The Data Stack Show 243: The Data Economy: Turning Information into a Tradable Commodity with Viktor Kessler of Vakamo
May 16, 2025
Viktor Kessler, Co-founder of Vakamo and innovator behind Lake Keeper, shares insights from his journey in data. He discusses the evolution of data architectures and the transformative lakehouse concept, highlighting the importance of decentralization and open-source innovation. Viktor delves into the monetization of data and governance challenges in decentralized systems, emphasizing security concerns and the impacts on data consumers. He also touches on optimizing data tables for improved performance, envisioning data as a tradable commodity in the modern economy.
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Ancient Systems Shaped Perspective
- Viktor Kessler shared his early experience working with ancient systems like mainframe DB2 and COBOL copybooks from the 60s and 70s.
- This history gave him appreciation of continuous change from punch cards to modern data stacks.
Lake House Revolution Explained
- Lake house architecture combines the rigor of data warehouses with the flexibility of data lakes.
- Open table formats like Apache Iceberg enable storing data anywhere without vendor lock-in, driving revolution in data management.
Treat Data as a Product
- Treat every data domain as a startup producing data products.
- Encourage decentralized teams to own, prepare, and expose data for consumers via APIs or SQL.