All the Things We Didn’t Do

Humio is a startup on a mission to democratise log analytics. With limited resources, being successful is just as much about avoiding bad decisions, as it is about doing things right. This is a talk about trade-offs, technology and culture in building a startup.

Working with log data introduces quite a different set of assumptions about how a data store should operate: you store a lot of data without known which part of it is relevant, and then after an incident, you want to be able to search it. Our biggest customers only look at 1% of the data they store. This is the opposite of how normal datastores operate: spend resources at ingest to make data easy to find. So we didn’t do it that way.