E22: From BigQuery to Motherduck: The Journey of Jordan Tigani

In this episode, I chat with Jordan Tigani, the dynamic engineer-founder of MotherDuck who previously led Google's BigQuery team and headed up product at SingleStore.  Jordan shares the inspiring origin story of MotherDuck, which emerged from the overlooked analytics' long tail, focusing on serving small users in data analytics. Our conversation delves into thought-provoking topics such as the conundrum of big data, bridging the gap between unstructured AI data and traditional data structures, the impact of scale-up data warehouses on customer decisions and MotherDuck's relationship with the open-source DuckDB. Tune in to uncover more gems from the founding story of one of the hottest data infrastructure startups in the market today.Highlights:[00:45] - Jordan shares his “aha” moments working at Google BigQuery that gave him the inspiration to start MotherDuck[3:14] - Jordan digs into where we’re at in the era of data evolution and whether big data is still an issue[6:14] - We discuss how data and compute requirements are shifting with the rise of AI & ML[8:15] - Jordan shares the significance of scale up vs. scale out and how it impacts user experience and the speed of development[12:52] - We explore MotherDuck’s relationship with the open source project DuckDB and how they work together[15:45] - Jordan talks about the user progression from DuckDB to MotherDuck[18:20] - Quantum Round-- Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world. Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!

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