CEO Today Hall of Fame

HALL OF FAME 3 www.ceotodaymagazine.com The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and partners with leading cloud service providers and database vendors including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft, Pivotal, and Snowflake among others. Tell us about your early career before founding Datometry. What attracted you to database research and commercial database development? As a teenager, and while still in high school, I developed commercial software for payroll and tax processing. Effectively starting out in the enterprise software development space at age 15, I had my very first brush with data management and query processing and found the technical challenge of extracting useful and actionable information from data compelling. During college, I became extremely interested in database research while working on combinatorial optimization problems in the context of query optimization. These are computationally hard optimization problems that database systems need to solve for every submitted database query, and, while there are many computational hard optimization problems in computer science literature, query optimization is, in my opinion, the one that has the highest practical relevance and importance for enterprises. During the course of my Ph.D., I worked as a researcher for several years at some of the top European research consortia on the theoretical underpinnings of optimization for parallel databases, but I was always drawn to system architecture and the actual development of database software. What deeply interests me about database development is that it combines incredibly hard engineering challenges with enormous practical relevance. Which one of these experiences was foundational - which one of them prepared you to start your own company and be a CEO? The desire to start my own company was fueled by my realization that large companies simply cannot innovate with the velocity or agility of a start-up, and starting your own company is one of the most effective ways to bring radical ideas. That said, I do want to acknowledge that working at large companies has been an outstanding learning experience for me: I have had the privilege to work with some of the sharpest minds in the industry and I value the learnings from their tutelage to this day. For a start-up to create technology that is truly disruptive, the vision of the founder or founders must be ahead of its time, and, for outsiders - quite unthinkable or unbelievable. During the course of my career, I have encountered a fair number of naysayers who have questioned the feasibility of some of my more innovative and ahead-of-their-time engineering ideas in database science. I believe this—for me— has been the single most helpful preparation in starting Datometry and becoming a CEO. As a CEO, I find that a key challenge is remaining steadfast in many situations and resisting the naysayers, and I have also found that the more advanced the ideas, the more stamina and focus on mission is required. At the same time, I do believe that it is very important to listen to your critics, understand the disconnect, and avoid becoming your own echo chamber. It is extremely gratifying that the Datometry team and I have been successful in undertaking and delivering on an engineering feat that many in the database industry and academia have said was impossible to accomplish. I look forward to solving more technological challenges in database science that conventional wisdom says are not solvable. What were your initial goals for Datometry? Would you say that today you’ve managed to achieve most of them? Our initial goal was to demonstrate the technical feasibility of our data warehouse virtualization technology. I knew that the moment we could successfully demonstrate feasibility, market forces would kick in, and we would be in the position to take Datometry to the next level. One of my key strategies in accomplishing this goal has been to build a one-of-a-kind team of outstanding subject matter experts. Most of our engineers hold Ph.Ds in database research and have developed database technology at leading companies, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Pivotal, Oracle, and Google, before joining Datometry. We are also fortunate to have some key, much-recognized industry and academic database experts as technical advisors. The Datometry team has built out our virtualization technology in record time—just under a couple of years—and, earlier this year, we started running proof-of-concept (POC) implementations with some of the largest enterprises in the US. The fact that Fortune 500 enterprises are engaging in POCs with Datometry—an early-stage start-up—speaks volumes about the importance and urgency of the problem we are solving, as well as the promise our technology brings to the table. We offer enterprises a unique solution that fundamentally changes their data management going forward as they look to implement cloud-first strategies to gain competitive advantage. I am proud that we accomplished our initial goals so resoundingly which resulted in our oversubscribed Series A financing. Now, we are in the next stage of rewriting the enterprise data management story. What further goals are you working towards with the company and what’s your vision for the future of its services? I consider what we have accomplished so far is just the beginning. At Datometry, we envision a world in which enterprise database customers no longer connect applications and databases directly. . We are convinced that the data warehouse virtualization technology pioneered by Datometry will become the management and control plane that connects all of the enterprise applications with the underlying data processors. This is a radical depature from the status quo and turns traditional enterprise database IT on its head: instead “As a CEO, I find that a key challenge is remaining steadfast in many situations and resisting the naysayers, and I have also found that the more advanced the ideas, the more stamina and focus on mission is required.”