Justin Borgman - Co-founder of Starburst

Our recent podcast guest and 2-time founder saw entrepreneurship as a way to have an impact on the world. He and his employees wanted to do something to help fight against COVID-19, so they made their whole enterprise solution free to COVID-19 researchers.

That’s true impact. That’s wanting your work to do good in the world.

In this episode, we interview Justin Borgman, Co-founder & CEO at Starburst, about founding his second startup.

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

Transcript

Justin Borgman: 0:00

My advice would be be opportunistic, be open to the opportunities because I don't think you ever really can predict when a great idea is going to cross your path.

Todd Gallina: 0:14

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. We're excited to have you here. My name is Todd Galena, and with me is Tony Olzak. He's the Chief Technical Officer here at Trace3. Tony, how's it going? Hey, Todd. Doing great. Good afternoon. Yeah, we got a kind of a scorcher out here as we're recording in Southern California. It doesn't happen that often, but, you know, temperatures got above 100 degrees, and, you know, people are dying in the streets, apparently. We can't handle it. Because there's like 4,000 wildfires

Tony Olzak: 1:10

happening there right now, right? Oh, yes. Also terrible, but yeah, adds to the heat. You know what's amazing is that my wife and I moved to Colorado. One of her reasons for moving was that California had too many wildfires. What she didn't realize is that that nice ocean breeze takes all the smoke from California and blows it right into Colorado. So our air quality is pretty amazing right now.

Todd Gallina: 1:35

You know, it's... It's terrible because she was probably pretty accurate because I imagine after you guys left, there must have been at least two or three colossal wildfires after you guys left.

Tony Olzak: 1:47

Oh, they're happening here now too, though. So, you know, that's just a fact of life.

Todd Gallina: 1:52

Oh, man. Hey, so I just wanted to share with everybody, all of our listeners, that Trace3 had its annual technology and leadership event just last week. Of course, we had some great thought leaders present there. Tony, you kicked off the show. Great job. Oh, thanks, man. But day three of the show was 100% dedicated to the community that we serve on this podcast. For example, Gamil Grand from Mayfield kicked off day three. Everyone's heard of Mayfield. They've been a Silicon tech investor for over 50 years. And we invite any of our listeners to go check out that stuff. You can go to tracetree.com and right there on the homepage, you'll be able to see the content that we put up from that three-day event. Again, day three was definitely focused on founders, VCs, and startups. But related to the show in particular, Tony, I was wondering if you'd want to play a little game with me.

Tony Olzak: 2:41

Ooh, sounds like fun.

Todd Gallina: 2:44

Okay, so what I did is I went back and I watched all the videos. And I have three particular quotes from speakers that I found super interesting. And I'm going to share those quotes with you. I'm going to obviously share who gave those quotes during their speeches. And then I was hoping you could expand on those quotes for the audience. Sounds good. Let's do it. All right. So Ashmeet Sadana, he is the founder and chief engineer at a company called Engineering Capital. His quote is this, data is the new oil and it's the new asbestos.

Tony Olzak: 3:22

Ah, yeah.

Todd Gallina: 3:23

Yeah, I remember that.

Tony Olzak: 3:25

Yeah, he had a really interesting take on this, which, you know, I think multiple people have already heard this whole data is the new oil, which is data is invaluable. It's the most valuable thing to every organization today's day and age. But what he posited was that over the next couple of years, businesses are going to try to get their hands on every piece of data they can. And over time, it can actually become toxic to an organization, meaning that when it comes to privacy and into the kinds of data and the waste and all the things that come around to it. And if you're not aligning it to IT value, that there's a big problem with the data that you have. And even from like a consumer example, TikTok was the example I believe that he used, which was they're consumer-facing. They actually have too much data and the kinds of data that they have and where it's being shared is actually going to result, could result in the death of the company, at least from a U.S. perspective. And not to get all into politics around this piece, but there's very real danger to if you don't manage your data well in all aspects, including things like privacy and what's going to happen with the future of GDPR and those types of regulations, that it's only going to keep getting more stringent. It's going to become a little more strict and what you can and can't do and what you can share. And you got to have a really good grasp on that. And that's where that saying comes in is that it is both the most valuable thing that your company can have and the insights that you can glean out of it. But there's so much waste and with the lack of oversight and control that it can become the newest bestest because it becomes very toxic to your company. Really very interesting quote.

Todd Gallina: 5:08

Yeah, it was great. His whole prezo was great. And that opened my eyes for sure. You know, whose responsibility is it? So let's say you're in an organization and you are doing data mining. Whose role is it to go and double check to say, hey, guys, listen, this data is going from super beneficial to the company to super detrimental in

Tony Olzak: 5:27

the company? Yeah, you know, that's something that is an evolving space. There are several different groups, and it depends on what industry that you're in. You know, in some cases, privacy is so regulated in what you're trying to do that you may have a... a privacy practice as a consultancy or a privacy department, or maybe it falls under risk and governance. You know, the data officers have been on the rise as a type of position that many organizations are taking up in today's day and age as well. And a lot of times data governance falls under them as well as another part of their responsibility. There's a lot of different ways organizations are trying to tackle this, but I will tell you that what we've seen is that as the economy gets tight, or stock values fall for a company, data governance is one of the first things to go. And I think that's where some of the worry comes into play is that if you're not proactively managing this. And if they're seen as a low value part of the organization because you don't realize the long-term impact, people are showing through their actions that we don't value that governance, that we don't value all the things that are coming to play that will spell a lot of problems two years from now. And I think that was part of the point of the talk is that we need to change the way we think about the value of data governance, compliance, management of that data, making sure that we've got mechanisms to remove wasteful data or data that could get us in trouble that is maybe sensitive in nature and how you manage through that. It's going to be very interesting next couple of years as we kind of accelerate all this digital transformation over the next month or two. accelerate this digital transformation over the next couple of years, not month or two.

Todd Gallina: 7:09

Things are moving pretty quick. And it's funny that you mentioned that because that's part of what this next quote is going to be. And this one's from Dharmesh Thakur. He's a general partner over at Battery Ventures, a huge investment firm. And, um, His point was that COVID was a huge reconciling moment for the way a company sees their technology team. And here's his quote. There's never been a faster evaluation and validation of what IT brings to the business than right now.

Tony Olzak: 7:36

Yeah, he had a really great talk around this. And it kind of touched on a couple different angles. And what he really was after is that technology, in many cases... has built many things that where they were a little bit ahead of the business and they were kind of bringing the business along. And when COVID hits and we had to rethink our businesses almost overnight, we started compressing years of digital transformation into months and businesses began to realize that one, there were a lot of things at their disposal from a technology asset perspective that they weren't leveraging that now they wanted not just that, but they wanted much more. And there was a massive acceleration that happened in the adoption of those technologies. But what's really cool is that if you start thinking about where the business is going and what they want, that there's going to be a really tight alignment between technology departments, the enablement and facilitation of innovation, digital transformation, bringing things like data to the table like we just talked about, but in very tight alignment to the business. And there's going to be incredibly fast cycles to evaluating the value the business value proposition of different types of technologies and how they impact the business. And we're going to expect them to happen at a tremendous rate of speed. One of the things that we saw that we heard from many of our own clients as well was typically you might have 900, obviously it depends on the size of the organization, let's say hundreds of projects going on at any given time. Well, if you apply some essentialism and some prioritization and you put all your people on one big problem, remote access, for example. They were able to do things. Many organizations were able to accomplish things in a matter of days or weeks that would have taken them years. And it turns out the business was perfectly fine with it not being or not being 100% of the way there, that 80% but doing it in two weeks was something that was magnanimous. And it was almost like a wake-up moment of what the possibilities were. If business aligns with technology and you have the same goals and you pour everything behind that, the speed that you can innovate and transform your organizations is pretty incredible. And so seeing what's going to happen over the next couple of years as we reevaluate the value that we believe that technology brings to the business and that we're leveraging technology more than we ever have to propel the business forward. There's going to be an incredible alignment between both sides of the fence and a very quick cycle to how we look at evaluating business value. Very intriguing talk.

Todd Gallina: 10:13

Okay. Obviously, we speak with a lot of startups that are focused on automation, AI. This quote is from someone named Tony Olszak, who's the CTO of Trace3. He said that automation creates more jobs than it destroys.

Tony Olzak: 10:29

Yeah. You know, that's something that is very top of mind, I think, for a lot of people right now is automation is just crazy hot in the industry right now. We have clients asking about us daily. Even if they're not publicly talking about it, everyone is looking at it. everything that happened to their business, the things that broke, the budgets they're operating under, maybe the efficiencies they want to drive. Maybe it comes from a digital engagement and shifting their business models. But how do you automate everything? But there is a concern around that that says, from a human to human perspective, and we're taking care of people, what does this mean for jobs? And what does this mean for your employees? And what's interesting is the World Economic Forum a couple of years ago put out some numbers that basically said X number of jobs are going to be destroyed by, and don't quote me on the exact number, but it was something like 58 million more jobs will be created than the ones that are displaced by 2022. And what's interesting about that is when you think about the efficiencies that automation drives, And then it changes what the art of the possible is for a business. And then as a business can expand what they get into or price points change or their market share increases, you inevitably create many more jobs. They just might be different. You're going to need to upskill. You're going to need to reskill. You're going to need different kinds of positions that are going to be generated. And it's definitely going to change the landscape of the business. But I think as we look at the benefit of moving much more towards an automated future, that we will have many more jobs that come as a result from the economic success of that future. And it's not really anything to be afraid of. And in fact, many, many people are embarking on this journey right now and doing some incredible stuff in this space.

Todd Gallina: 12:19

Yeah. And as you mentioned, creating jobs, which is huge. I think everybody was always terrified that a machine was going to take their job away. And I think you just illustrated why it's the complete opposite. For sure. Okay, so for those of you listening, as I mentioned, you can go back and check out these videos. Tony, as I said, had a great talk there, and you can see all of our founders. We had about seven or eight of them speaking, some of them pitching their technology. Please make sure to check that out. And Tony, I say we get to our guest. What do you think?

Tony Olzak: 12:49

I'm ready.

Todd Gallina: 12:51

Looking

Tony Olzak: 12:51

forward

Todd Gallina: 12:51

to it. Okay, as promised, our guest is a two-time founder and industry expert on all things big data and analytics. His first company, Hadapt, was founded in 2010 and was acquired by Teradata four years later. So we're really excited to hear about that. His current startup is called Starburst, who just 60 days ago raised $42 million in Series B funding. He is the co-founder and serves as chairman and CEO. Please welcome to the show, Justin Borgman. Welcome,

Justin Borgman: 13:19

Justin. Hey, thank you guys for having me. Yeah, how are things in Boston? You know, not bad. We're all trying to make the best of this situation. Fortunately, Massachusetts has done a pretty good job, I think, of staying inside and wearing masks and doing all the right things. So optimistic right now that hopefully things stay this way here.

Tony Olzak: 13:39

That's good to hear. And we've actually got some questions around that are sort of related to that we'll bring up later, but we'll get to that in just a second. And to kick us off, we would just love to hear a little bit more about Starburst and why you started. What do you guys do at Starburst?

Justin Borgman: 13:54

Yeah, so we're the company behind an open source project called Presto, which was originally created at Facebook. And it's a SQL query engine, which means that it allows you to run SQL queries very quickly across data anywhere. And that's really the piece that makes it unique is the fact that it's like a database without storage. It allows you to analyze data sitting in any other piece of storage that you might have. So for example, if you're a very large enterprise, you likely have Oracle. You have Teradata, you have IBM, you have a Hadoop cluster, and now maybe you're starting to move to the cloud. And so you've got data in S3 or maybe Snowflake. What Presto allows you to do is essentially run a query and access data across all of those different data silos. So it's become very popular for accessing data that you have within the organization and creating that more holistic view. And it also allows you to basically have a very low cost way of doing data warehousing analytics directly against object storage, like S3, for example, or Azure Data Lake Storage, or Google's Cloud Storage, all of which are kind of the least expensive tier of storage that you can have if you move to the cloud. And being able to access it there directly has a lot of cost advantages. So that's kind of the origin. We got involved back, well, actually, my co-founders created Presto back in 2012 while they were at Facebook. I got involved in 2014 after the acquisition of my first company. And then we formed Starburst back in and have been building the business ever since.

Tony Olzak: 15:26

Very cool. And your names have been coming up a lot lately, and probably due to a lot of people trying to figure out what they do next with what they do with Hadoop and how object storage is taking off. Have you guys seen a significant uptick in just market demands recently with the direction that Hadoop is going?

Justin Borgman: 15:46

Yeah, for sure. I think very much object storage is the new data lake. I think a lot of the concepts that Hadoop defined are really important and probably will stand the test of time. even if Hadoop itself is not necessarily the vehicle for those concepts over time. But the idea of open data formats, for example, storing your data in ORC or Parquet, these kind of open file formats is a big deal. And just the data lake concept is a big deal. But increasingly, we see that moving in the direction of the cloud and leveraging those cloud platforms as the new data lake.

Tony Olzak: 16:20

You know, interesting thing that we were reading about when we were prepping for this podcast was we read that you guys gave your software away for free. to COVID-19 researchers. How has that been received? And so soon after raising another round, has that put any stress on the organization or how does the organization itself embrace that?

Justin Borgman: 16:39

Yeah, I mean, I think at least internally here, all of our employees were kind of looking for a way to make a difference and have a contribution to this kind of global challenge that we all face. And, you know, we're not a drug company. We're not working on vaccines. So it was kind of like, you know, what could we do? And I think so much of this pandemic is really about data and trying to understand and track the virus and learn about it, understand it better. So we thought, hey, you know what? Presto's great at that. Presto's great at analyzing data. Could we make this available for free to researchers, our enterprise solution, which comes with a lot of extra features, and maybe have some small impact? And I think we've been pleasantly surprised. We actually have had a few people reach out and take us up on that offer. The government of Malaysia, in fact, is actually using it, as well as some others as well. So I think it makes us feel good like we can actually have some impact. And I think from a business standpoint, it really has Great to hear that

Todd Gallina: 17:52

people are taking advantage of it. Be interesting to see how that tracks. Justin, let's go way back to maybe some of your early years. Was there anything in your background that made you realize that you had an entrepreneurial spirit as a kid? Yeah, I think for me, it was

Justin Borgman: 18:10

actually like, right around age 12, which for me was the early 90s and kind of watching the internet be born and all of these great companies changing the world back then. I mean, Microsoft and Yahoo and later Google and Cisco and just seeing the way that the world was being transformed. And I think for me, what was attractive was just the ability to make a difference, as cheesy as that might sound. For some, that's politics. For me, I guess I felt like entrepreneurs entrepreneurship was actually maybe a more effective way, or at least one that made more sense to me on how I could have an impact on the world. So I think that was what drew me to it, was just watching these companies transform our way of life. And then it was kind of a question of how do you get there? I mean, as a 12-year-old, I had sort of no idea. So I got very involved in computers and got a degree in computer science and became a software developer. And even at that point, I still didn't necessarily know what business I would start. So it actually wasn't until grad school when I was getting my MBA down at Yale that I met some guys in the computer science department there who had some interesting research. And for me, it was kind of a light bulb went off. And I encouraged them to commercialize that research with me. And that research was called HadoopDB. And it was really one of the first, I would say, kind of thoughts around thinking about Hadoop or this data lake concept as a data warehousing alternative, as a lower cost, more scalable way of doing data warehousing analytics. And that was pretty interesting. I think back in 2009, 2010, when my co-founders were working on this. So we decided to actually spin that out of the university that became Hadapt. And that was really the beginning for me. And I think it was, you know, I guess my advice would be kind of be opportunistic, be open to the opportunities, because I don't think you ever really can predict when a great idea is going to cross your path.

Todd Gallina: 20:06

And so just a double checking on this. So you had spun Hadapt out of The MBA program, or had you been in the workforce working for a little while and then started it?

Justin Borgman: 20:17

So I had been in the workforce before business school. So I was a software engineer before that, and then went to business school really to actually just kind of broaden my horizon and get a better foundation on business. And again, thinking that I would one day be an entrepreneur, but not actually thinking that I would be necessarily an entrepreneur while I was in business school. So it was actually literally after the first year of the program, it was a two-year program. And it was after the first year that I started this business with my co-founders there. And I actually took a leave of absence from the MBA program to actually build this, later finishing at the end just to make my mom happy. But- Gotta make mom happy. That's right. The promise

Todd Gallina: 20:58

I made. You gotta keep those promises. You're here at Starburst. You raised two rounds of funding in the last 10 months. So congratulations on that. That's amazing. Thank you. But you guys were rolling for quite some time before you took on that investment. So can you walk us through kind of the first, you know, three or four years when you had bootstrapped the company and then the reason why you kind of seek the Series A and then the Series B? So, you know, bootstrapping was a great

Justin Borgman: 21:27

way for us to basically be patient about the way that we approach the business, really get to know our customers really well, and kind of craft the perfect go-to-market for what we were trying to do. That started with just selling support contracts, but I think that business model started to evolve to what some people call an open core model, where we realized that by providing extra value that wasn't available in the open source was actually not only really impactful for customers, but also a pretty viable business model, because now there was a real incentive and a real reason to buy. Because I think one of the challenges any open source company faces is How do you compete with yourself, essentially? How do you compete with free, right? Because the open source software itself is free. And I think one way to do that is to provide differentiated value around the core open source. Now, we continue to be the leading committers to the open source project. In fact, I think about 90 plus percent of the code base has been written by us. But it's those extra features that makes things work from a commercial perspective. And we were able to take our time with that and really see that work. For us, the first big feature was actually role-based access control. So a security feature that essentially allows different people in the organization to have different access to the data. And that feature, I think, was an important inflection point from a product perspective in terms of allowing the business to really start to scale. So that's kind of how we got it off the ground. And you're absolutely right. We ran more than two years without taking any capital at all. We were cash flow positive, profitable. And so when we actually met VCs, they were kind of puzzled because in Silicon Valley, you never really see that. You don't see profitable startups. So it was a fun

Todd Gallina: 23:11

way to get it off the ground. So the question is, why? So why the first round and then why the second round? Was there more development you wanted to make on the product? Did you want to invest in marketing the product? Give us a little insight there.

Justin Borgman: 23:26

Yeah, well, it was a combination of really two factors. I think one was we were starting to feel increasingly that this opportunity was even bigger than we might have fully anticipated when we started the business, quite frankly. I think what we were seeing was a lot of companies are in transition where they have data sources today and a vision for where they'd like to go. And in many cases, that's a vision to get to the cloud. And we were finding that Presta was kind of this perfect fit because it essentially creates optionality for our customers, architecturally speaking. So they can access the stuff they have today and also set themselves up for the future moving to cloud object storage, let's say. And regardless of what of that journey they're in, we have one kind of central SQL interface to allow you to run all those queries. So your end users aren't impacted by changing from one system to another system and to another system. All those migrations are hidden behind the scenes. It sort of abstracts it away. So we saw that playing really well in the market. And that combined with actually meeting a particular investor named Mike Volpe at Index, got us thinking. Mike is an outstanding investor just in general, but in particular, he's really, I think, made a name for himself investing around open source companies. And he was responsible for Hortonworks, Confluent, which is the Kafka company, Elastic. This is sort of like his thing. And he scaled these things up pretty substantially. So I was intrigued when we had the opportunity to speak with him. And I think kind of right place, right time just sort of felt like this was the moment to actually accelerate and actually take on capital to do so. Because the one downside to bootstrapping, bootstrapping is great. I highly recommend it to anybody, especially as you're starting a company. But the one downside is You can't grow as fast. You can only reinvest the profit that you generate, right? And so that's just going to naturally be a slower growth rate. So taking the venture capital dollars for us at that point was really more of a growth accelerant. And even though it was our series A, meaning our first round, we had already established, I think, product market fit and had already actually been in business for a couple of years selling this. So we were able to take that cash and immediately invested in scaling out the go-to-market, which Primarily me, hiring a lot more salespeople, in addition to engineers, of course, to continue to work on the product.

Tony Olzak: 25:49

Oh, that's pretty awesome. You know, that's very interesting how your journey went there. And did you guys raise money at your first company as well? Or did you bootstrap that one as well?

Justin Borgman: 25:59

That one, I would say, was much more traditional. We raised venture right from the start and raised about $17 million in total across a couple rounds. So much smaller relative to what we've done here. But I would say it was much more traditional. And I think a lot of the lessons from that experience informed the way that I wanted to build this business. And what I mean by that is when you do raise venture right out of the gate, you have immediate pressure from your investors and expectations. to hit milestones. And I think that's natural and it's normal, but when you're still in the product market fit phase of trying to figure everything out, that pressure can sometimes be counterproductive and sometimes force you to make short-term decisions. And I think there's very much a tendency in my view in Silicon Valley to try to pretend that you're successful before you are, kind of like a fake it till you make it type of mentality. And And that just never resonated with me. Just isn't my style. One of the company values that we have is this notion of authenticity, meaning kind of being real, being honest and being intellectually honest with ourselves. Like we don't want to convince ourselves that we're great. I think we like to look at our own flaws and see them as opportunities for improvement. So, you know, the bootstrapping model allowed us to really kind of stay out of the typical Silicon Valley rat race where you raise the capital and your next goal is the next capital raise. Like, Those are artificial milestones that aren't actually healthy, I think, in a lot of ways, right? Like our goal is to build a real business, a meaningful business for the long run, not just make it to the next round. So those are just some of the lessons I think I learned through the first business.

Tony Olzak: 27:37

Yeah, it's good to hear. It's kind of like being a music artist on YouTube with a million followers before you get your first recording contract is slightly different situation than being an unknown. Right, right. By the way, Justin, that happened to Tony. That's why. Every day. About to drop my new album tomorrow. So just shifting gears for a second. We typically will ask around the founding team, but your situation was a little bit different. In this case, you met some folks who were the primary contributors of an open source project. which was being used at an established company to solve a big problem. We'd love to hear more around, one, I think I read on your website the other day that you guys had like four CTOs. We'd love to hear about how you took that, the meeting of that group, turn it into a founding team. What thought might've had to be a little bit different coming from that angle? And then also, how did you then think about filling out the rest of the founding team?

Justin Borgman: 28:40

Yeah, absolutely. And we actually have 12 co-founders in total because of the way that we sort of started the business almost as a unit right from the get-go and with those contracts to work with. So yeah, 12 co-founders, all of them brilliant engineers, myself being, of course, the exception to that. but all the rest of them being brilliant engineers. The four CTOs is always funny that people ask about that all the time. You know, CTO number one was or is Camille, Camille Bida-Pavlikovsky, who was actually my co-founder for my first business. And as we were getting this thing up and running, he was coming with me from Teradata and was our first CTO, I guess you could say. Then we added the creators of Presto, Martine, Dana, and David. And we're trying to figure out titles for them and what role would they play. And we just settled on, hey, you know what, we're going to have four CTOs. There's no rules on how we do this. And the reality is all four of them play really, really important roles in our future. Martine, Dana, and David are very focused on the technology direction, kind of more inward facing on where we're going from a product and technology perspective and still super active in the open source community. And then Camille, I would say, is maybe a little bit more customer-facing, sort of focused on the application of the technology to customer problems. And so, yeah, it's a nice balance. Everybody sort of has their role there.

Tony Olzak: 30:05

Oh, very cool. Yeah. On that open source front, does that create any weird conflicts for companies or do they just expect it? Like, hey, we're going to contribute to open source. This is a big problem that we want to solve. A solution doesn't exist out there. We recognize that this may mean this talent will spin out to go pursue that later. I mean, how does all that work?

Justin Borgman: 30:25

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's sort of a... almost philosophical question of, you know, do companies create open source software or do individuals create open source software, right? And I would say there's probably a lot stronger argument to be made that it's actually individuals that create open source software. And, you know, when Martine Dane and David left Facebook, sort of the, you know, moral authority or the central voice of Presto kind of left with them and is embodied within them as the driving forces behind the project. So I think that's probably... an inherent risk in any open source development, but there's a lot of pros and cons that come with it. I think for a company like Facebook, not only is it a recruiting mechanism for their engineers to be able to say, hey, the technology you build here is going to be world-class enterprise grade and will have an impact beyond even Facebook. And I think that's rewarding for an engineer to sort of get involved with. And I think that's part of the appeal, even working at Starburst now and continuing to work on that project, you have that ability to a much broader audience, which I think appeals to folks. The other benefit is you get actually community involvement in it. So you're not the only one necessarily writing the software. In the case of Presto, a lot of the geospatial functions actually came from Uber. Uber is a huge Presto user, and they needed the ability to understand traffic and so forth relating to airports and other locations. So they added these geospatial functions, which now are used by just about every ride-sharing company in the world. They all use Presto because of these functions. We didn't actually build them. Facebook didn't even build them. Facebook added some more, but it was really Uber that sort of drove that initially. And so you get this nice virtuous effect of kind of everybody working together to make the technology even better.

Tony Olzak: 32:17

Oh, that's very cool. Well, and you kind of touched on something there that we're always curious about, which is, you know, that culture that Facebook was able to create that actually helps them attract talent and, you know, just with the promise of being able to change, not just them, but, you know, take your ideas and technology out into the world. So your founding team, you know, a good portion of them coming from Facebook and then you coming from Teradata and your, you know, other companies in your history, how much of culture did you pull from where you guys came from and how much of it survived? I guess what we're always curious about is what lessons did you learn and what did you guys apply to the culture at Starburst that makes it unique or things that maybe you guys have turned into your advantage?

Justin Borgman: 32:56

Yeah, that's a great question. Without hopefully not offending either of the companies we came from, I would say that I think our culture is sort of deliberately unique. And what I mean by that is some of our core values are this notion of grit, for example, like just working hard. Like we don't give free lunches here. Some of those companies in Silicon Valley do, and that's fine, but that's not our style. And so I think like kind of from day one, when you get here, we talk about this as not trying to build a unicorn, a unicorn being kind of imagination and not real, but rather building a workhorse. And that's sort of like our ethos, I think. You know, everybody here is working incredibly hard, grinding, Again, authenticity is really core to the culture. Humility is important to the culture. We want everybody to kind of express their views. And then this idea of ownership is also very important, not just literal ownership in that all of our employees, of course, own stock in the company, but the feeling of ownership, feeling like if there's something broken, you have the power to go fix it. And so those are all really, really important things to us. I think sometimes in bigger companies, you don't necessarily have that ability to to feel ownership over what you're working on. You have to ask for permission. You've got a bureaucracy perhaps to navigate with in some cases. So we really try to remove that and make sure people feel empowered to kind of just own it and make the company great because it's your company as well.

Tony Olzak: 34:27

Awesome. You know, just shifting gears just a little bit and... We can go back to that later if we have more time, Todd, because I'd love to explore some of that more, especially New England, like the Boston area companies versus Silicon Valley, which for sake of time, maybe we'll circle back around that if we've got more time at the end. But Justin, just like shifting gears for a second, we talked earlier about you taking a couple of rounds of funding within the last year. Now that money is coming in, you're looking at that next phase of growth. What's the hardest thing that you guys have experienced with that next level of scale? Now there's some level of expectation. There's some things that you guys set out to do. Now the money is there. We'd love to hear more about then how do you guys approach that and what hurdles have you had to overcome?

Justin Borgman: 35:11

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there are definitely growing pains that come with that. I think one of the most important focuses is that we've had internally. And fortunately, I think our entire executive team is aligned around this idea is the concept of enablement, right? How do we enable the new people that we hire? Because we've grown dramatically. I mean, probably 12 months ago, we were probably 30 people or something like that, maybe 35. I'm not even exactly sure. And now we're, you know, 135 or something like that. So, you know, adding 100 people in 12 months is One thing that changes inherently is I am not involved in everything or my co-founders are not involved in everything, right? We can't be. You can't sort of scale yourself as an individual that way. What that means is you have to make sure that the next generation of hires who are coming in know what they're doing you know who are you know when they're talking to customers they're saying the right things they know the right answers when they're working on the product they they know how to build the feature that we need to build so so there's a lot of investment i think that we're trying to consciously make in training and enablement and creating documentation i think these are all really really essential things because when you're just a dozen or a couple dozen people in a room, you can get that answer just through osmosis. And especially now in this COVID environment that we're in, you don't get the benefit of all those water cooler conversations. So it kind of forces you to actually be even more, I think, rigorous around creating processes for enabling your new hires.

Tony Olzak: 36:44

Yeah, that's actually a question I was going to ask because you're trying to scale right now and, you know, in the middle of a pandemic and what would, you know, normally factor into how you might think about that has to have radically changed. And, you know, we're very curious about how you maintain your culture with, you know, tons of new employees coming on board in the middle of all this remote work situation. Or if that was, you know, how much of that did it actually influence you or would that have been part of your design anyway? Because, you know, what kind of organization you wanted to actually have?

Justin Borgman: 37:14

Yeah, great question. It's funny because I probably haven't met half of our company because we've added so many people since this lockdown has started. And that's a weird, weird feeling, you know, to not actually have physically met so many people in our company today. There's always been an element of remote orientation just because when we started, some of our early engineers were actually in Poland and then we had guys in Boston and then we had people in California So the need to basically work across these three geographies created, I think, at least some systems of how do we do this, you know, Google Hangouts, Zoom meetings, etc. And again, documentation becomes actually an important part of that as well. The internal wikis that we use to sort of record in history, you know, the right way of doing X, Y, or Z become very important. But no doubt it's a challenge. I'd much rather be traveling around. You know, our VP of sales and I joke that, you know, we would take a middle seat any day right now, right? None of those things that you normally hate, right, about traveling, like now sounds so great. So we're hoping we can get back to it.

Todd Gallina: 38:26

That's so funny. That's so true. So miserable. You never wanted the middle seat, but now you want to be on a plane. So true. Right. Hey, one of the great things that we're learning when we're speaking with you, Justin, is you've applied a lot of lessons learned from your first go around to this, which is incredible because they happen relatively quickly. There's only about a year and a half or two years off between the two. Can you take us through the feeling of being acquired? When you launched Adapt, I don't know what your exit strategy was, but you were acquired. Take us through that. And if you don't mind, share with us if that's the exit strategy with Starburst or are you planning a much longer haul here?

Justin Borgman: 39:03

So, yeah. So with Hidapt, I mean, I don't know that we had a plan necessarily of exactly how big we would build it or what the outcome would be. I think, you know, myself, certainly I'll speak for myself. I was a first time CEO. I was 29 years old. This is 10 years ago now. So now I know how old I am. You know, I was figuring everything out by the seat of my pants and it was it was hard. It was incredibly hard. And I think the reason, you know, there are so many lessons from that experience is because it was such an intense experience. experience, survival, sort of what required learning quickly. And that's really the way I kind of felt that whole experience was. It was four years, but it felt like it went by in a day and it was just super intense. And I think as far as evaluating acquisitions when we did, probably stating the obvious here, but it always helps when there's more than one interested party. We were fortunate to have two suitors.

Todd Gallina: 39:59

Oh, that's

Justin Borgman: 39:59

great. Yeah, exactly. So that allowed us to sort of get what we were trying to look for, at least in terms of what the terms of the deal might look like. And, you know, it is the end of a journey, but it's also an opportunity to relax. And I think because that first one was so intense, I kind of needed those years at Teradata to repair and reflect and learn from everything through the first one. And now I think with this one, this one feels so much different to me in a lot of ways. I think With this one, every decision we've made from the beginning has been for the long run. And how do we build something that can really stand the test of time? Now, I can't tell you today if that means this is going to be some giant public company, but I do strongly believe it's going to be something substantial. And I think that's really our goal here is to build something meaningful that truly does have an impact on the industry. And so we're trying to make the right long-term decisions.

Todd Gallina: 40:54

We're excited to watch where things go. One of the things that we love to ask about, Justin, on this podcast is interactions you had with your customers. One of the things that makes you guys unique is when you started this company, you'd mentioned that you had customers right out of the gate. Can you maybe share a gratifying customer moment that you've experienced?

Justin Borgman: 41:14

Yeah, sure. So we now have a customer advisory board, which I think is also a recommendation I would make to any company. Once you have enough customers to warrant having a customer advisory board, it's a great venue to get feedback sort of collect feedback from your customers but also i think the reason i bring it up is we just recently had a few of these meetings and it's an opportunity to reflect as well on on i think the journeys that you've had with some of these customers which are meaningful they're meaningful even even personally you get to know these folks really well and and you know what you're trying to do to build this business here at starburst is also actually having a material impact on their career and what they're able to do within within the company so A couple of my favorite longtime customers are Comcast and FINRA. We're actually allowed to talk about both of those. So that's why

Todd Gallina: 42:05

I'm

Justin Borgman: 42:05

mentioning them. Not all of our customers let us use their name. But both of those teams are just incredible. In the case of Comcast, they have a really, really interesting use case. They've talked about this publicly. But essentially, they have event log data from every time you hit the remote control. All of that viewing behavior gets logged into a data lake. And then separately in a Teradata data warehouse, you've got billing information, what somebody subscribes to, how much they spend every month, maybe where they live. And if you want to actually correlate the shows that they watch with how much they spend and understand the customer lifetime value of a Bravo viewer versus an ESPN viewer, that's something that we actually enable them to do. It was a project that in the beginning probably was sort of an experiment and has now become really, really important to the business and drives a lot of revenue for the company. So that's just incredibly satisfying to not only see the impact we've had on the organization, but but also on the individuals as they have grown in their careers and they've gotten promotions and they've become more influential within their organizations because they were visionary and took a chance on us when we were small. And that's just such a powerful thing.

Todd Gallina: 43:17

That's incredible. It's funny. Trace3 is also a big fan of the customer advisory board. And I think Tony's like second day on the job. He ended up at one of our customer advisory boards. Yeah, we're big fans. Tony, you remember that, right?

Tony Olzak: 43:30

Pretty great way to kick off your job. I mean, just taking it all in. One of the things that we're curious about is there's a lot of radical transformation happening in data analytics right now. We touched on a little bit of stuff around Hadoop earlier and just what the future looks like in a multi-cloud world and what clients are trying to experience. When you guys look out at the landscape, is there anyone interesting that you view as competition and how do you guys think about your competition?

Justin Borgman: 44:00

Yeah, great question. I would say there are kind of two that we think about. One is AWS, because I think AWS is competition for almost everybody. Yeah, for sure. If they're not on your list, then they will be, I guess. So the reason they're a competition for us is I think they've historically... kind of made a name for themselves of taking open source projects that they don't actively participate in themselves. They don't contribute to the software, but they take them and they make them available at a low cost on their platforms. So they do that with Presto. They actually have two different Presto-based offerings. One is on EMR, and then there's one called Athena, which is Presto wrapped as a query service, essentially. And, you know, I think we always have to keep an eye on that. It's good motivation for us to continue to create compelling differentiation and make sure that we're adding value that Amazon can't, but it's definitely one that you always have to keep an eye on. I think they are the 900-pound gorilla, I guess you could say. The other that we think about, which is a little bit more of co-op petition, I would say, is actually Snowflake. So Snowflake, hugely successful, about to go public in a matter of weeks. And at least from what I hear, will be a very, very large valuation on day one. What's different, we basically solve similar problems, but do them in completely opposite ways. And what I mean by that is Snowflake is very much a traditional database, except for the cloud. That's kind of their differentiation. They're like Teradata, except for the cloud, which means that they have storage compute separation, and so you can elastically scale up and down. It's kind of a cloud-ready data warehouse. But like Teradata or every other traditional database, you have to load the data into Snowflake first. And there's a lot of time and effort associated with ingesting the data. And once you do, you're actually locked in. You've got all of your data now in Snowflake, right? And so now they've got you. And of course, prices will go up over time, especially at the public company. That's going to become more and more expensive for you. It's a great database system. I'm not knocking it in any way. And it's a great business success story. But it is very much to me just an incremental iteration of database history. Whereas the way that we approach it is we basically say, leave the data wherever you want. You have the freedom to decide where your data is. We don't own it. We don't take it. And we'll just query it wherever it lives. We still deliver very fast SQL performance, all the things that Snowflake does, but you have the freedom to say where that data lives. Now, the reason I say this is coopetition is because Snowflake can actually be a data source for Starburst. meaning that you could have some data sitting in Snowflake and some data sitting directly in S3, and you could join these tables together. And we do have customers who do that. So we're kind of able to play an agnostic sort of role to where your data lives, and Snowflake could be one of them. But I would say probably over time, it's our belief that eventually customers will start to make their data storage decisions based on cost primarily. So Snowflake or Oracle or Terady or what have you just become very expensive devices places to store data. So anyhow, I hope I didn't go too long on that, but that's sort of how we think about it.

Todd Gallina: 47:09

No, no, we totally appreciate it. Thanks for that. So we're towards the end, Justin, I think we wanted to circle back on one of the questions Tony had. And I think that was the difference between a Boston startup and potentially a Silicon Valley startup. Tony, is that where you were headed with that question? Yeah, exactly. Thanks, Todd.

Justin Borgman: 47:28

Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll say, first of all, that Starburst is a almost, I mean, maybe this sounds too grand, but global company in the sense that we have offices in a few different places, and that includes Silicon Valley and Boston. But there is definitely a Boston mentality, I think, to the way we approach things, this being headquarters here. And I think that's reflected in this sort of view that it's important to sort of be real, be authentic, work hard. we're less about kind of the self-promotion, less about the sort of smoke and mirrors, if you will, that I think sometimes comes out of the ultra-competitive environment that you have in Silicon Valley, where you've got almost too much money flowing around and pretty much anything can be funded sort of trying to grab attention. And I think here, we sort of just prioritize you know, reality and trying to focus on, you know, winning the next customer and winning the next customer and winning the next customer and building a great product and less about kind of beating our chest. So I hope that that gets instilled in sort of the culture that we build here. Again, you know, we talked about earlier, we don't offer free lunch and we're sort of proud of that because I think that speaks to to the way we think about the world. That, you know, this isn't supposed to be easy. This isn't, you know, we're not begging you to sort of come here and work on this. This is folks who are super passionate and driven and want to win. And I think that's where we're all united and just focused on that.

Tony Olzak: 48:56

That's great to hear, Justin. And thanks for sharing. I think we learned some incredible things today, and you guys are off to a tremendous start. We can't wait to see where you go next. Awesome. Thank you, guys. This was a lot of fun. You bet, Justin. Thanks

Todd Gallina: 49:08

for hopping on. Appreciate it. You bet. Take care.

Outro: 49:14

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. you've

Todd Gallina: 49:48

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