Astronomer

“You know, I think the most exciting part for me from all that is throughout all of that, right? We do not lose a single customer or a single employee.”

“When you look at kind of what we did for the rest of that quarter and coming into the next quarter, not only did we have our biggest quarter in company history after that, we also made major strides from a business perspective in terms of the product and servi…”

“So astronomer focused on the airflow company started in 2018, and it kind of grew out of previously astronomer. The company had started before, and we were focused on something else. We were building a clickstream product. So if you know, like the company segm…”

“The first version we built of that product, we built that backend orchestration piece. We used a cloud native service for that, something called SWF, Simple Workflows. And that was good, but what we found was we needed something a lot more dynamic, and we need…”

“And this funny thing started to happen where we tell customers what our product was powered by, and they'd be more interested in that than the product itself.”

“Somewhere in the hundred to 400 range.”

“Segment was very good at what they did. And we were always playing catch up. And when your job is to play catch up, you know, that's not something that makes it feel very sustainable. It doesn't really give you that much room to innovate.”

“Like you could have every internal conversation that you want. You can kind of debate things to no end. You can look at studies about market size and so on and so forth. But when people who are willing to pay say, I will pay you if you can give me an easy butt…”

“Running open source technology is like adopting a puppy. Right. Like it's free to get, but it's a lot of work once you got a puppy. Right. And that's kind of where this idea of commercial open source comes in. It's like doing all of the things that you don't w…”

“In the early days, it's really about going into conversations with your biases turned off. It's like, hey, I want to focus on the problem this customer is bringing to me. I don't want to focus on trying to find some sort of Confirmation bias for preconceived i…”

“In the tech landscape, a really good guidance point for that is to do it with a, based on the salary of an engineer, right? You can say, hey, is this going to be worth half an engineer's salary to you? And you kind of put a number on that, or is this going to …”

“In the early days, Airflow was used for very, what I call analytics workloads, as in the sense that it would move data around, and ultimately, the end result would be a number in a dashboard... What ended up happening is Airflow still does those analytics work…”

“And in that stage for us, the way you think about price and value is completely different because you're not thinking about, hey, what is the cost of an engineer doing it, right? You're thinking about what is that problem worth to a business and how would a bu…”

“We needed to show traction in a way that was set at a higher bar than if we were based in San Francisco, or if we had had the creator of the open source project on our team.”

“In fact, now that you're saying it, I think our most successful email campaign was the subject client was Don't open this email unless you use Apache Airflow. Like, that was the subject line we used.”

“Because we didn't have a bunch of astronomer t-shirts we could give them, one of the things we'd do is like, we'd look up who we're visiting, find out what they majored in college, and we'd go to like the used bookstore and get a book about that topic. Because…”

“Getting to the first million definitely took over 18 months. After we got to that, it definitely went faster, but it was a slog to get there.”

“Airflow has downloaded over three hundred million times last year, and there's 80,000 plus companies using it. And that includes everyone from Siege State Startups to The biggest banks in the world to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that are building incre…”

“I was offered a chance to sell my shares in secondary at our Series B, Series C rounds. You know, that was, this was the Zerp era, and I said yes.”

“They did need a new CEO immediately. And the founder, I believe his name is Pete, stepped up within days. Pete DeJoy.”

“Nothing will kill a joke, like independent of all the crazy astronomer, Chris Martin, Coldplay thing. There's nothing that will kill a joke faster than a series D enterprise SaaS company making the joke.”

“This is maybe some of the best crisis comms work we've seen in you know, this decade.”

“The last fiscal year, astronomers saw a 150% year over year ARR growth, world-class, a 130% net revenue retention, and 90% product utilization with customers.”

“If you are, especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO you should be, you should probably not be talking about that. See that CEO. Because if you come out and say they were not good and that's why I had to step…”

“The production company was involved with the latest astronomer video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow.”

“I think they're worse off in the sense that they have to do a CEO search, which is always tricky and has a one in three chance of failing.”

“The CEO of a company called Astronomer was caught on the kiss cam hugging one of his employees, the head of HR.”

“There's a polymarket today on whether he'll be out by the end of next week. Ah, odds are currently sitting around 38%.”

“We're not actually producing a YAML file or any proprietary file format at the end of the day. We're really just producing a best practice Airflow DAG file.”

“We actually acquired a company called Datakin not so long ago.”

“I think we're around 350 people now, give or take. We have folks in New York, London, San Francisco, India, and kind of all over remote first.”

“I think, like, the cloud, it's worth also mentioning, like, the major public clouds that have managed air flow services as well. You know, we see quite a lot of adoption of Amazon's MWAA service and Google's cloud composer service, and I think, like, that real…”

“We basically offer access to our team. And our technology for one flat price, you know six grand a month if you want it to run on in our shared cloud, or 10 grand a month if you want us to put up a private instance of the platform so that your data, so that yo…”

“We ended the year at a 600 K ARR run rate. So we went from zero to 600.”

“1.1 million. Priced. Yeah, yeah. No, no, it was a convertible note. So we've actually done like four rounds of notes, which is something shocking to me.”

“No, we're actually, we've got 20 customers. So yeah, average revenue historically is around three K a month.”

“So our churn, our, we've got a net negative churn of 48% right now.”

“So two, a third of our revenue is, is from expansion revenue of our current revenue.”

“So we had new customers, you know and we're about to, like I said, add about a bunch of new ones here in the first part of the year and probably double our revenue in the next six or eight weeks.”

“We actually just started here in, in 2017 to spend any money on customer acquisition. everything's been referral and outbound up till now.”

“No, I say we started around 12 months, then we got down to about six months, and then we doubled the team size. We went back up to 12, and now we're back down to nine again.”