Running any sort of innovative data infrastructure startup (whether data prep, database, data pipeline, etc.) is now an exercise in futility. The big three cloud providers <i>will</i> embrace your innovation, extend your product, and extinguish your business.<p>Given the market power of cloud providers, every infrastructure innovation now a "sustaining innovation" in Christensen's terminology.<p>The key to success seems to be building a product for a niche the cloud providers think is too small, and then either maximizing your value within that niche so that if your market grows large enough for a cloud provider like AWS to come after you, you can pivot to providing customizations to your highest margin customers. MongoDB is a good example of this.<p>On the other hand, none of the major cloud providers seem capable of moving up the value chain to the application level, so if I were starting a company today I would focus on leveraging my infrastructure-level innovation to create a vertical opportunity in a high margin market instead of seeking to build a horizontal platform (IoT platform for example).