We're on a mission to reshape the data universe

In the cult-classic 1978 book The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought embarks on a long computation to determine the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. After running for 7.5 million years, it finally reveals the answer to be “42”. This left everyone puzzled, as they arrive at the sinking revelation that they never actually knew what the question was in the first place.

After exiting my first startup in 2020, I couldn't shake a sense of foreboding that a deeper, more insidious problem stood unchallenged in the data industry. Despite the abundance of specialized tools that emerged from the Big Bang of the 2010s, truly scalable analytics remains out of reach for all but the most well-funded data teams.

As pipelines grow, data practitioners struggle to keep up with the ever-changing demands of the business. You have to wrangle infrastructure code, business logic, and data artifacts scattered across multiple tools that were never designed to be compatible with one another to begin with. All this while, you're sandwiched between shifty schemas upstream and ill-defined requirements downstream. The result is complexity—absurd amounts of it, making data stacks nightmares to maintain. But good luck explaining that to business teams still feeling nostalgic about spreadsheet databases. There is no rest for the wicked in dependency hell.

Wait, but why? Because it's far too easy to search for a simplistic answer if you haven't really thought about the question. If you only get to see what comes out at the business end of an ELT pipeline, you simply won't know what are right questions to ask.

That's why I started Y42, named as a reminder that well-framed questions yield meaningful answers—so that we never have to ask Deep Thought, “Why 42?”.

When you say “we're venturing into the unknown”, adventurers will come. Today, we are a crew of sixty-five bold, brilliant and relentless souls on a mission to reshape the data universe. We've posed and answered questions such as “Why not implement version control for the entire data warehouse?”, “Why recompute tables when storing them is cheaper?” and “Siri, how do you pronounce idempotent again?”.

United by our irreverence towards the status quo, we've created a data orchestration platform with Git at its core, to put you in control of your data warehouse. Because when you bring its inner workings out of the shadows, businesses begin to ask more informed questions—the real answer to complexity, the data universe and everything related to analytics.

Warmest regards,
Hung Dang

P.S. Don't panic!