Starburst Reviews

There is a massive lack of awareness or outright denial of reality throughout leadership regarding the state of the morale of the company and the state of the opportunity. The product is very hard to set up, hard to maintain and hard to scale. (It can be done but it takes an army internally and an army at the customer. There is a long list of nuances and contingencies to make the product work well.) It is very hard to sell. In theory Starburst sounds great. After heavy pipeline generation activities, prospects are willing to discuss what is possible. In practice customers start to see the complexity quickly when starting to scope a POC. The GTM messaging is trying to make the change from federated analytics and data mesh to data lake analytics. Sales leadership is very quick to prevent proof of concept if the customer is not fitting into Starburst’s process. The feature difference between SEP (deployed in customer environment) and Galaxy (SaaS offering) is significant, but the field is forced to blur and blend the capabilities of both while pushing Galaxy. Customer case studies are bent and twisted. The actual health and usage of Starburst in many customers is anemic. Many sales reps have sold nothing. Internally culture is a is abysmal. (Not just sales, across the entire organization.) There is no ownership outside of sales. Sales cannot fix the technical challenges customers face. Sales yells into the void for support. Starburst leaders arrogantly speak condescendingly about true industry titans and how stupid customers are for working with them. Leadership behaves as if these problems could be fixed with tighter MEDDIC, CoM nomenclature and pipeline Champion/EB gates; but the problem is so much deeper than that. The company is also incredibly cheap, from compensation, equity, promotional gear, even down to the expense policy.

Enterprise sellers - think hard before making the move to Starburst. The sales pitch to bring Enterprise sellers in to Starburst is focused on leads banging down the door and Snowflake/Databricks takeouts being abundant. Neither being the case. Across the Enterprise teams the reality is that few companies are really all in on the strategy of data federation and even fewer are abandoning their existing Snowflake and Databricks deployments. Sales management works in a Commercial mindset, prescribing what you say, how you say it, and inspecting meetings via ChorusAI. Feedback is not constructive and lends no credence to an Enterprise sellers experience or discretion. The sales process is heavy and when combined with the lack of true business opportunities creates an extremely negative sales culture where a few sellers are making a great deal of money and the large majority are having very little success and are frustrated by the constant inspection and negative feedback cycles.