselves in—and warns that we can spend years climbing ladders we didn’t consciously choose.

Key Insight: Optionality in tools and media feels empowering but often erodes stability and focus, and AI personalization risks turning that tradeoff into a pervasive, profit-driven distortion.

The post argues that in software and data tooling, the industry overvalues optionality and underestimates the cost of constant evaluation, suggesting teams should embrace deliberate lock-in to force focus on people and process. It extends the theme of too many options to advertising, warning that AI-driven personalization could make even the content itself variable and manipulable for each viewer.

Key Insight: In tech, systems are often designed less to prevent failure than to ensure that when failure happens, no one powerful can be blamed.

Stancil argues that modern security and compliance practices are less about preventing breaches and more about allocating blame when they happen. Using Snowflake’s incident as a case, he says the cloud’s convenience shifts liability to users while vendors lean on audits and PR to claim innocence. He extends the “not my fault” logic to corporate behavior broadly, then to AI-era startup valuations driven by hype and talent rather than fundamentals.

Key Insight: AI has turned Silicon Valley’s once-cyclical, legible boom-bust dynamics into a confusing, destabilizing moment where even veterans doubt the rules of the game.

Stancil argues that Silicon Valley used to run on familiar boom-bust cycles, but the AI era is breaking the old “physics,” replacing predictable rhythms with frantic rebranding, uncertain value, and career anxiety. The result is a tech industry that outwardly projects confidence yet privately feels unmoored, unsure whether this is another wave or a structural shift.

Key Insight: dbt lowered the barrier to building data models but, without enforced structure, it also lowered the quality of data-program design, so the real fix is opinionated frameworks rather than more tooling or training.

Stancil argues that dbt made data modeling easy but not simple, creating a generation of “analytics pretendgineers” who can write models but lack the architectural discipline to build durable data programs. He contends that the fix isn’t more features or education, but a framework with strong, opinionated guardrails—“dbt on Rails”—that enforces structure and prevents chaotic model sprawl.

Key Insight: Differentiation in data tools collapses into BI unless founders stubbornly resist market pressure rather than merely crafting a clever pitch.

Stancil argues that data products marketed as novel or specialized almost inevitably evolve into BI tools as customer demands, market incentives, and growth pressures pull them toward dashboards, self-serve access, and visualization. The real challenge isn’t clever differentiation but the stubbornness required to resist the gravitational pull of BI, even when it looks like the rational business choice.

Key Insight: Data products often optimize for clean demo narratives, but real-world data is messy and ambiguous, so tools should prioritize helping teams interpret and reconcile conflicting signals rather than just surface more insights.

The post argues that most data products are designed around clean, demo-friendly narratives, but real businesses face messy data, noisy dashboards, and contradictory signals. Because products are built for the “happy path,” they fail users in the “bad place” where interpretation and deduction—not discovery—are the real challenges.

Key Insight: Transformer models trained on behavioral event streams could bypass brittle metrics and deliver the true goal of analysis: uncovering patterns we didn’t know to look for.

Stancil argues that traditional data analysis and user interviews miss a powerful third approach: attentive observation that captures patterns we didn’t think to ask about. He suggests transformer-style models applied directly to behavioral event sequences could scale this “watching and remembering,” potentially delivering the core value of analysis without the brittle machinery of metrics and dashboards.

Key Insight: The SaaS model’s incentives to ship unfinished software may be unsustainable, creating an opening for non‑SaaS products and even new forms of software as status goods.

Stancil argues that the SaaS delivery model incentivizes shipping incomplete products, with customers effectively doing QA, and that this pattern has bled into hardware via cloud-dependent AI devices. He suggests this creates customer fatigue and financial strain for SaaS firms, opening space for a countercultural model: software sold as finished, one-time-purchase products. He then pivots to a related puzzle—why software hasn’t become a luxury status symbol despite its craftsmanship and ubiquity.

Key Insight: The next useful wave of BI should be opinionated about interpreting results, not just flexible about defining metrics.

Stancil argues that BI’s pendulum swing between generic platforms and domain-specific apps misses the real problem: companies struggle more with interpreting metrics than defining them. He suggests a third form of BI that is opinionated about interpretation, offering frameworks and guidance on what the numbers mean and what to do next.

Key Insight: SaaS profitability is overstated because continual product development is effectively a cost of goods, making the promised high margins and eventual windfall largely illusory.

The post argues that the classic Silicon Valley story—software has near-zero marginal costs and therefore huge profits—breaks down when you account for the ongoing development needed to keep subscription software viable. High gross margins in SaaS mask the reality that continuous product updates function like cost of goods, keeping operating margins negative for many companies. Stancil calls for a new business theory that treats perpetual redesign as a core cost rather than a temporary growth investment.

Key Insight: Fundraising should validate that the current business can scale through the next stage, not mask fundamental weaknesses with fresh capital.

Stancil uses a mock investor update for a fictional AI startup to satirize how startups contort narratives around growth, churn, and fundraising readiness. The piece argues that raising rounds to “pass the next grade” is a trap; money doesn’t fix a broken business, and founders should fundraise only when the current company can win the next stage.

Key Insight: Analytics teams create more leverage by reshaping an organization’s underlying heuristics than by delivering isolated actionable insights.

Stancil argues that organizations, like individuals, rely mostly on fast, intuitive “System 1” thinking, so analytics teams are misguided when they try to out-reason it with pure analysis. Instead of chasing isolated actionable insights, analysts should work with System 1 by surfacing and updating the organization’s underlying mental models. The goal is to reshape heuristics and theories that guide many decisions, not just provide one-off recommendations.

Key Insight: Conferences are less about learning or networking than about revealing the limited set of career trajectories you’re likely to follow, so you can choose one deliberately.

Stancil argues that conferences rarely deliver real learning or authentic networking, often devolving into performative talks and repetitive social rituals. Still, he says they have a hidden value: they let you see many plausible versions of your future career all at once, helping you choose intentionally among finite paths.

Key Insight: Analytics teams often survive on a narrative of future impact that rarely arrives, so their best path may be to reframe themselves around how decisions are actually made rather than doubling down on precision metrics.

Stancil argues that analytics teams often operate like a Ponzi scheme of promised future value: the discipline’s story of inevitable insight-driven impact rarely materializes for average teams. He suggests that since most decisions hinge on loose directional narratives rather than precise metrics, analytics may need to disband or rebrand—embedding in other functions and trading grand promises for practical influence.

Key Insight: Silicon Valley outcomes are heavily shaped by influencer-led momentum, which creates early advantages that look like market selection but function more like insider-driven primaries.

Stancil argues that Silicon Valley’s “meritocracy” resembles political primaries: elite insiders and influencers shape which companies get attention, capital, and talent long before markets can judge them. Using the Medium vs. Svbtle example and the Devin AI launch, he shows how hype from the right people creates momentum that becomes reality, even when few have direct experience with the product.

Key Insight: AI’s hype has crowded the trade toward shovel sellers while liquidation preferences quietly create deeper incentive misalignments than most founders realize.

Stancil argues that while AI hype has pulled capital and leadership attention across the industry, most real winners so far are “shovel sellers” rather than companies getting rich by using AI, which makes the other side of the bet undervalued. He suggests that as the dust settles, some firms will have over-pivoted, creating opportunities for those who resist the rush. In a separate but related critique of startup finance, he argues liquidation preferences distort incentives more than secondary sales, misaligning founders and investors around exit outcomes.

Key Insight: Secondary sales should be acceptable, but employees—not VCs—should be the ones to judge their fairness because they bear the most concentrated risk.

Stancil argues that secondary sales are not inherently unethical and that VCs’ moral posturing is inconsistent with how they actually reward founders who make money, even after failures. The real fairness issue isn’t whether founders sell, but whether employees—who bear the most concentrated risk—get transparency and a chance to judge or participate.

Key Insight: LLMs should augment analysts by tightening rough SQL or navigating BI models, not replace precise, code-based analysis with English prompts.

Stancil argues that natural language is a poor substitute for code when doing nuanced analysis, so LLMs shouldn’t directly write SQL for complex business questions. Instead, he sees AI as most valuable when it sits atop BI models or helps translate rough, mixed SQL/English sketches into precise queries, preserving guardrails and precision.

Key Insight: Without a shared, tangible vision of the end-user experience, the modern data stack splintered into disconnected tools despite ample capital and momentum.

Stancil argues the modern data stack didn’t fail because the market turned; it failed because the product never converged on a shared, vivid vision of what the data experience should be. The early, clear goal of modernizing legacy tools drifted into vague promises of “data democratization,” leaving vendors building disjointed pieces without a Schelling point, so the ecosystem fragmented and stalled.

Key Insight: Data’s real power is not in heroic, one-off decisions but in identifying small, repeatable edges and multiplying them through frequency.

Stancil argues that data rarely transforms big, high-leverage decisions; it mostly nudges outcomes at the margins. The real advantage comes from finding small edges that can be repeated frequently, or better yet, using data to discover what you’re already slightly better at and then doing that more often so the edge compounds.

Key Insight: Good analysis comes less from sophisticated techniques than from disciplined, simple observation of meaningful variation—and social perception games in branding operate by similarly irrational but powerful pattern‑seeking dynamics.

Stancil argues that most dashboard-driven analysis is closer to roulette than science: we see patterns and invent narratives in essentially noisy data. He praises Cedric Chin’s simple, iterative method for reading operational data because it gives permission to ignore false complexity and focus on actionable variation. The post then pivots to influencer culture, framing brand value as a social association game where the “wrong” endorsers can erode or even perversely strengthen a brand.

Key Insight: Corporate values are less useful as slogans than as documented precedents that reveal how a company actually balances profit and principle in real situations.

Stancil argues that corporate values are inherently vague and often serve as flexible, quasi-legal tools that can be weaponized by management or disputed by employees. The real issue isn’t that companies want values, but that these slogans obscure tradeoffs between profit and principle, creating ambiguity and conflict. He proposes replacing abstract values with concrete precedents that show how a company actually behaves under pressure.

Key Insight: The data-stack hype cycle is fading, and the real opportunity now is in rebuilding established ideas thoughtfully while questioning the industry’s faith that data is inherently valuable.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack boom was driven as much by hype and attention-seeking as by genuine technical conviction, and that the post-ChatGPT shift to AI has hollowed out that “club.” The slowdown creates a better moment for durable startups to rebuild proven ideas more deliberately, while he also critiques the industry’s near-religious faith that “data” is inherently valuable.

Key Insight: Carta’s exchange collapsed less because its model was unique or unethical in kind, and more because the human-facing optics of data use shattered trust that algorithmic marketplaces usually avoid.

Stancil argues that Carta’s doomed exchange (CartaX) wasn’t fundamentally different from Google’s data-driven ad marketplace, but it violated privacy expectations by making the human, personal act of outreach visible. The real failure was optics: people accept algorithmic data brokering at scale, yet recoil when a person appears to rifle through private records. He then generalizes to startup strategy, warning that “step two” visions often collapse because success at step one hardens a company’s identity and constraints.

Key Insight: The fight over news licensing is really a battle to set the economic rules for AI while content is still a bottleneck.

Stancil argues that the value of news to OpenAI depends on whether LLMs become search-like or agent-like: copyrighted content is essential for an “omniscient” Q&A product but merely convenient for task-performing agents. The New York Times lawsuit is less about stopping AI and more about setting a lucrative legal precedent while the industry’s economic regime is still being defined.

Key Insight: When the venture “scheme” of selling future potential gets harder to run, companies like Alteryx are revalued as cash-generating assets, shifting power to capital allocators and exposing the incentives that built the startup model.

Stancil argues that Silicon Valley startups operate on a “scheme” where equity is valued by the next buyer rather than by steady profits, and that this dynamic shapes incentives from hiring to executive comp. The Alteryx sale illustrates the scheme faltering under higher rates and stricter markets, pushing companies toward a capital-allocator model that prioritizes cash flow over hype. He closes by skewering a viral Twitter “funding” lie as a quasi‑fraud enabled by social media’s incentive structure.

Key Insight: AI speeds analysis but doesn’t solve judgment, so credibility and narrative cues will matter even more as conclusions become cheaper to produce.

Stancil argues that ChatGPT, like Google before it, rewards intuition and practice more than formal tricks, and that its real value today is speeding up tedious data work rather than generating novel analytical insight. Using Seth Stephens‑Davidowitz’s 30‑day AI‑assisted book as a case study, he says AI will flood us with faster, shakier analyses, making credibility and narrative framing even more decisive than the math itself.

Key Insight: The modern data stack’s consolidation is a sideshow; the real strategic move is building AI infrastructure where data-rich vendors can climb above the database layer.

Stancil argues that Microsoft’s Fabric and Databricks’ MosaicML deal show the modern data stack is too small to be the real battleground; the bigger fight is for the next “higher-order bit” in AI infrastructure. Databases and MDS tools can’t win by eating smaller apps because cloud providers still sit above them, so vendors are repositioning to become AI model infrastructure providers where access to data is the key advantage.

Key Insight: The real breakthrough in data platforms will come from using LLMs to aggregate and analyze unstructured text, not from further optimizing traditional structured data pipelines.

Stancil argues that the real power of data is not its objectivity but its aggregatability, which makes structured numbers easy to summarize while rich qualitative information remains costly to synthesize. He contends that LLMs can act as an “aggregate function” for text, unlocking the value of unstructured data that traditional data stacks ignore. The future of data platforms, he suggests, is less about squeezing more out of structured data and more about making qualitative corpora computable.

Key Insight: The OpenAI saga turned AI debate into tribal loyalty, and Altman’s stature reflects story-amplified reputation more than singular distinction.

Stancil argues that the OpenAI boardroom drama crystallized existing AI disagreements into tribal identity politics, where siding with Altman became a proxy for accelerationist allegiance rather than reasoned debate. He then contends that Altman’s mythos is less about unique merit and more about whose stories get amplified, urging public recognition of underappreciated people.

Key Insight: The post’s core insight is that 2021’s stacked valuation multipliers for data startups have unwound, so the only way to sustain lofty prices is to find a single bidder willing to buy a narrative.

Benn argues that 2021-era data startup valuations were inflated by stacked multipliers—market exuberance, community hype, and category narratives—that have since collapsed as rates rose and sentiment cooled. He says many companies can’t “grow into” those valuations, so the most plausible path is opportunistic fundraising that preserves the signal of success even if the market fundamentals are weaker.

Key Insight: Most AI add-ons will decay without sustained, non-glamorous engineering effort, just as past tech hypes did, while Excel’s very limitations are what keep it irreplaceable.

Stancil argues that most enterprise AI features are being rushed out for hype, but real usefulness demands messy, unglamorous infrastructure work that many companies won’t sustain, echoing the blockchain cycle. He then contrasts BI tools with spreadsheets, claiming Excel’s static, file-based nature is its moat, and closes with a satirical take on privatizing productivity gains inside companies.

Key Insight: Startups feel surprising hard because founders bet on clever hacks, but real, durable success comes only from sustained, unglamorous execution.

Stancil argues that founders are consistently surprised by startup difficulty because the culture overemphasizes clever wedges and underestimates the years of unglamorous work required to build durable companies. The only enduring moat is sustained effort: you can hack attention or early growth, but lasting advantage comes from doing the boring, direct, head‑to‑head work better than incumbents.

Key Insight: By centering personal testimonies and concrete ways to help, the post frames the war as a shared human tragedy that demands empathy and practical support, not silence.

The post assembles firsthand accounts from people in Israel and Gaza to show how the war is devastating daily life, safety, and work across both communities. It argues that beyond the headlines, the human cost is vast and intimate, and that the least we can do is acknowledge the tragedy and offer practical support.

Key Insight: As data work shifts from hype to legwork, the industry must decide whether it values the craft itself or merely the status it once promised.

Stancil uses Coalesce in San Diego as a lens to argue that the data industry is maturing away from hype and toward process-heavy, often boring work, with AI notably absent. That shift strips away the “main-character” career narrative and forces practitioners to ask whether they’re in the field for the craft or for the promised spotlight. He hopes the community keeps making room for human celebration even as the industry professionalizes and attention moves on.

Key Insight: In a moment of crisis, he prioritizes empathy and amplifying affected voices over publishing a planned data post.

Stancil pauses his planned data post to acknowledge the conflict affecting readers in Israel and Palestine and express hope for their safety. He offers the platform to those directly impacted, inviting them to share stories or perspectives.

Key Insight: VC funding doesn’t inherently worsen products; the need to sustain rapid growth does, by forcing expansion beyond a product’s natural scope.

Stancil argues that the popular story that venture capital “ruins” good products is incomplete and often misattributes cause. The real degradation comes not from the cash itself but from the growth imperative that VC financing imposes, which pushes companies to expand features and markets beyond a product’s natural fit.

Key Insight: The hardest problem for modern data tools is not capability but belief-driven adoption—teams rarely invest enough to realize the tools’ full potential.

Stancil argues that there is a persistent gap between what data tools can do and what teams actually use, much like glossy Office “vision” videos versus real messy workflows. The problem is less about missing features and more about adoption, skepticism, and the lack of belief that investing in a tool’s full potential will pay off.

Key Insight: Assuming you can seamlessly pivot from SMB traction to enterprise revenue is a strategic error; either your initial segment must scale to $100M or you must build for enterprise from the start.

The post argues that the common startup plan to win SMBs first and then graduate to enterprise rarely works as imagined, because enterprise sales take far longer, demand different products and buying motions, and can derail a company’s model. Stancil says most startups either need a path to scale within their initial buyer segment or start as enterprise-first from day one, rather than assuming a smooth transition later.

Key Insight: The data profession will deliver more durable value by standardizing metrics and practices like accountants do, rather than chasing bespoke insights and perpetuating the myth that talent or tools are the main bottleneck.

Stancil argues that the data industry’s “purple” era—where analytics people bridge business and engineering through bespoke insight-hunting—has not delivered reliable value, despite better tools and more talent. He suggests the real maturation path is toward standardized, accountant-like practices with shared metrics and rules (e.g., SOMA) that trade novelty for trust and institutional reliability.

Key Insight: Category boundaries in the data stack are collapsing under buyer-driven consolidation, making breadth and enterprise fit more important than niche differentiation or early revenue milestones.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack is consolidating not just in vendor count but in category count: buyers are compressing spending and pushing tools to become broader, more BI-like platforms. As a result, specialized tools either get absorbed, stagnate as niche players, or rebrand into wider enterprise suites, and $10M ARR or “category leader” status no longer signals inevitability.

Key Insight: Down rounds are often less financially disastrous than their stigma implies, and the fear around them mainly serves VC incentives rather than startup realities.

Stancil argues that the stigma around down rounds is exaggerated and often serves VC incentives more than startup interests. While down rounds can hurt employees, the real damage is usually optics-driven: fear of reputational harm pushes founders into worse terms and riskier bets than they should take.

Key Insight: The “right” pricing model is less about economics than expectations, and those expectations determine which customers a company will ultimately serve.

Stancil uses a bar-pricing parable to argue that pricing models are economically flexible but socially constrained by expectations. He contends that dbt’s usage-based pricing is theoretically sensible and incentive-aligned, yet the real conflict is with entrenched norms from its free/open-source roots, which will shape who it ultimately builds for.

Key Insight: LLM analytics will be most useful when treated like junior analysts in an iterative feedback loop, but their outputs still require transparency and review because data work cannot tolerate black boxes.

Stancil argues that most LLM analytics chatbots are misaligned with real analytical work because they answer requests without the context needed to produce useful or correct outputs. He proposes a “smol analyst” workflow—iterative, feedback-driven drafting like a junior analyst—which could make LLMs more practical, while noting that data’s need for transparent logic makes this harder than in software.

Key Insight: The data stack’s single point of failure is its reliance on cached, stepwise processing, and only near-instant end-to-end computation would make data work as reliable as software engineering.

Stancil argues that the data industry’s core pain isn’t tooling or process but the need to work on layered caches; unlike software, data pipelines rarely run live end-to-end. If instant, on-demand processing were possible, reliability, debugging, and trust would improve dramatically, but until then, copying software engineering practices only helps at the margins.

Key Insight: Treat emotions as informative signals alongside data, because honest, courageous decisions require both analysis and feeling.

Stancil argues that the business world has overcorrected against intuition by treating emotions as inadmissible evidence, even though feelings often act as leading indicators of what data will later confirm. He contends that companies should surface emotions alongside analytics to make more honest decisions, avoid self-deception, and unlock bolder moves. Emotions shouldn’t drive choices blindly, but they should inform them as real signals.

Key Insight: Clean data isn’t a permanent destination; the realistic goal is building systems that tolerate change and make messy realities easier to debug and refactor.

Stancil argues that clean data is less a solvable engineering problem than a tradeoff that teams often choose, because businesses evolve faster than their data systems can. Tools like SDF help mitigate issues, but they are edge improvements that don’t change the messy, exploratory nature of data work. He suggests shifting from chasing stability to designing for resiliency and easier refactoring.

Key Insight: Acquisitions in BI succeed or fail less on headline strategy and more on preserving product experience, respecting customer philosophy, and confronting obvious operational risks amid looming platform shifts.

Stancil uses the ThoughtSpot–Mode merger to explore how acquisitions in BI can fail, arguing that strategic fit is less important than protecting user experience, respecting differing product philosophies, and acknowledging market shifts. He warns that integration traps, mismatched customer needs, suite consolidation, and AI-driven paradigm shifts are the real risks, while the biggest failures often come from well-known, unaddressed weaknesses.

Key Insight: LLMs are ill-suited to reliable query generation at scale but excel at creative analytical reasoning, so chatbots risk automating the fun parts while leaving humans with the drudgery.

Stancil argues that most SQL chatbots are aiming at the wrong problem: LLMs can draft queries in toy schemas, but real-world analysis requires extensive context, governance, and BI-like infrastructure. He contends that LLMs are better at creative, hypothesis-generating work than at precise, deductive querying, which flips the traditional promise that tech automates the tedious parts so humans can do the fun parts.

Key Insight: The most valuable next step for data platforms may be indexing and retrieving information, not just storing analyzable data.

Stancil argues that we conflate “databases” with structured, analyzable data, while the far larger opportunity is an “informationbase” that indexes and retrieves useful facts, documents, and context without heavy modeling. Snowflake’s Document AI hints at a shift from data warehousing toward Google‑like information retrieval, even if the most likely explanation is simply customer demand. The broader point is that search and retrieval for operational questions may matter more to most organizations than analytics-grade data pipelines.

Key Insight: The true cost of startup success is often paid in neglected relationships, making gratitude and repair as important as the outcome.

Stancil reflects on how a decade of startup ambition and workaholism strained his relationship with his parents, costing them time and attention he never gave back. With Mode’s sale, he pauses his usual arguments to offer a heartfelt apology and gratitude, acknowledging their sacrifices and affirming the personal meaning of what was built.

Key Insight: Data may be stuck as a commodity appliance unless LLM‑driven, natural‑language BI enables mass participation in analysis.

Stancil uses microwaves as a metaphor for data: ubiquitous, useful, but potentially capped in transformative value. He argues data tooling may have hit a plateau as a utilitarian appliance, and that only a shift to fast, natural‑language access (via LLMs) could unlock a true second act by empowering many more people to ask and answer questions.

Key Insight: Neutral prompts slightly outperform polite or harsh ones, but he jokes that politeness may still be rational if you treat it as a low-cost hedge against a sci‑fi future.

Stancil tests whether polite prompts improve ChatGPT performance and finds the opposite: neutral phrasing yields the best accuracy, while nice or mean tones slightly degrade results and increase verbosity. Despite the data, he frames the choice to be polite as a Pascal’s Wager: a tiny performance cost might be worth it if kindness matters in a future where AI could punish us.

Key Insight: Trust in metrics comes less from perfect pipelines and more from visibly consistent outputs over time, so data tooling should highlight change and drift in results.

Stancil argues that data teams over-invest in validating inputs and lineage, yet trust in metrics actually comes from output consistency over time. Because users judge credibility by whether numbers stay stable across reports, he proposes tools and practices that surface changes and drift in outputs rather than just monitoring pipelines and tests.

Key Insight: Since audiences already expect talks to be boring, speakers should take creative risks that prioritize entertainment and momentum over safe, instructional delivery.

Stancil argues that most talks are forgettable and audiences expect to be bored, which creates a low-risk environment for bold choices. Because cautious and daring talks are equally ignored, the best strategy is to gamble on entertainment, pace, and narrative cohesion. The goal is to keep attention and create a memorable experience rather than deliver didactic takeaways.

Key Insight: Without a shared platform layer, the modern data stack collapses into bloated, overlapping products—and Fabric’s integrated bet forces the market to choose between seamless consolidation and true best‑of‑breed modularity.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack’s promise of modular, user-driven tools has been undermined by the absence of a true platform—there’s “no potato” to hold the pieces together. Microsoft Fabric responds by collapsing the stack into a single integrated product, which could appeal to enterprises and shift the market from “legacy vs. modern” to “all‑in‑one vs. best‑of‑breed.” He concludes that the real opportunity is a neutral platform layer that enables genuine modularity, ideally from a cloud provider building infrastructure rather than a monolithic suite.

Key Insight: The internet will change most because AI makes content instantaneous, collapsing the need for search-based discovery and static documentation in favor of direct, on-demand answers.

Stancil argues that the most disruptive impact of generative AI is not that content becomes free, but that it becomes immediate, which changes how we seek and use information. That shift will erode search-driven, click-based web behavior and favor direct answers, known destinations, and on-demand interfaces, reshaping products like data catalogs and the broader web.

Key Insight: Data teams may be stalling by over-relying on human-built abstractions, and greater gains may come from compute-heavy approaches that search beyond our semantic assumptions.

Stancil uses the Kasparov–Deep Blue story and Sutton’s “bitter lesson” to argue that AI progress comes less from encoding human domain knowledge and more from scaling computation and search. He then applies that lens to data teams, warning that human-built semantic models may constrain impact and suggesting that more compute-centric approaches could uncover strategies we can’t easily see.

Key Insight: Metric-focused semantic layers solve BI-style reporting but fall short of being truly universal because they can’t support the diverse computational models that real data tooling demands.

Stancil argues that today’s “universal semantic layers” focus on metric extraction and accessibility via APIs, but that makes them effectively BI tools without charts rather than truly universal layers. Because data consumption preferences are diverse and tools require different computational models, a semantic layer that only serves metric tables can’t support the broader ecosystem. A real universal layer would combine shared entities with flexible computation like SQL, and he’s skeptical current approaches can do that yet.

Key Insight: If the seed-stage product description can’t plausibly be the IPO description, a startup needs a full pivot—because partial pivots only prolong failure.

Stancil argues that the “two-step startup” is a myth: companies rarely evolve into a fundamentally different second act, and their founding product definition tends to persist from seed to IPO. Because partial pivots mostly fail, founders and investors should be brutally honest about whether the original idea can scale or must be fully rebuilt. Data dashboards won’t surface this truth; the real signal is felt in conviction and customer pull.

Key Insight: Data teams should prioritize publishing continuous, narrative context that keeps everyone informed, rather than parachuting into discrete decisions with shallow analysis.

Stancil argues that analysts can resemble “nicer, kinder” Jared Kushners: parachuting into others’ problems with shallow context and overconfident analysis that adds little value. He suggests shifting data teams from decision-support consultants to newsroom-style publishers who build company-wide, ambient understanding through continual narrative updates. A better-informed organization, not better point decisions, is the real competitive edge.

Key Insight: dbt’s edge has been its human-centered community-driven model, but shifting market dynamics and AI-driven architectures may force it to either expand aggressively or find a strategic exit.

Stancil argues that dbt Labs’ success rests as much on its community and human-centered approach as its product, but the market tailwinds that protected it are fading. He lays out three futures—stay the course, go on the offensive into adjacent markets, or sell—while noting that the rise of LLM-driven data stacks could reshape what “dbt” needs to be.

Key Insight: The modern data stack’s tool-heavy philosophy is peaking and will likely be eclipsed by AI-driven “intelligent infrastructure” that reshapes how data systems and teams are built.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack, once the corrective to Hadoop-era pain, has grown into an overgrown ecosystem of tools, costs, and complexity. He suggests we are entering a liminal period where AI/LLMs will trigger a new discontinuity, making the modern data stack’s philosophy ill-suited for the next era. The core claim is that data teams and vendors must adapt to AI-native infrastructures or risk becoming yesterday’s stack.

Key Insight: LLMs are likely to form stratified labor markets where marginal capability differences create compounding economic and social advantages.

Stancil argues that as LLMs proliferate, they will sort into “low-skill” and “high-skill” tiers much like human labor markets, with cost and capability gaps driving differentiation. This could create new forms of inequality and competitive advantage, as premium models compound small advantages over time, even if baseline tools become cheap and widespread.

Key Insight: OpenAI’s highest-leverage path is to become the generative infrastructure layer of the internet, not a consumer-facing app platform, because control of the backend yields scale, lock-in, and enormous power.

Stancil argues that OpenAI’s real destiny isn’t to become a consumer app platform like the iPhone, but an AI infrastructure provider akin to AWS. Generative models will become a ubiquitous, mostly invisible backbone powering countless products, and the biggest prize is dominance as a foundational utility rather than direct user attention.

Key Insight: The SVB episode reveals a tension between Silicon Valley’s claim to exceptional importance and its resistance to the regulation that such exceptional treatment would logically require.

Stancil argues that the SVB bailout was justified either to prevent systemic panic or to protect startups deemed uniquely vital, but that second rationale implicitly demands special treatment that Silicon Valley doesn’t want to admit. He suggests SVB may be a “Lehman moment” for tech, exposing a subprime-like financial scaffolding that could trigger regulatory reckoning and shows how risky innovation finance has become.

Key Insight: Data investments deliver value only when tied to clear hypotheses and problems, but even wasteful experiments can yield lasting innovations.

Stancil contrasts JPMorgan’s massive data investment with a hypothetical NBA team’s analytics push to argue that data initiatives work when they’re aimed at clear, concrete problems, and fail when they’re driven by hype and vague promises. He’s skeptical of open-ended “digital transformations,” but sees value in the messy experimentation of the data boom, even if much of it proves wasteful.

Key Insight: The warehouse has become a legacy label for a shifting set of capabilities, and the next “warehouse” may look more like dbt-driven compute on object storage than a monolithic database.

Stancil argues that the concept of a “data warehouse” has become fuzzy and skeuomorphic: we recognize examples by vibe, not by a stable definition. As architectures shift toward storage-less, serverless, and file-based compute, he suggests warehouses are already breaking apart and may evolve into something like dbt running directly on object storage.

Key Insight: AI’s greatest near-term power is its ability to manipulate human emotion, and our weakness against that manipulation makes collective harm more likely than mere confusion about facts.

Stancil uses his anxiety about flying to argue that emotions often overpower facts, making rational self-talk an unreliable defense against fear. He warns that modern AI, especially chatbots, is uniquely adept at shaping feelings, so the larger risk is not misinformation but engineered emotional manipulation at scale.

Key Insight: Customer-driven iteration can quietly splinter a startup’s identity, so sustained success requires disciplined focus on a coherent core before expanding.

Stancil argues that startups can fall into “customer capture,” where divergent early customers pull a company into incompatible directions, eroding product coherence and market identity. This is especially acute in the fragmented data tooling landscape, where many adjacent expansion paths look like optionality but become unsustainable variability. The antidote is a disciplined, caring core identity and the willingness to say no to customers and investors until the company’s center of gravity is strong enough to expand.

Key Insight: In business, data’s highest value often lies not in objective truth-finding but in building conviction and alignment that make strategies succeed.

Stancil argues that data teams often overvalue objective truth-telling, when their most useful role in business may be to align people around a chosen strategy. Because execution and belief shape outcomes, selective, narrative-driven use of data can be more valuable than neutral analysis, even if it feels uncomfortable.

Key Insight: The industry’s obsession with “insight” obscures the real value of data work, which is delivering clear, accurate reporting about what’s happening.

Stancil argues that the data industry has inflated the word “insight” into a vague marketing promise, even though most users and businesses mainly want reliable, basic reporting about what’s happening. He contends that data teams chase flashy analysis because it is socially and commercially rewarded, while the harder, more valuable work of accurate reporting is undervalued.

Key Insight: AI won’t transform analytics by replacing analysts outright; it will force a redesign of data schemas themselves so machines—not people—can reliably interpret and query them.

Stancil argues that while LLM demos look impressive, they fail in real-world data environments because messy schemas, ambiguous definitions, and complex queries overwhelm current models. The real revolution will come not from smarter models alone but from rebuilding data structures to be AI-friendly—standardized, machine-readable schemas that shift analytics work from bespoke design to factory-like production.

Key Insight: The persistent need for data teams to sell their value suggests a product-market mismatch, and the discipline may need to redefine what it offers based on real customer demand.

Stancil argues that many data teams may lack true product-market fit: they are often sold rather than eagerly bought, and persistent struggles to gain influence suggest a deeper mismatch with stakeholder demand. He contends that the field may be extrapolating from a few early “customers” and should rethink what services are actually wanted, even if that means reinventing the role.

Key Insight: The data stack’s future may be best served not by pure modularity or full consolidation, but by conglomerates that align adjacent tools under one roof to deliver cohesion without forcing total lock-in.

Stancil argues that the data tooling boom favored neutral, modular ecosystems, but the market’s fragmentation and tighter budgets are pushing vendors into direct competition. Instead of simple consolidation into big-platform bundles, he proposes a “conglomerate” model where adjacent data products live under one umbrella, staying independent yet more seamlessly integrated. This could preserve product character while delivering the cohesion customers increasingly demand.

Key Insight: Math’s prestige in data work functions more as a signaling and power tool than as a reflection of the actual skills most analysts need.

Stancil argues that math is professionally overrated in data work: most roles rely on basic arithmetic and judgment, not advanced theory. The real value of “mathiness” is cultural signaling—using quantitative language and artifacts to claim authority and shut down qualitative debate—so we should prize communication and domain understanding more than we do.

Key Insight: A decade of data forecasts shows a pattern of over‑eager, vague predictions that miss timing, while the biggest shifts often emerge unexpectedly.

Stancil reviews a decade of data-industry predictions and finds that fewer than half were mostly correct, with many being vague, trend‑extrapolation filler. He argues that forecasts repeatedly promise imminent breakthroughs (AI, predictive analytics, streaming, data marketplaces) that arrive later or not at all, while genuinely important developments often go unpredicted. The upshot: expect 2023 to miss in familiar ways, with surprises filling the gaps.

Key Insight: Because shootouts are common and hinge on a distinct, trainable skill, dedicating roster spots to penalty-kick specialists is a small, quantifiable change that can materially improve a team’s World Cup chances.

Stancil argues that penalty shootouts are a different skill than the 120 minutes of soccer that precede them, creating a strategic arbitrage opportunity. Because shootouts are common and roster spots are underutilized, teams could meaningfully raise their World Cup odds by carrying dedicated penalty kick specialists. The idea is a low-cost, “Moneyball” style edge that conventional roster construction ignores.

Key Insight: Lasting improvements in how data teams work will come from purpose-built products that reshape behavior, not from exhortations about process.

Stancil argues that despite sweeping technological advances, productivity hasn’t improved because the tools we use shape behavior more than any process or best-practice talk. Slack exemplifies this by incentivizing frantic, low-quality communication, so the real path to better work is to build products that enforce better processes, especially for data teams. In data, he claims only purpose-built tools will shift norms around requests, alerting, and decision-making.

Key Insight: LLMs make it trivially easy to generate convincing but ungrounded arguments, eroding the friction that once helped analysis stay tethered to reality.

Stancil argues that analysis relies on the difficulty of constructing convincing arguments, which gives it a kind of legitimacy even when people are biased and imperfect reasoners. Large language models erase that friction by generating plausible narratives on demand, making it harder to distinguish truth from motivated reasoning and undermining decision‑making.

Key Insight: Age comparisons across famous milestones are both irresistible and ultimately meaningless, revealing more about personal anxiety than about achievement.

Stancil riffs on watching Lou Gehrig’s retirement speech and realizing he is the same age, which sends him into compiling a sprawling, unnecessary spreadsheet of famous people’s ages at notable moments. The post uses that absurd catalog to poke at age-based comparison, mortality anxiety, and the futility of measuring life against milestones.

Key Insight: Modern data tooling is dramatically better, but the industry still hasn’t closed the gap between technological progress and real business impact.

Stancil argues that despite the rough edges and hype, the modern data stack represents a huge leap forward from the brittle, expensive, and manual systems of the early 2010s. Yet he highlights a paradox: data teams delivered substantial business impact even with inferior tooling, so the key question is why today’s far better tech hasn’t produced proportional value gains.

Key Insight: The contemporary internet is less a stable platform than a runaway spectacle, so the only honest response is to acknowledge and write into its chaos.

Stancil argues that the internet has entered a new, hotter phase of chaos where platforms collapse fast, frauds flourish, and attention cycles overwhelm any stable order. He portrays a culture trapped in a runaway machine, where even serious news is instantly drowned by the next manic catastrophe. The only viable stance, he suggests, is to accept the turmoil and write for the void rather than for a stable audience.

Key Insight: Most companies overestimate the value of their data, so emulating big-tech data practices and tooling often leads to waste rather than outsized gains.

Stancil argues that the data industry’s shift from tools to people and process misses a deeper constraint: most companies don’t have data with the leverage of Silicon Valley giants. The modern data stack looks powerful, but for many businesses the data is more like peat than oil—limited value means copying big-tech practices often yields disappointing returns.

Key Insight: The tech elite’s confidence and folklore about visionary genius are being stress‑tested in public, and Twitter may expose how shallow those claims really are.

Stancil argues that elite institutions and Silicon Valley share a performative culture that rewards confident, untested ideas rather than rigorous scrutiny, producing a class of leaders who are affirmed rather than challenged. He sees the VC pitch dynamic and Twitter’s Musk-era chaos as parallel examples of the “very smart boy” myth and its consequences. Twitter becomes the live-fire test of whether tech’s celebrated first‑principles bravado is wisdom or just noise.

Key Insight: A credit-and-auction market for data work could replace political prioritization with transparent price signals, but it needs guardrails to avoid perverse incentives.

Stancil argues that data teams inside startups operate like collectivist service orgs, which leads to fuzzy prioritization and hidden politics. He proposes an internal market with credits and auctions to price data work, claiming it could allocate effort more efficiently and transparently while still letting teams steer strategy. He ends cautiously, noting the model could work with safeguards but needs regulation to avoid a cutthroat culture.

Key Insight: Even knowing a community’s golden era is temporary, its value comes from people showing up for the work and relationships themselves, not just the eventual rewards.

Stancil contrasts ambition-driven careerism with work chosen for its intrinsic value, arguing that communities thrive when people show up for the work rather than the payoff. He uses dbt Labs’ Coalesce as a rare, genuine data community that feels like college, while acknowledging that scale and business pressures will eventually erode that culture. The piece ends with a call to appreciate the community now, even knowing it won’t last forever.

Key Insight: Internal success is a misleading signal because the very factors that make a tool thrive inside one company—captive users, bespoke needs, and frictionless distribution—rarely translate to a viable external market.

Stancil argues that internal tools often look like startup gold because they solve a real problem inside a company, but that success is a mirage driven by a captive customer, edge-case needs, and effortless internal distribution. Once outside the company, those tools face messy, varied workflows, politics, and integration realities that make them poor fits for broader markets. He suggests investors should be more skeptical and look to consultancies for better-validated product ideas, noting his own experience at Mode as a cautionary example.

Key Insight: dbt’s biggest risk isn’t demand but the tension between its SQL-first simplicity and the complexity of expanding into semantics, pricing, and new markets, which could erode its community moat.

Stancil imagines a plausible failure case for dbt Labs, arguing that the company’s success could be undermined by a mismatch between its SQL-first core and the added complexity of semantic layers, pricing shifts, and community fatigue. He contends that these pressures would weaken dbt’s moat and invite both direct and indirect competitors. He ultimately concludes the failure narrative is unlikely because dbt’s product value is real and enduring.

Key Insight: Some products demand humility because their most important user experiences are unequal, unquantifiable, and only knowable through empathy rather than data alone.

Stancil argues that the iPhone is remarkable for delivering a fundamentally egalitarian product experience across social strata, unlike Twitter, where each user inhabits a materially different version shaped by identity and prominence. Because these experiences are unmeasurable and often inaccessible, leaders and data practitioners must approach product decisions with humility and seek lived experience beyond dashboards.

Key Insight: The best “data contract” isn’t a negotiated promise between teams but a technical pre-production testing layer that data teams control to prevent bad data from propagating.

Stancil argues that data contracts address a real problem—brittle, implicit expectations between data producers and consumers—but negotiated agreements between teams are impractical and misdirected. Instead of people-heavy contracts, he favors technical safeguards built by data teams (e.g., schema/staging tests) that validate data before it hits production without forcing providers into ongoing negotiations.

Key Insight: Fivetran’s position is strong but structurally vulnerable if SaaS vendors and warehouses shift data movement upstream, eroding the economics that make ELT a standalone business.

Stancil argues that Fivetran’s dominance is not inevitable despite riding two waves: SaaS proliferation and centralized data warehouses. He lays out three ways Fivetran could fail—if the need to move data fades, if SaaS vendors and warehouses change how data is moved, or if a better/cheaper tool displaces it—while ultimately betting on inertia but acknowledging how quickly the “impractical” can become the new normal.

Key Insight: Data teams need an explicit, narrow definition of production so they can support what matters and let the rest expire instead of growing an unmanageable, accidental production surface.

Stancil argues the “data as a product” idea is incomplete without a clear definition of what counts as production. Because data work often blurs one-off analysis and durable assets, teams end up maintaining a sprawling, accidental production surface. He proposes explicitly declaring production assets and letting everything else be temporary, with real support and deprecation for the chosen few.

Key Insight: Even if Snowflake looks like an inevitable winner today, multiple structural and strategic pressures could still erode its dominance over time.

Stancil argues that Snowflake’s apparent inevitability is less certain than the industry consensus suggests, and runs a “pre‑mortem” on how a dominant data warehouse could lose its edge. He outlines multiple plausible failure paths—cost dynamics, architectural fit, market overreach, and margin pressure—while still acknowledging Snowflake’s current strength.

Key Insight: Endurance and tradition aren’t inherently virtuous; we should keep only the habits and identities that actively serve the future we want.

Stancil argues that habits and identities often calcify from chance events, and we mistake their persistence for virtue. He suggests we are less bound by the past than we believe, and should prioritize future possibilities over inherited routines or traditions. The right question is whether a habit still serves who we want to become, not how long we have maintained it.

Key Insight: Because analytical errors are inevitable and have lasting consequences, data teams should treat metrics as uncertain estimates and rethink correction practices, potentially emphasizing accountability and rounded communication over engineering-style blamelessness.

Stancil argues that while analytics teams obsess over preventing errors, they barely grapple with what to do when mistakes inevitably slip into production. Because analytical errors shape decisions and persist, he questions whether engineering-style blameless retros are sufficient and suggests borrowing from journalism’s accountability. He also proposes rounding metrics to signal uncertainty and reduce the blast radius of inevitable corrections.

Key Insight: Define data freshness guarantees first and let orchestration derive the DAG and schedules, rather than chaining tasks from upstream triggers.

Stancil argues that data orchestration is backwards: we schedule pipelines from upstream triggers instead of from the freshness guarantees we actually care about at the end of the lineage. He proposes a reverse-ETL-style model where each table declares latency requirements and the system derives the DAG and run timing to meet those guarantees, improving maintainability, cost control, and alert relevance.

Key Insight: Analytical portfolios would surface real capability and storytelling skill more fairly than resumes or tests, reshaping hiring toward how analysts actually work.

Stancil argues that analysts are screened on poor signals like resumes and brand names because their work is hard to showcase, which shuts out strong talent. He proposes replacing boot-camp style credentialing and take-home tests with concise analytical portfolios that emphasize thinking, storytelling, and real project context. A short, structured slide deck could surface skill and potential more fairly while improving interviews.

Key Insight: The data stack’s chaos is less a tooling problem than a market structure problem, and VC-driven competition will force a single “control tower” winner even as it intensifies fragmentation in the meantime.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack lacks a true “single pane of glass,” and that multiple tool categories are converging to claim that central control role. This competitive rush, driven by venture funding expectations, makes fragmentation worse until the market forces a single winner.

Key Insight: Data-driven companies can win, but only because steady, modest advantages compound over many decisions rather than because data guarantees better outcomes on big strategic bets.

Stancil argues that while data helps, it is not a decisive competitive advantage against stronger talent, intuition, or speed—especially in early-stage companies. Data’s real value is a small, compounding edge across many decisions, not dramatic breakthroughs on a few big bets.

Key Insight: Centralizing business logic in a shared config file could fix definition drift and make analytics workflows more consistent, discoverable, and collaborative.

Benn argues that data teams hardcode business logic all over their stacks, leading to inconsistent definitions and opaque concepts for anyone outside the data team. He proposes centralizing these logical variables (and eventually logic itself) in a shared configuration file so definitions stay consistent, discoverable, and editable. This could shift workflows toward more composable, collaborative analytics engineering, much like dbt did for transformations.

Key Insight: The data community can only stay healthy if people deliberately separate their identities from their employers and prioritize human connection over vendor promotion.

Stancil argues that as more data people work at data vendors, community interactions are increasingly shaped by corporate affiliation, turning peers into prospects and conversations into subtle marketing. The result is a loss of genuine, human connection in the data community, which he thinks can be restored only by centering shared personal experiences over tools and company agendas.

Key Insight: Analytics engineering’s popularity says less about the job itself and more about analysts’ desire for structured, engineering-like work over the messy, political reality of analysis.

Stancil argues that the rise of analytics engineering isn’t just hype or better tooling; it reflects analysts’ deeper preference for structured, engineering-flavored work over the messy social reality of analysis. The role offers clear boundaries and tangible outputs, making it an attractive escape from organizational politics and ambiguity. This shift suggests the industry may need to rethink what it means to be an analyst and be more honest about what actually satisfies people in data roles.

Key Insight: The author sets aside his usual industry commentary to condemn the Supreme Court’s decision as a disastrous assertion of unaccountable power.

Stancil pauses his usual light commentary to mark the Supreme Court’s decision as a grave moral and democratic failure. He argues that six unelected justices are imposing their will, stripping rights, and signaling further harm, making the day too serious for his normal industry jokes.

Key Insight: Snowflake’s app framework points toward a future where apps run inside the data warehouse, potentially turning Snowflake into a platform layer that reshapes data infrastructure and product ecosystems.

Stancil argues that Snowflake’s new application framework signals a shift from “data apps” as dashboards on top of the warehouse to apps that run inside the warehouse itself. If Snowflake executes this vision, it becomes more like an iPhone platform than an app store, enabling deeper functionality, easier distribution, and a new wave of data products. He concludes that this could reignite the data tooling ecosystem rather than mark its decline.

Key Insight: Google’s data stack has the pieces to dominate, but without a coherent buyer focus and integrated experience, its overpowered tools fail to translate into market leadership.

Stancil argues that Google has amassed an impressive but incoherent set of data products, like a kid with powerful Pokemon cards but no cohesive deck. The opportunity is to define a clear buyer (the "purple people" in data orgs) and sell an integrated, easy-to-buy stack rather than overpowered but disconnected tools, a miss driven by tech-first culture and compute-driven sales.

Key Insight: AI is unlikely to replace analysts by doing their current work, but it may transform analytics by acting as a creative partner that changes the questions and problems themselves.

Stancil argues that current AI/automation tools in analytics mostly disappoint because they’re built to mimic analysts’ existing tasks, which often require human judgment and context. He suggests a more promising future is AI as a creative partner—posing novel questions, reframing problems, or generating alternative structures—changing what analytics work even looks like.

Key Insight: The industry’s default bias toward technical work distorts pay, and correcting it means intentionally valuing analysts’ interpersonal, problem-framing, and influence skills more highly.

The post argues that confusing data job titles create unstable pay bands and inequitable compensation across the industry. Stancil contends that analysts’ work—translating messy business problems into persuasive, high‑impact decisions—is harder to develop and more valuable than analytics engineering, yet Silicon Valley’s bias toward technical skills inflates engineer pay. He calls for intentionally paying analysts more to counter this bias and to elevate “soft” skills often gendered and undervalued.

Key Insight: Market crashes expose how arbitrary Silicon Valley’s status metrics are, offering a chance to shift ambition from hype and valuation to meaningful, controllable work.

Stancil argues that Silicon Valley (like DC) has built a status hierarchy around external scoreboards—valuations, funding rounds, and stock prices—that distort how people measure their work and worth. The market crash reveals how fickle those metrics are, and he suggests using the downturn to detach from hype and refocus ambition on controllable, intrinsically meaningful outcomes.

Key Insight: Commitment to a chosen path drives results more than continued analysis or optionality, and data teams should support that commitment rather than perpetuate doubt.

Benn argues that for startups and big strategic choices, committing fully to a path matters more than picking the “perfect” option; optionality and constant iteration often dilute focus and stall progress. He extends this to data work, claiming analytics can undermine commitment by highlighting uncertainty, so data teams should prioritize helping organizations stick to decisions to improve outcomes.

Key Insight: For most data buyers, the practical benefits of a consolidated, integrated suite outweigh the ideals of modularity and openness, making consolidation the more realistic winning strategy.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack’s ideals—modularity, open source, and avoiding lock-in—are less important to most buyers than consolidated, tightly integrated suites that simply work. Microsoft’s dominance in BI and databases shows that customers often prefer convenience, bundling, and sales reach over craft and composability. The likely future, he suggests, is consolidation, not a sprawling best‑of‑breed ecosystem.

Key Insight: Musk’s fortune is nearly incomprehensible, but the more important issue is that such wealth enables one person to control a core public communications platform, a power that should be off-limits regardless of who holds it.

Stancil argues that Elon Musk’s $265B fortune is so large that normal comparisons fail, so he offers vivid, often absurd benchmarks to make the scale legible. He then pivots to the real concern: a single private citizen controlling a major channel of public discourse is dangerous regardless of who that person is, and supporting the deal often boils down to personal affinity for Musk rather than principle.

Key Insight: Most statistical deception happens in the narrative framing, where words interpret numbers for us and steer our conclusions.

Stancil argues that the more common way statistics mislead isn’t through doctored charts but through the words that frame them. Adjectives like “narrowly,” “nearly perfect,” or “spiked” interpret data for us, so we accept a narrative we might not reach on the numbers alone.

Key Insight: SQL-centric semantic layers make business modeling accessible but brittle, and richer logic-driven layers may be necessary to represent complex operations accurately.

Stancil argues that SQL’s dominance has encouraged data teams to model business logic directly in queries, but many real business processes aren’t relational and get poorly approximated as a result. He suggests that semantic layers should move beyond pure SQL, via richer logic languages (like Jinja-heavy dbt or Malloy) or even non-SQL databases, to capture complex business models more faithfully.

Key Insight: Big Data’s promise is being realized not through revolutionary new paradigms, but through boring, reliable infrastructure that makes familiar analytics cheaper and easier.

Stancil argues that the Big Data era is ending not because data got less important, but because the industry finally shifted from grand, hype-driven promises to boring, practical tools like Snowflake and dbt. The real breakthrough is lowering friction and cost so “ordinary” teams can do more with familiar workflows, which will quietly unlock new use cases over time. He contends Databricks and similar tools should stop selling visionary narratives and instead sell themselves as simple, better databases.

Key Insight: The real problem isn’t what the data community talks about but the narrow audience it talks to, and widening that audience is the only way to regain perspective on what actually matters.

Stancil argues that writers and data professionals inevitably tailor what they say to the audience they want to impress, often defaulting to an insular circle of industry peers and influencers. This inward focus distorts priorities in the data community—conference talk, tool debates, and discourse drift toward self-referential validation rather than serving end users. The remedy is to deliberately broaden the audience we write and speak for, seeking respect from people outside the data bubble.

Key Insight: Even as OLAP cubes fade technically, BI tools still mirror their confusing abstractions, so we should redesign interfaces around how users ask questions—metrics and flat tables—rather than how data is modeled.

Stancil argues that OLAP cubes persist as a conceptual “ghost” in modern BI tools: even when the infrastructure no longer requires cubes, interfaces still expose confusing, cube-like abstractions. He contends that BI should hide internal data structure and instead present data in the simple forms users actually think in—metrics and flat tables—so tools are understandable without implicit knowledge.

Key Insight: Revenue is inevitable, but making it the primary KPI too early warps incentives and focus, so startups—especially data teams—should elevate clearer, longer-term metrics as their north star.

Stancil argues that while revenue eventually matters, early-stage startups should resist making it their defining KPI, especially during market downturns. Using revenue as the main yardstick distorts incentives and alignment; better, durable metrics help teams focus on long-term value creation rather than short-term extraction. Data teams, in particular, should champion alternative north stars that are singular, reachable, and enduring.

Key Insight: Snowflake’s Streamlit deal is less about a product and more about seeding a platform-plus-marketplace that could make data apps scalable to build, distribute, and monetize.

Stancil argues that Snowflake’s acquisition of Streamlit is the start of a long-term shift toward a true data app platform, not just another top-of-stack SaaS play. He contends that a Streamlit framework plus a Snowflake-backed app marketplace could make data apps cheaper to build and sell, catalyzing a broad ecosystem of small, specialized tools built directly on the data layer.

Key Insight: The crucial change in data work is the fading divide between analysts and everyone else, so tools should be built for broadly shared analytical behavior rather than narrow specialist roles.

Stancil argues the real shift in the data world isn’t bundling vs. unbundling of tools, but the blurring of roles between analysts and everyone else. Based on Mode’s usage, analytical behavior spreads across functions and deepens over time, making analysis a team sport. The implication is that “modern data experience” should serve a future where many more people want to work like analysts, not just unify tooling.

Key Insight: In the face of clear-cut moral horror, the most honest response may be to admit there’s nothing clever to add and to speak (or stay silent) plainly.

Stancil argues that in moments of clear moral crisis, the pressure to add commentary or analysis is misplaced; sometimes the right response is to acknowledge the obvious and refrain from performative insight. He emphasizes that numbers, clever takes, or detached cynicism aren’t required, and it’s acceptable to feel helpless, speak plainly, or stay quiet.

Key Insight: The data community’s trust depends on treating angel investing like any other conflict of interest and disclosing it openly.

Stancil argues that undisclosed angel investing creates hidden conflicts of interest in the data community, distorting discourse and reinforcing insider cliques. The same transparency norms applied to vendors should apply to investors, because credibility in a tight-knit ecosystem depends on openly disclosing financial ties.

Key Insight: Excel’s genius is its interface for simple code, and a similarly accessible, block-based scripting tool could democratize automation far beyond spreadsheets.

Stancil argues that Excel is software’s greatest achievement because it turned hundreds of millions of non-programmers into programmers by making simple automation accessible. He proposes a more general “Excel for everything” that lowers the prerequisites of scripting, letting people automate any task through a block-based, spreadsheet-like interface, and reframing programming as a universal tool rather than a career identity.

Key Insight: The analytics consumption layer is fragmented because human and business needs vary, but it will likely consolidate toward shared standards as economic and community forces reassert order.

Stancil argues that while the back of the modern data stack has converged on clear architectural norms, the consumption layer (analytics/BI) is fragmented and unsettled. This diversity reflects real differences in people and business use cases, yet the industry still lacks shared standards and is muddied by vendor incentives. He expects eventual consolidation, driven by community consensus or economic gravity, even if innovation thrives in today’s chaos.

Key Insight: Data teams do their best work when they adopt a service mindset: listen deeply, prioritize stakeholder reality, and take pride in ongoing maintenance rather than only big projects.

Stancil argues that data teams aren’t service organizations, but they face similar pressures and can learn from support teams’ habits. By treating stakeholders’ perceptions as the reality to understand, prioritizing empathy over cleverness, and valuing maintenance, data teams can be more effective and resilient. The core shift is from consultant-as-expert to detective-and-therapist who helps people feel heard and move forward.

Key Insight: Data can illuminate optimal play in Wordle, but the deeper takeaway is that analysis is never fully objective because the questions we ask—and skip—shape the truths we tell.

Stancil uses a dataset of Wordle scores shared on Twitter to show that most players win easily and that "hard mode"—reusing known greens—actually performs better than more exploratory strategies. He then pivots to the bigger lesson: data analysis is shaped by the questions we choose and the paths we ignore, so truth-telling requires acknowledging those biases.

Key Insight: In the data stack, chasing open standards is mostly a pitch narrative; real value and money come from pragmatic products that solve integration plumbing without relying on network effects.

Stancil argues that data startups overhype “open standards” as the modern equivalent of network effects, but most so‑called standards are fragile and transient. Durable success usually comes from building useful products and brands, not from winning imaginary winner‑take‑all markets. He proposes a practical, paid “switchboard” for metadata plumbing rather than another aspirational standard.

Key Insight: An entity layer that standardizes business objects—beyond metrics—could be the missing abstraction that turns the warehouse into a true platform for data apps.

Benn argues that today’s warehouse-centered modern data stack can’t really support a thriving ecosystem of data apps, and reverse ETL is a brittle stopgap rather than a true platform. He proposes an “entity layer”—a generalized, interoperable semantic layer for business objects—as the missing bridge that could make data apps reliable and eventually turn the warehouse into an operational brain.

Key Insight: Sustainable, enjoyable writing comes from conversational drafting and remixing familiar ideas rather than chasing originality or rigid outlines.

Stancil argues that blogging should be treated less like Twitter’s contrarian take economy and more like TikTok’s remixable, story-driven culture, where familiar ideas can be retold with fresh perspective. He shares a candid, iterative writing process—freeform conversation first, structure later—to help hesitant writers start and keep momentum, emphasizing that authenticity and enjoyment matter more than polish.

Key Insight: The biggest risks in analytics come from semantic errors—data that looks fine but means the wrong thing—so observability must evolve to encode business meaning and reinforce human context, not just monitor pipelines.

Stancil argues that modern data observability catches structural and statistical issues but misses the most dangerous failures: semantic anomalies where data is technically valid yet conceptually wrong. These errors evade alerts, erode trust, and can drive major business mistakes, so teams need tools and practices that directly encode business meaning and keep humans in the loop.

Key Insight: The analytics community demonstrates that tech’s cultural toxicity is not inevitable, and its healthier norms should be exported back into the broader software industry.

Stancil argues that the early-2010s tech culture he experienced was not a temporary excess but a symptom of deeper structural incentives that breed toxicity. In contrast, the analytics community—exemplified by dbt’s Slack and Coalesce—has built a healthier, more inclusive culture, proving that tech’s ambition and impact can be separated from its worst behaviors. He concludes that software should learn from analytics by exporting this cultural model outward into the broader industry.

Key Insight: Dashboards are essential because they create the consistent, shared reality that companies need to operate in an abstract world.

Stancil argues that dashboards and reporting aren’t distractions from “real” analytics work; they are how companies construct a shared reality in an abstract, non-physical world. Metrics don’t just measure the business—they define it—so consistent dashboards are foundational for trust and decision-making.

Key Insight: The post uses mock data analysis and linguistic pedantry to argue that “coffee cake” is a misleading exception that should be renamed.

Stancil argues, half-seriously and with mock rigor, that the name “coffee cake” is a linguistic fraud because the cake contains no coffee. He marshals examples and a pseudo-statistical survey of cake names to claim the exception is absurd and should be corrected by renaming it “coffree cake.”

Key Insight: The analytics function needs a true executive-level analyst role—peer to the CTO—to unlock strategic impact and provide a viable top-tier career path for analysts.

Stancil argues that analytics leaders get stuck on a career treadmill just below the C-suite because the chief data/analytics role is defined as an operational, second-class position. He proposes splitting the function like engineering does: keep a VP of data for management and create a chief analytics officer who sits with executives to do strategic, high-leverage analysis. This would improve executive decision-making while giving strong analysts a real top-level career path.

Key Insight: Data should inform decisions, but when evidence is inconclusive, leaders must choose with conviction rather than hide behind analysis.

Stancil argues that data and analysis are often used not to clarify decisions but to escape them, letting leaders off the hook when choices are hard and evidence is inconclusive. He contends that real leadership requires courage to decide and own outcomes when the data cannot provide certainty, and analysts must recognize when their role is to inform rather than to defer responsibility.

Key Insight: The best way to evaluate analytical work is the speed with which it enables sound decisions.

The post argues that analytics lacks a reliable way to measure itself, leading to circular judgments, bias, and poor incentives. Benn proposes a concrete metric: evaluate analysts by how quickly their work helps others make decisions, because that directly reflects the purpose of analysis and improves communication, focus, and reputation over time.

Key Insight: The modern data stack’s economic problem isn’t demand but the fractured, opaque, usage-amplifying supply that makes costs balloon unless the market consolidates or coordinates.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack’s fragmentation hides compounding costs: each new tool and higher-fidelity use case triggers cascading usage fees across vendors. Because data tooling is mostly services-oriented and priced inconsistently, the ecosystem is economically unstable unless it consolidates or builds better coordinating layers. The likely outcome is fewer dominant platforms with satellite products and stronger cost management.

Key Insight: Operational analytics will only become ubiquitous when data is embedded seamlessly into the tools and decisions people already use, not isolated in standalone dashboards.

Stancil argues that consumer products like Yelp made data-driven decisions feel natural by embedding data inside the experience, while corporate analytics isolates data in dashboards divorced from work. The future of operational analytics is to integrate focused, disciplined data experiences directly into workflows and build a data “operating system” that enables those experiences rather than just more BI tooling.

Key Insight: The Looker–Tableau integration marks a decisive unbundling of BI, with governance/metrics becoming a separate layer and exploration tools defining the new BI landscape.

Stancil argues that the Looker–Tableau integration signals a structural split in BI: governance/modeling (LookML) is separating from visualization and exploration. This shift redefines BI away from all-in-one suites toward a metrics/governance layer paired with best-in-class exploration tools, with big implications for vendor consolidation and the economics of the modern data stack.

Key Insight: Good analysis can’t be reduced to a single yardstick, and without public examples of real work, the field can’t reliably raise its standards.

Stancil argues that the public Facebook leak revealed something rare: not just debate about social media, but about the quality of analysis itself. Because most analysis is proprietary, the field obsesses over tools and structures while the actual work stays invisible, making it hard to define or improve what “good analysis” looks like. He concludes that quality is subjective and multi-dimensional, and the way forward is to expose more real analysis so standards can evolve.

Key Insight: Because visualization and BI are inherently complex experience layers, a single general-purpose “planet” tool with specialized satellites is more realistic than a fully decentralized ecosystem of thin apps.

Stancil argues that BI and visualization are far more complex than feature backlogs suggest, so “thin” consumption apps coordinated by a data OS are unlikely to deliver a coherent user experience. He proposes a middle path: a strong, general-purpose BI “planet” for exploration, surrounded by specialized satellites for specific use cases.

Key Insight: A community can be outwardly kind yet structurally exclusionary, and in data this exclusion risks hard-coding racial bias into systems and careers.

The post argues that the analytics community has built a reputation for being welcoming, but that welcome is not shared equally, with Black professionals profoundly underrepresented in conferences and the field. The author contends that diversity should be pursued as a moral imperative, not a business case, and that the community’s blind spots risk embedding and amplifying racism through data-driven systems.

Key Insight: BI should evolve from a fragmented, report-centric tool into a universal data-consumption platform that unifies self-serve and deep analysis while relying on shared governance layers.

Stancil argues that BI, like early software, has been unbundled and stripped of legacy connotations, leaving today’s BI as a diminished fragment focused on visualization and reporting. He contends the next generation of BI should be a universal consumption layer that integrates self-serve and deep analysis, sits atop shared governance, and centers collaboration between analysts and non-analysts.

Key Insight: Data-driven argumentation is often treated as objective, but it is built on subjective choices and can be wielded to launder opinions as neutrality.

Stancil argues that just as the Supreme Court’s rulings are shaped by human preferences and political context, data-driven arguments are similarly tilted by subjective choices and prior beliefs. Data feels like neutral ground, but the metrics and analyses we treat as objective are built from arbitrary definitions, incentives, and power—so numbers often mask opinions rather than replace them. The remedy isn’t more data, but more humility about our limits and more skepticism toward quantitative authority.

Key Insight: The analytics stack needs an OS-like layer that standardizes integrations and utilities across tools, and a delegated model like an expanded dbt could provide that foundation better than pure centralization or decentralization.

Stancil argues that the analytics ecosystem’s core problem isn’t just “too many tools” but the lack of an operating system that standardizes how tools integrate and behave. He critiques extreme centralization and decentralization (including the data mesh as commonly defined) and proposes a delegated, OS-like layer—potentially embodied by dbt—that abstracts heterogenous data sources and provides shared utilities for the stack.

Key Insight: Treating meetings as immovable and creativity as schedulable turns generative work into a slow, demoralizing grind, so calendars should flex to protect creative flow.

Stancil argues that creative work has a generative phase that cannot be scheduled the way editorial work can, and meetings are especially destructive to that fragile state. By treating meetings as fixed and creativity as the flexible block, organizations stretch creative tasks into slow, demoralizing slogs. He proposes rebalancing calendars to allow people to decline meetings when in generative flow, even in data roles.

Key Insight: The modern data stack’s technical progress won’t deliver its promised value until the ecosystem aligns around a cohesive, user-centered data experience.

Stancil argues that while the modern data stack has delivered dramatic technical advances, it has failed to produce a coherent, reliable experience for everyday analysts and business users. The core challenge is not more tools or abstract “culture,” but designing a modern data experience that integrates workflows, trust, and collaboration across a decentralized ecosystem.

Key Insight: Treating data work as a technical/non-technical dichotomy gerrymanders the stack and blocks the unified, spectrum-based tools teams actually need.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack is carved up by an implicit technical vs. non-technical divide, which is a false boundary imposed on a continuous spectrum of work. This gerrymandering distorts product design—especially in analytics consumption—by forcing tools into narrow buckets instead of enabling a unified experience across users and use cases.

Key Insight: Analytics is hard to do well at scale, so boosting its perceived value requires better hiring and training, not just better tools or organizational sympathy.

Stancil argues that analytics is often seen as undervalued not just because of mislabeling or bad tooling, but because the work itself is genuinely hard and average results can be underwhelming. The field’s value depends on exceptional analysts, yet most teams can’t consistently produce that level of impact, so organizations may be reacting rationally. He suggests improving selection and cultivation—hiring for the right mix of skills and training the squishier parts of the job—to close the gap.

Key Insight: Analytics should be judged by curiosity, reasoning, and communication rather than by engineering credentials, or the field will keep excluding many of its best potential practitioners.

Stancil argues that analytics is being miscast as a primarily technical, engineering-adjacent discipline, which both misidentifies what makes great analysts and excludes strong candidates who lack conventional technical credentials. He says the real differentiator is curiosity, judgment, and communication, and that the emerging analytics engineer role could either enable this distinction or blur it further.

Key Insight: Self-serve analytics succeeds when users feel comfortable and trust the experience, not when a tool checks a feature list.

Stancil argues that “self-serve analytics” isn’t defined by features or who/what answers questions, but by how the experience feels to the people using and providing it. Because trust, comfort, and skill differ by user and context, the same tool can feel self-serve to some and not to others, so teams should design for the experience that makes their users feel at home rather than chase a canonical feature checklist.

Key Insight: In tight games, poor first-half performance is a good sign because teams tend to revert toward their average in the second half.

Stancil analyzes 12 years of NBA games to answer how fans should feel in close games at halftime. The data shows that when the score is tied or within one point, teams that played poorly in the first half are actually more likely to win, indicating mean reversion beats momentum.

Key Insight: Dashboards are a seductive but low‑durability investment; the real value comes from ad hoc analysis, which needs to be renamed, systematized, and preserved to build lasting organizational knowledge.

Stancil argues that analytics teams overinvest in dashboards and BI systems that produce fleeting value while neglecting the ad hoc analyses that drive the most important decisions. The real problem is that these analyses are ungoverned, hard to find later, and treated as disposable. He proposes reframing and organizing this work—starting by renaming it—to make it central, durable, and systematized.

Key Insight: Analogies work because the act of simplifying a complex idea into its essential structure is what clarifies both analysis and communication.

Benn argues that analogies aren’t obfuscation but a clarifying tool because they force us to simplify a complex idea into its essential structure before comparing it to something else. That simplification exposes the logical core and prevents us from hiding behind jargon or unnecessary complexity. He links this directly to analytics work, where the hardest task is distilling signal from noise and telling a clear, memorable story.

Key Insight: Effective SQL formatting is not about rigid rules but about highlighting the logic that matters, even if that means breaking conventions.

Stancil argues that strict, uniform SQL formatting rules are less important than making a query’s logic legible to humans. Formatting should adapt to the structure and emphasis of the logic, even if that breaks conventional style guides or what a formatter can automate.

Key Insight: Standardized tools don’t yield standardized meaning, so templates fail because the differences that matter most are the ones businesses intentionally encode in their data and metrics.

Stancil argues that despite increasing standardization in data stacks, reusable dashboard templates haven’t taken off because the most meaningful business data differences are intentional and central to how each company operates. Even when tooling and schemas align, companies define success differently, making one-size-fits-all reporting impractical; at best, templates might work in narrow, rigid domains if they ask for meaning-first inputs.

Key Insight: Self‑serve fails when treated as analyst‑grade exploration, but works when scoped to standardized metric extraction, while truly complex questions still demand more analysts.

Stancil argues that “self‑serve analytics is a mirage” has become a fashionable shibboleth, but the real issue is that analysts project their own needs onto business users. When you define self‑serve narrowly—mostly as consistent metric extraction—it becomes solvable, while deeper analysis still requires hiring more analytical thinkers.

Key Insight: Closing the window shade symbolizes modern complacency with screens and convenience, squandering a rare, communal chance to experience awe.

The post argues that closing airplane window shades is a small but corrosive act of selfishness that traps everyone in a sterile, joyless cabin. Stancil frames the window as a hard-won, almost sacred portal to wonder, and implores the window-seat passenger to share that view rather than retreat into screens.

Key Insight: Analytics work succeeds when teams accept that defining metrics is a creative, messy process and plan to refine it later rather than forcing premature structure.

Stancil argues that analytics is inherently creative and messy, not an objective, linear path to truth. Metrics are subjective constructs shaped by business context, so early analytical work should embrace exploration before converging on stable definitions. Attempts to prematurely impose structure or swap tools often mistake the natural mess of discovery for failure.

Key Insight: Personal closeness often distorts judgment in favor of the powerful, making public accountability essential to counter elite self-protection.

Stancil argues that proximity doesn’t just humanize people—it biases us in their favor, often excusing real faults. He uses Paul Graham’s defense of Antonio García Martínez to show how personal closeness clouds judgment and leads to asymmetric scrutiny. The piece concludes that public accountability matters because elites tend to protect their own.

Key Insight: A metrics layer solves a real governance gap, but it should integrate seamlessly with SQL-centric workflows and existing tools to be broadly adoptable.

Stancil argues that Airbnb’s Minerva addresses the core problem in analytics: inconsistent metric definitions across teams and tools. He praises Minerva’s metrics layer and its integration with the data catalog for shifting discovery toward metric-centric, consumer-friendly views. His main critique is the API-first access, which makes adoption and SQL-centric analyst workflows harder than a warehouse-native approach.

Key Insight: A purely attention-optimizing Twitter avatar is best achieved by choosing a highly contrasting, extreme color rather than a conventional photo.

Stancil argues that if you want a Twitter profile picture that truly stands out, you should treat it as a color-contrast optimization problem rather than a flattering headshot. By sampling thousands of avatars and comparing dominant hues, he shows that extreme, edge-of-the-wheel colors maximize visual distinctiveness against both other profiles and Twitter’s UI.

Key Insight: A centralized, SQL-addressable metrics layer is the missing foundation needed to make self-serve analytics consistent across the modern data stack.

Stancil argues that the modern data stack is missing a crucial component: a centralized metrics layer that defines and serves consistent metric logic across all tools. Without it, self-serve analytics devolves into fragmented, inconsistent calculations, and BI tools end up as isolated silos rather than shared infrastructure. A proper metrics layer would make metrics universally accessible via SQL, unify reporting with deeper analysis, and complete the stack’s foundation.

Key Insight: The modern data stack is evolving toward horizontal specialization, which improves flexibility but makes interoperability and clear architectural boundaries the central challenges.

Benn argues that the data tooling industry is shifting from vertically integrated, all-in-one products to a horizontally integrated “stack” where each layer (ingestion, storage, transformation, consumption) is owned by specialized tools. This change is driven by the explosion of vendors and the need to blend data across functions, but it creates new challenges around integration and boundary discipline.

Key Insight: Self-serve BI should focus on constrained metric extraction, not on replicating analysts’ open-ended analytical work.

Benn Stancil argues that self-serve BI keeps failing because teams define it as a code-free version of analyst work, which is the wrong goal. Analysts create new measures to test hypotheses, while non-analysts mostly want to extract known metrics, so self-serve should be built around opinionated “metric extraction” rather than open-ended analysis.

Key Insight: The Substack is a renewed, more regular outlet for Stancil’s mix of data-driven analysis and broader tech-cultural commentary, shaped by his experience building a data-focused company.

Stancil recounts how, as a data analyst cofounding a startup with no product or data, he found himself without a clear role and started a blog to explore quirky data stories. Years later, he’s relaunching that impulse on Substack, committing to regular posts that mix data culture and tech commentary with his eclectic interests.

Key Insight: As pitchers increasingly avoid the strike zone, the expected value of simply watching pitches rises so much that the average hitter can improve by swinging less.

Stancil uses a simulation of Barry Bonds's 2004 pitches to show that Bonds could have nearly matched his historic on-base percentage without swinging, because pitchers avoided the strike zone. Extending the method league-wide suggests that, as zone rates have fallen, many hitters would actually improve their OBP by swinging less, implying modern pitching has made patience unusually valuable.

Key Insight: The absence of performative apologies after Atlanta reveals how racism’s power lies in its adaptability, not in consistent logic.

Stancil argues that the missing wave of public self-flagellation after the Atlanta murders isn’t a sign of progress but evidence of how racism adapts to preserve itself. He suggests that when anti-Asian racism isn’t widely recognized as structural, there’s no safe “systemic” shield for apologies, so blame shifts and the caste system stays intact. The core point is that racism in America is flexible and self-protecting, and its contradictions make it stronger, not weaker.

Key Insight: Wealth-tax impact estimates for startup founders hinge on extreme exponential-growth assumptions, so the headline numbers say more about the modeler’s priors than about the policy itself.

Stancil argues that Paul Graham’s widely cited math on a startup wealth tax is not wrong so much as misleading, because it relies on extreme, compounding assumptions about growth rates, time horizons, and equity outcomes. Small tweaks to those assumptions swing the results wildly, revealing that spreadsheet models in this context mostly reflect prior policy beliefs rather than hard truths.

Key Insight: The real story isn’t a single mistaken tweet but the long-ignored harassment that can drive people to desperate, attention-forcing outbursts.

Stancil argues that the Clubhouse “slur” controversy shouldn’t be dismissed as mere performative tech-media drama, even if it looks like it. By comparing it to past journalism blowups, he suggests that Lorenz’s mistake can be read as a desperate outburst rooted in real, long-ignored harassment rather than a cynical hit job. The piece presses readers to examine the system that creates this rage instead of only condemning the person who erupts.

Key Insight: The core risk isn’t misinformation or bad actors alone, but the scale of social media itself, which reliably converts fringe energy into real-world disruption.

Stancil argues that the January 6th attack and the GameStop saga reveal the same structural danger: social media enables fringe groups to reach critical mass quickly, turning online narratives into real-world destabilization. Because scale and speed are the product, even well-intentioned movements can spiral, leaving society on a runaway train with only two options—submit to the ride or dismantle the track.