Yellowbrick: Interview With Founder & CEO Neil Carson About The SQL Data Platform Company
Summary
I scraped through my software engineering degree at the bottom of the class, despite acing the programming classes, because I was spending my time on entrepreneurial pursuits instead of studying.” “In the US, I worked at big companies like Oracle, BMC, and Dell to learn how smooth-running organizations worked, and at small companies like Liberate, Everdream, and Fusion-io to be part of early-stage scrappiness and understand how the sausage is made. We realized it was possible to produce a much higher-performing OLAP database at a far lower cost by making proper use of SSD storage to reduce memory requirements and increase CPU throughput. So, when investors came to do their due diligence and understand the latest hardware capabilities, we were literally removing server parts from the garage and putting them next to the kitchen sink to talk about them! Our customers love us because of performance and cost savings at scale (compared to legacy technology like Teradata, IBM, RedShift and Oracle), security (running in private clouds and on-premises), high concurrency (lots of users querying live data predictably) or the Kubernetes-centric, hybrid cloud nature of our product that’s great for businesses with data residency concerns.” What challenges have Carson and the team faced in building the company? Carson acknowledged: “The biggest challenge for us, like many later growth stage technology companies, has been in dealing with the realities of the new business environment: Lower valuations and harder fundraises while growing somewhat slower than before.