The Founder Formula

Todd Mostak - Co-founder of OmniSci

• Trace3 • Episode 21

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When we asked Todd what clued him in that he was destined to become an entrepreneur, he said, “Intense curiosity.”

The first-time founder taught himself Arabic, programming languages, data science, and entrepreneurship.

In this episode, I interview Todd Mostak, Cofounder and CEO at OmniSci, about his amazing startup journey.

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.

Todd Mostak:

We're on a mission to overturn the status quo. Our mission is to make analytics instant, powerful, and effortless for everyone.

Todd Gallina:

The Founder Formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future-leaning startups. Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast-paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created, and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Founder Formula. My name is Todd Galena and with me today is Tony Olzak. He's the Chief Technical Officer here at Trace3. He's coming to us live from Colorado. Hey Tony, how's it going? Doing awesome. Thanks for having me, Todd. You're welcome. We are thrilled because today's a big day. We have a big guest. You guys are out there in Colorado. How's it been for you so far? It's going pretty well.

Tony Olzak:

Took a chance to take the family camping for a week, which was amazing just to get out in the open, just experience nature and get out of the house for a little bit. You know, we're just sick of being cooped up.

Todd Gallina:

So wait, wait, wait. So camping. So that's a weird thing because of all the social distancing. I'm sure there's plenty of room between tents, but you know, one of the things that's great about camping, you get the fire outside of the tent, stuff like that. And then, you know, have some pastors by. So what was your experience? By the way, a whole week? That's pretty ambitious. Yeah.

Tony Olzak:

Well, it was my wife's 40th birthday and we were supposed to take a nice trip. So this actually was her idea, which is great. Just great to get the family out. You know, just having the campfire. We were out by a river camping nestled up near Aspen, Colorado, just taking in the outdoors. playing the guitar late at night, getting to experience the day, just going on some hikes and just getting outside. I think when you're cooped up this long, just going on a hike and being in nature is just something very enlightening about that. You just get a good reset in your

Todd Gallina:

life. That sounds awesome. What do you guys do for food when you're camping? That's always a big thing. One day, two days seems to be pretty normal, but did you have to pack for four or five days of food?

Tony Olzak:

Oh, if you saw the way my wife travels, you'd realize that that is not an issue. When I say camping, I really mean glamping. And so we had a fire campsite and then we had a cabin to go along with it. And if you saw what we packed in our SUV to go out there, you would have swore we were moving across the country. I mean, she had... Endless suitcases and just bags of food. We had food. We probably could have quarantined up there for months and not run out of food. So food was not an issue.

Todd Gallina:

So you ended up bringing almost as much back as when you went there. I think we transported half a grocery store up there. You were feeding other people in the camp. We were feeding everyone. So, hey, man, you ready to kind of get it on with our... Get it on? What am I doing here? Let's get it on. Are you ready to rumble? Are you ready to bring on our guest? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, as promised, our guest is an entrepreneur and Harvard graduate. While there, he conceived the idea of accelerating analytic platforms by using graphic processing units, industry known as GPUs, something traditionally used for video games. He then took that idea and co-founded OmniSci, where he serves as the company's CEO. Please welcome Todd Mostak. Welcome, Todd. Hey, Todd. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks

Todd Mostak:

for having me on your show.

Todd Gallina:

You bet. Tony and I were really excited to meet you today and really excited to chat with you. So thanks so much.

Todd Mostak:

Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. Yeah, excited to dive in today.

Tony Olzak:

Awesome. Well, hey, Todd, let's kick this thing off. What we would love to know is a little bit more about OmniSci, the company you founded, and why you

Todd Mostak:

started it. Yeah, Tony, it's been an interesting journey, honestly. And I've met a lot of founders through the years, and some of them, it's like their life dream, or at least they have a very deep and solid plan. behind how they started the company, right? For me, it was a little bit the opposite. It kind of was one thing leading to another. If you'll oblige me just for a second, going back many years. So I graduated undergrad from UNC Chapel Hill with, and I think this is a sign of, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do in life. I was on econ and anthropology, double major with a math minor. And in fact, I had gone through a few things. I almost went comp sci, like I enjoyed programming, but you know, Guess wasn't my thing, you know, an undergrad or I didn't have the discipline maybe. So graduated, didn't want to go work for a bank, randomly found a job online. I wanted to see the world, figured out, you know, how can I do that? Found a job online teaching English in Syria, Aleppo, Syria. This is You know, 2006, 2007, before the Civil War. And so it was a safe place at the time. So I said, you know, this sounds like an adventure. You know, didn't know any Arabic, didn't know, you know, read the news a little bit. Soon enough, I was on a plane to Aleppo. And honestly, you know, I kind of fell in love with it. First, it was difficult, fell in love with language, culture, taught English and started learning Arabic and eventually got a fellowship to study Arabic. Arabic in Cairo from the U.S. State Department and spent a year there, worked as a translator. So I spent a few years in the Middle East, came back to Harvard with my grad school focused on politics in the Middle East and did my thesis through the Kennedy School there. And right when I came back, Arab Spring happened. So basically, you know, this is 2011, 2012. People were saying, oh, man, we weren't expecting that. And I was really interested in, you know, social media, not only as a catalyst for what was happening, people were tweeting and such about these protests or their opposition to these regimes, whether it was in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria or wherever, but also it was a really incredible data source for the first time. So if you think about how most people do research, I've traditionally done research in places like the Middle East or social movements. It's like ethnography. They're interviewing people that are living there. But with Twitter, I started harvesting hundreds of millions of tweets. And this is where my brief background in CompSci, and I was a hobbyist programmer, came in handy. I started harvesting all these hundreds of millions of tweets and said, this is a great way to see what people are saying, when they're saying it, and often for geocoded tweets, where they were saying it. So I started pulling all this together and did my thesis around using Twitter to analyze the kind of attitudes and social formations around the revolution in Egypt. And soon it became a big data problem. You know, I was trying to do graphs. Who did people follow? Did they follow regime politicians, secular opposition politicians, Islamist politicians? opposition politicians. Where did they live? So where were they at night? So then you could start to judge their demographics. How did SES relate towards their attitudes towards the revolution? And then finally, things like NLP, like analyzing the tweets and comparing it with a pro-regime, anti-regime. So it became this big data project. And I didn't have a big Hadoop cluster at my disposal. I wasn't in the comp sci department. Hadoop was just kind of coming online. It's a big thing. And so I was just using my workstation that I had built to actually play video games of all things and maybe do a little bit of work. I saved up for a single mid-grade GPU at the time and started finding that everything I was doing was incredibly hard and cumbersome in the sense that it wasn't big, big data, but for a single machine, single workstation at the time, hundreds of millions of tweets doing all this processing, things would take overnight. They would run out of memory. Things would just go haywire one way or the other. And even if they didn't, there was a huge amount of latency between having a question, right? Or something like, I wonder if, or some sort of hypothesis and being able to test that hypothesis. You know, you'd have to wait overnight or whatever. And it quickly was clear that the kind of the slow hardware software I had at my fingertips, whether this was stuff I was writing myself in Python or C or using Postgres, it was the barrier to kind of getting to the answers I needed. So I kind of threw myself into the problem. And I guess this has been a... blessing or cursing me my whole life. I get very deep in something, like when I want to solve something. It was like learning Arabic was like that. You know, I knew no Arabic, but I wanted to learn Arabic. I was there and I just would like read flashcards all day or whatever. So I did the same thing, threw myself into Comp Sci, switched all my electives to take Comp Sci courses. The only elective they would give me at Harvard was a GPU course, interestingly. GPUs weren't very cool back then, right? This was well before the whole deep learning revolution. And so I took this GPU course because I wasn't a CS major and got really into GPU programming, graphics, and then gradually into the compute side with CUDA. And then got into big data analytics and was able to enroll in the database course at MIT in Cross and Roll under Mike Stonebreaker and Sam Madden. Mike Stonebreaker just won the Turing Award. Incredible, frankly, a genius. He did Postgres, Ingress, Vertica, a bunch of other companies. And kind of putting all these things together, I said, you know, I think that big data analytics, not just the database side, not just the SQL piece, but also the visualization side and the ML, AI piece can be accelerated with this new hardware that was coming in line in the form of GPUs. And so that was the impetus for the first prototype of the product, which I wrote for my... I almost dropped out of school because I was just staying up all night writing the first prototype of what was called MapD. That was our company name until a year or two ago, Massively Parallel Database. And... It was very primitive, but it could run queries over billions of rows of milliseconds. And the professors liked it. And they were like, what's this liberal arts kid writing this stuff? Let's see if he'd be interested to dive in. So they were generous enough to give me a fellowship to be a research fellow at MIT, which I did for a year in CSAIL. And yeah, then I saw that other people had this same problem, which led to the founding of the company. So long-winded answer, but hopefully it gives some context. Well, it's not

Todd Gallina:

long-winded in that it's It's basically the definition of an overachiever. When I listen to you here, you're at UNC. After that, you travel to the Middle East. You basically watch a revolution. You write a Harvard thesis and develop a prototype and involved with MIT. I mean, it's insane all the things that happened in such a short period of time. And I'm sure we'll get into more of that. But before UNC, like before all of this happens, Was there something in your background that you look back to and say, hey, listen, I am destined to be an entrepreneur?

Todd Mostak:

It's funny you ask that. I think, I don't know if it's entrepreneur, but I was always, and probably my parents would say, a little bit of a strange kid in that I would have intense curiosities and almost obsessions about things. Like I got... deeply into rock collecting, coin collecting, building model rockets. And I would just spend all my time on these things and know everything about rock formations or whatever it was when I was a little kid. So I think it's like being able to... And it can actually be a liability too. I would find in school, I would get so interested in one thing and want to dive so deep that I would neglect my other studies. Like in the case of that MIT course, course, I was basically coasting on all my other classes so I could build this thing instead of just doing the bare minimum. So maybe that was there. In terms of entrepreneurship, I never necessarily wanted to start a business. And even today, first and foremost, I think that accelerated analytics and what we're doing with GPUs can have tremendous impacts for our customers and it can be disruptive in the wider space. And That vision, I still feel, is what propels me and motivates me and gets me out of bed in the morning. And the 20-hour or 18-hour days, sometimes you have to throw in versus financial outcome or building a business. However, the business is a vehicle to make that happen. I don't think there's any misalignment between those two. You've got to bring it to market. You need salespeople. You need developers to help you build this thing. And so you got to fundraise. You got to get revenue. But my deep goal is to bring something disruptive to market that really changes the game for our customers. And as a product that I wanted to use, frankly, when, you know, I would have killed to have back when I was at Harvard doing my thesis.

Todd Gallina:

You mentioned fundraising and you have kind of a funny story. I'll let you tell it, but you actually got your first infusion of investment dollars by winning a contest. You want to tell us about that? Yeah, no, I mean, I feel, I

Todd Mostak:

actually still can't believe this happened. So, um, I was at MIT in 2013. And then my co-founder and I worked up the courage to jump out on our own. We had founded the company, actually, September that year. And we had saved up a little money and our parents gave us 5 or 10 grand. We didn't need much money back then. It's funny. And we set off on our own. And it was clear after a few months, we weren't... We were reading the manual. How do you do a startup? How are we going to get money? And... We were having a few conversations with VCs, but they weren't moving anywhere particularly fast. And so I started saying, hey, you know, I think I'm gonna have to get a job so I can pay rent. And, you know, I don't know if this is going to work. So we decided to do this contest from NVIDIA, this early stage challenge that they just started putting on. And what was cool about it that year is they had upped the ante and put a hundred K pot in, like no strings attached, just money, not like the loan or not like... VC or investment money, just 100K check. And we said, let's go for it, right? So we did this thing. And we were basically two and a half employees at the time, me and him and half a guy who was working part-time from us from MIT. And so we put in for this. And at the time, the other companies seemed like behemoths. They had 10 or 15 people. I know that sounds funny, but compared to us being two and a half, they seemed like big and established companies. And somehow, I guess just the vision or the cool interactive visualization that we showcased, somehow it won the day and we won this prize. I was shocked. And Jim was there with the video. I couldn't believe it. So we got the 100K and that really put us on the map in the sense of it got either the VCs who were kind of waiting around the water or who didn't even know about us, put us on the map and we quickly did... I think what became in total $2 million seed round led by Google and NVIDIA, GV and NVIDIA. Awesome.

Tony Olzak:

That's fantastic. You know, we were talking about this a little bit earlier. And when you were going down this journey as someone who's new as an entrepreneur and you secure that $100,000 and then how that turns into your seed round, we'd love to double click on that for a second of $100,000 between two and a half people. It doesn't seem like a lot of money. Or is that just the door to getting the next round? And how do you manage your time and your people against that? Because I think there's a lot of curiosity around, you hear about these small buckets of money that people secure in the beginning, but what do you do with it? I mean, you're racing against the clock. Yeah,

Todd Mostak:

but I have to be honest here. When we saw those... five zeros, you know, on that check and hit the bank account. We were like, Oh man, we hit the jackpot. Right. It's all relative. Right. And I, I think that's, there's an important lesson in there and how scrapping us can win the day, you know, and you have to be careful about as you gain resources or as you are able to obtain venture capital, you know, you have to deliver more with that money. Right. So I think with the 2 million, you know, it was a bit faltering at, at first, right? We didn't... I think there was a vision, a product vision there, but how we take that to market or hire our first employees was frankly not very developed at the time. We would sit around sometimes just talking about what we needed to do more than... I don't know. There was just a lot of... Especially as we started bringing on employees. And it was tricky for my co-founder and I. We hadn't given each other titles. We were just... very, I think I was saying earlier to you guys, it was like this very idealistic, romantic, it's a commune, we're all together. But then quickly the reality set in. It's like, who tells engineers what to do and such? And it got a little tense. So my co-founder and I parted ways. And I think that's really, honestly, as much as I respect him, and I think ultimately we should have set out these roles and responsibilities early on, that's when we really started the company. Because then it was like, okay, I'm in this alone. This is terrifying. because people bet a relatively large amount of money on us. And I've got to get our crap together here and make a plan. And so that's when I was like, okay, how are we going to hire people? I actually moved out to California, which had kind of been in the process, and used networks from MIT and such to help find some really critical engineering talent. And we were kind of off to the races. And we were a little bit lucky in that our investors knew that they were funding a deep technology company. I don't think that at the very beginning, they were expecting a ton of revenue. They just wanted to see some betas and some progress, right? And customers liking it and getting value. So we got, you know, some companies have to jump into the deep end. And if they don't have real revenue by their age, they're dead. But we always got a little bit more wiggle room just because I think people knew databases are hard to build. GPU databases and full stack GPU analytics solutions are even harder. And that this would take a little more time.

Tony Olzak:

So you've got your initial round of funding. You moved to California, which I heard is a great way to make your money go further. And now I imagine you're starting to think about scale. You said you're starting to hire employees. I'd just love to hear what your experience was and maybe how that might be different in true startup mode versus a little bit further down the path, which you are today.

Todd Mostak:

That's a great question. So Yeah, we moved to California. The funny thing is, I don't think there were tons of deep business reasons behind it. Sure, one of our early customers was out here, the company in Silicon Valley. Plus, NVIDIA was out here. Google was mostly out here. So there were some things, but I think a lot of it was romantic. We watched Social Network and wanted to be just like Zuckerberg, right? So anyway, we got out here. I think it was, in hindsight, a good decision just tapping into the talent networks here. And, yeah, like, I think the funny thing, especially after we raised our A, and our A round was $10 million, which is, you know, compared to two, it was a huge leap, and it was a lot, 5x. I think some of the first mistakes, which have taken a bit to recover from immediately, and maybe this is also part of being a first-time founder. I think investors believed in me and believed in the vision, but there was always a little bit of adult supervision. Does Todd need adult supervision? I hadn't done this before, and that's completely fair. In hindsight, I also think it led us to hire ahead of ourselves or hire maybe bigger than we needed to, or people who would probably have been good fits at later stage companies earlier than we needed to. And so I think for a period, there was a little bit of mismatch between, you know, I have any asset, it's, you know, like drive and like just wanting to run hard and being scrappy and, you know, maybe a little bit of gut about where the product and market are going. But, you know, there was a little bit of mismatch early on when, you know, people who want to bring in processes and other things that probably are the right things for bigger companies. But I also think that one of the biggest advantages of an early stage startup is its ability to be nimble. And so there was some things there that, you know, some lessons I've learned, you know, I think always in a startup, even a company like Amazon or, you know, you look at our Netflix, you got to think young and think small, right? Because that's your advantage against these bigger companies. You need the processes you need, but not, not more. So I don't know if that answered your question, Tony, but that was kind of the starting out. And we started hiring people and such and, And some of our key employees are still here today, five, six years later. Five years later, we're from that initial batch. And it feels like we got lucky we didn't have recruiters or anything. Just people thought what we were doing was cool. Building a database on GPUs, we were lucky that it attracted a lot of great engineering talent and such. People who just wanted to pitch in, do something badass like that.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, that's great. And I think you touched on this a little bit. I mean, moving to California into areas where people are flocking to do something exciting and work on what comes next. And there is a little bit of benefit as people are congregating in areas, understanding that they want to go build that next thing. So definitely a smart move. You mentioned Netflix and Amazon and how you think about process. As someone who had never really done this before, how important was culture to you when you were thinking about to really nail that side of the company?

Todd Mostak:

I don't think I thought about it really at all. I'm just being really honest, or much at all. I mean, you think about it unconsciously, right? Is that person a good fit here? The question whether, yeah, I think you were mentioning earlier, would you want to sit next to that person for five hours on a plane? For sure, right? There's that piece. But I don't think we consciously thought about culture for the first few years, frankly, of our existence. And I think that's common. I've heard that from other founders. And the other part is that I think culture is like when you're young or when you're early stage, it's just like the water you swim in. You don't really think about it. The culture is embodied in the small group of people that you've hired, right? And it may not be needed or even very possible. to consciously shape it as just that small group of people and the dynamics that they create. And a lot of it is, you know, as I've read now in hindsight, defined by the founder's personality and how they approach the company. So I think it wasn't until later that we really started to think about how we consciously cultivate the culture that we want. And one of the things, and as we grew, it was important for us to maintain our focus on kind of technical leadership and our technical skills a culture of technical excellence and meritocracy, especially as we brought on, not that marketing or salespeople are bad, they're absolutely necessary, worth their weight in gold, but we wanted to make sure we kept a product and engineering-driven culture, a culture of ownership. These are all in our core values. We even stole from Jeff Bezos and day one attitude. Every day is day one, right? Because one of the things I found, going back to the process part, is it's very easy to slip into day two thinking. And I once had somebody ask me, like, why are we focusing on this? That's something that happens to big companies. And I think that's absolutely wrong, frankly, because it can happen when you're 30 or 40 people, right? You just start getting comfortable. Maybe you land that round of funding. You look at all the money in your bank account, say, okay, we can relax. We should put in these processes. We don't need to be as hungry or as... frankly, paranoid, to quote Andy Grove, as we were. And that's the beginning of the end. And that can happen on year two or year 20, right? But it's easy for it to slip in. Yeah, we did see

Todd Gallina:

that quote, the day one quote that Bezos has and how you attribute it to your company as well. And many people do. But as you said, it's tough to do. It's tough to do as you grow, for sure. Hey, transitioning from developing the company to getting your first customer, you guys, when you first created your beta, you had interest from household names, Procter & Gamble, Verizon, Qualcomm. So they're very interested in coming on board early as customers. Can you tell us a little bit about bringing on big names, the risks associated with that, and more importantly, the rewards with getting something that you created in the hands of customers and seeing it really work?

Todd Mostak:

Right. And I think that's a really important question. I think there's a delicate balance here because we were lucky to... So Verizon Wireless was one of our first customers. And as you would expect, they were fairly demanding and had expectations. And we were lucky to find somebody who was a visionary enough to see our potential, but put off with the gaps that inevitably exist between any early stage product and mature product. And it delivered them huge... I think it helped that for them... You can imagine Telco. And Telco is by far our biggest commercial space. And we're putting a lot of focus there to even expand even more. Telco is producing so much data. And there's a lot of value on being able to understand that in real time, whether it's analytics around fraud or why calls are being dropped or monetizing customers or preventing churn. The list is... Or where you put cell towers, the list is fairly endless. So it was a big boon to them. And I think being in the deep end early on was helpful because I also see startups that are... It actually doesn't necessarily matter the size of company. You can be at places like Verizon. But if you're used for kind of science projects or by innovation groups, not that those things are bad per se, but you're not really put into heavy prod, you might be a nice to have and you never get the deep feedback of like, man, my reputation or my business is depending on you. So that was good for us. And we had a set of those customers early on, Fortune 50s. And then we started getting into federal as well in a fairly major way. The thing I think that can go wrong, which I've seen with other folks, other founders I know, is that all of your business depends on one company, one or two major customers. And A, that's obviously risky because it's not diversified. If they're at a churn, you're really in bad shape. But also, they just have so much control over your roadmap. You don't build a product for market, you build a product for them. So I think we're really lucky to have a set of early customers that use it heavily and had high expectations. We saw the real-world use cases, but they couldn't dominate. Any one couldn't dominate the roadmap because it's nothing else because the other ones would get pissed off that they weren't getting what they needed. So it was a delicate balancing act, but I think healthy for

Todd Gallina:

us. That's great. I'm sure one of the ways you were able to do that is just share where the product was going. I don't know if you give examples of different customers that are using them, but it allowed you to stay true to what you were building. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. So we've had a couple of people on the show. In fact, you're the third founder that we've had on that went through a name change. And there's always a different reason around that. So as you mentioned, you guys were previously known as MapD. That's what you were founded as. And then you became OmniSci. Can you take us through a little bit of the why the name change and then maybe some difficulty around

Todd Mostak:

that? Yeah, no, happy to. You know, I think the public why that we gave, and I think I can be a little more open about this now that it's in the rearview mirror. The public why was, for one, MapD. Everybody thought we were some kind of mapping company at first blush, right? So, you know, it'd be annoying. Like, oh, you're just a mapping company. You're like MapQuest or something. I'm like, no. It had to be the first thing out of my mouth just so, you know, people wouldn't get confused and go down a different rabbit hole. And it was hard because One of our strengths, I think, as a platform is big spatial temporal analytics. GPUs are very good at geospatial visualization, things that traditional BI or GIS tools don't do well. They don't scale or they don't have the deep geospatial analytics. So it was doubly confusing. Now, that was one reason. I really love the name MapD and we still have a lot of people wearing, there's like a MapD subculture where a lot of people wear their old MapD gear around the office or when we were in the office. There was another reason, which is a certain company wasn't happy with the closeness of the name to their name. And I won't go more into that, but that was really like, we had always thought like, should we change our name? But it always seemed too risky. I frankly don't think we would have done it, but that's what pushed it over. Tony and I are practically

Todd Gallina:

Googling, Other companies with MAP in the name.

Tony Olzak:

No, I think I know what he's talking about and I don't think they're going to be a problem anymore. Yeah, they may have been acquired.

Todd Mostak:

Anyway, so that's that. Everybody says a name is just a name, but if you built up brand equity in a name, this is just a little bit of word of warning from my own experience. It's a bigger shift than you think. It was a tough transition, frankly, because I think a lot of people, I've had people come up at trade shows and be like, are you competing with MapD? Just like MapD, we are MapD. Even now, a lot of people still haven't made the shift almost one and a half, two years down the line. And so I think there was a lot of loss of name recognition and people just wouldn't find you. And we've basically gotten back in more, but it took a year, year and a half. That's a lot of... You think about the leads that were lost, we're fine, right? I mean, things are fine, but I do... And we started to have to do a lot of brand campaigns just to get the word out and had to push our marketing team just to deliberately tie. They wanted to sail off into this brave new world, which makes a lot of sense. But I'm like, you need to slap the MapD logo on all of our booths and everything we do just so people can make that connection because it takes longer than you think. People were coming up to you and they're like, are

Todd Gallina:

you competing with MapD? And you're like, what, the mapping company?

Todd Mostak:

It's pretty funny. Yeah, so it's not as easy, especially if early days, I'm sure it's fine. But like, that was several years in, right? And there was like a little bit of a cult dev, especially kind of cult dev following around MapD. It was a little more difficult than I expected. I think OmniSci is a better name, right? Frankly, from a, doesn't sound like mapping, OmniSci giving knowledge to all data science connotations. But yeah, it's more just a brand equity thing. We think it's cool. Yeah, it's a very cool name.

Tony Olzak:

So beyond competing with yourself against yourself, how do you think about competition? Do you track your competition or do you even believe that anyone is your competition based upon the problem?

Todd Mostak:

No, I think, yeah, competition exists on different levels, right? And I always heard a useful way to kind of divide it is market competition versus technological competition. So I think in the sense that we're trying to overturn the space, a lot of people who buy our product were maybe using a combination of a data warehouse like Vertica or Redshift in the cloud, or maybe it's Snowflake, or maybe it's something else, Teradata or something, and Tableau or some other BI platform on top. And so they kind of, and they may still use those things, right? They may pull data from Vertica into us and they may put Tableau, we're an open database, so they may put Tableau on us and that we've actually tried to make that work really well, especially recently for some customers. But the full stack will display some or all of that, right? But the nice thing is that we can actually partner with these guys too, depending on what makes sense. So, sorry, what was the question again? I got so into...

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, it was about, do you actually travel? Yeah, and

Todd Mostak:

so there's that thing, right? And then there's, and we definitely feel like we're on a mission to overturn the status quo. Our mission is to make analytics instant, powerful, and effortless for everyone, which the undertone of that is it's not like that at all today, which I really don't. It's cumbersome, it's slow, it's surface level in many cases. Now, technologically, there are other players who have entered this space. I think you don't want to toot your own horn, but some at least in the wake of us getting some notoriety and being able to raise funds and having some wins under our belt. And so that's good, right? Competition is healthy. I've never been somebody to obsess over competition. And maybe this is the space, it depends on the space you're in. I feel like you have to focus on innovating for your customers and doing everything you can to make them happy. And if you do that really well, and it's more than just making them happy, but it's also figuring out how to find new customers, of course, then the rest will follow, right? I think if you're too obsessed with competitors, you'll just do me two things and you won't innovate. On the other hand, I will say in hindsight, it can be good to be aware and a little bit paranoid, right? Because especially when there's like a small space, everybody who tries you will try your competitor. And I think in hindsight, maybe some of them were We were kind of our heads in the clouds. We're building great product, right? We could have been a little harder-nosed at times and made sure we at least were able to defend ourselves because that's just the way enterprise sales works, right? And really be able to articulate the advantages of our product versus the other competitors. So I think I've grown to realize the importance of being competitively savvy, but I don't think competitive obsession is really healthy for anyone. So it's a fine line.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, for sure. I think Todd was, uh, Todd Galena was going to challenge you on your rock collection later, but, uh,

Todd Mostak:

I'm still, I can, my daughter was, uh, starting to collect rocks and I couldn't even remember like all the names anymore, you know, geo for sure. You know,

Todd Gallina:

there's a rock named after my last name. There's a Galena rock.

Todd Mostak:

That's right. Yeah. Is that, is there any relation there or? Todd's

Tony Olzak:

still getting royalties, yeah.

Todd Gallina:

It's more closely resembles my intelligence level, you know, but it's got a stripe on it, Tony, in case you ever want to find one. I think I

Tony Olzak:

know

Todd Mostak:

what you're

Todd Gallina:

talking about,

Todd Mostak:

Todd. Yeah,

Tony Olzak:

that's

Todd Gallina:

cool.

Tony Olzak:

So, you know, we started thinking about your founder's journey. At some point, there's conversation around an exit. or an acquisition? Are there criteria for what comes next? And are you guys gunning for one thing or another? Or are you just so focused on what's going on right now that it hasn't even crossed your mind?

Todd Mostak:

That's a good question. So I think for us, because we were doing this deep technology play, and especially as we started to get customer traction, it was always like, go as long and go as fast as we can to build revenue and market traction and build best products as quickly as we can. And yeah, the rest will work itself out. So by that, I mean, I think like if you over optimize on an acquisition, you're likely to, um, you find the local maximum, right. Versus just like, we're, you know, we were lucky enough to be well funded through the years to the different rounds and focusing on just like innovating service customers and building market share. And then, you know, you'll be more attractive to potential acquirers if that was it. But frankly, I think the end goal for now is there's no reason that this market's not big enough to support public company if we can execute correctly, right? So that's the goal. I mean, I'm also a pragmatist, right? If it ever ended up that market for us capped out at X, which I don't think will be the case because I don't think this is about GPU, accelerated analytics, right? Really, this is about interactive analytics at scale in a way that nobody else can do. And that's the TAM of big data analytics is tens of billions of dollars, right? So I fully think there's a potential there. It's more down to can we execute. But if I found one day, hypothetically, that the market wasn't there or we didn't have... the ability to execute at the level needed, I think that's when you start thinking about an acquisition process. We're just not there yet. I also think that the best way if you do want to be acquired is to have deep, profitable, organic partnerships with key players that you probably didn't start with acquisition in mind. It was to complement your go-to-market. And we're always focused on building on those. Just like We have an incredible partnership. We're very proud of it and proud to work with you guys. You do that as just a part of business. And then some of the big players out there may take interest someday. Not a focus right now.

Todd Gallina:

Well, you've had to make a lot of huge decisions getting up to this point as it relates to exit or acquisition. That's one of the many big decisions you've got in front of you. Todd, for sure. Hey, this has been awesome. This has been great. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to share with our audience, Todd?

Todd Mostak:

I would just say that if you're thinking about starting a company, it can be really fun. Obviously, it's been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, aside from family and kids. Rewarding in a different way, honestly. But it's brutal. It's tiring. It's thankless many times. If you're a founder and you're a solo founder, which essentially I became, you don't rarely have somebody to confide in and the odds are stacked against you, right? I feel like a lot of things that we're still here and growing, it's like we got lucky breaks along the way. I found somebody, found the right investor, etc. So just a word of warning. Do it because you think you want to do it, because you'd have fun doing it, or because you think you would learn from it. but not necessarily because it's going to be a walk in the park or just like you see on Shark Tank or something. Maybe that's actually not a good example of this. I'm like, if VCs were ever that, if somebody was like that, I would just walk out of the room, right? So aggressive.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah.

Todd Mostak:

They're so aggressive. I mean, even if they are aggressive, they do it in subtle ways. Those guys have it worse. And they're like, you sell half your soul for $10,000. The

Todd Gallina:

money's always so low compared to the stuff that we're used to seeing. It's funny. Todd, this has been great. I'm sure speaking for Tony and myself, we've just learned a ton. I'm sure our listeners are going to dig the advice that you laid out here. What an exciting, thrilling journey. that you've been through up to this point. We just can't wait to continue to watch as this unfolds over at OmniSci.

Tony Olzak:

Once again, Todd, that was amazing. Thanks so much for being here. Appreciate the time. Can't wait to see what you guys do next. And you take care of yourself and your family. Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Todd. It's been great.

Outro:

Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast.

Todd Gallina:

Until next time.