Big companies have valuable datasets, small companies have talent. It makes sense for big companies to acquire talent, not datasets.

Increasingly, small companies have really novel and valuable data sets.

like?

Like Comma.ai, Pair (my company), Travelflan handful of others

plus acquiring data is trivial compared to devising a good model

I think (hope) you missed a sarcasm tag there?

I spend 90% of my time manipulating data to try to build bigger, better datasets, and only 5% modelling.

acquiring != manipulating