Aaron Katz
Co-Founder and CEO, ClickHouse. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@ceo_clickhouse ↗LinkedIn ↗clickhouse.com ↗
Aaron Katz co-founded and leads ClickHouse, guiding the open-source analytical database’s transition into a high-performance commercial cloud platform serving customers like Netflix, Spotify, and Uber. Before ClickHouse, he built a 25-year career in enterprise software, serving 12 years in global sales leadership at Salesforce and later as Chief Revenue Officer at Elastic.
2shows
3appearances
79statements
15resolved
13supported
0contradicted
87%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Aaron Katz said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
SDR and CSM roles often serve as a crutch, says Aaron Katz
“In my experience, it can often, both of those functions can be a crutch for a broader issue inside of the company.”
Katz: Revenue durability is the single biggest risk for AI applications
“If you were to come down to one, if you were to say this, what's the single biggest risk would be durability of revenue because the switching costs that you and I talked about are very high for infrastructure software. The switching costs can be very low for a…”
Katz: AI agents will be fully autonomous within three to five years
“If you look out three to five years, those agents are going to be fully autonomous.”
Katz: Frontier AI labs will remain dominant over specialized models
“I think you're going to have specialized models for specific use case, like legal tech. If you look at Harvey, for example, I know they're, I think, leading the category in terms of specialization, but I think the large frontier labs are still going to be the …”
Katz: Top Silicon Valley startups are considering moving workloads on-prem
“And even companies that I thought would never be going back on prem are talking about going back on prem. Like some of the most innovative digital native companies in Silicon Valley are now thinking about moving their stack from, you know, one of the hyperscal…”
Katz: Very few open-source companies successfully defend their moats
“I think if you can maintain A competitive advantage with your cloud offering or your proprietary features that are very, very difficult to replicate, then you can maintain that moat. And I think very few open source companies get that right.”
Katz: ClickHouse will surpass $1B in ARR before December 2027
“Well, I'd put the over under at December, 20, 27. And I would take the under.”
ClickHouse sees demand to migrate workloads off Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift
“In the cloud data warehouse market, to answer your question specifically around Snowflake, we do see demand for customers to migrate off of technologies like BigQuery and Redshift, and Snowflake either for Cost or performance or both.”
Aaron Katz: Cradle-to-grave sales reps boost efficiency and customer retention
“If you can enable your direct sales team to kind of handle a lead from cradle to grave I think you're going to drive efficiency as part of your sales organization. I think you're going to improve your customers buying experience and you're going to have higher…”
Katz recommends Datadog for hosted APM over stitching custom solutions
“If you are looking to deploy a hosted APM solution, and you asked me objectively, my recommendation, I'd say use Datadog. I'd say that the product, the maturity, the experience is, is considerably better than trying to stitch together something using ClickHous…”
Katz: Low AI gross margins matter less given rapid growth
“As long as they can demonstrate a path to margin expansion over the course of the next few years, while still growing at these unprecedented levels with very healthy balance sheets, I worry less about gross margins like we did five years ago in traditional ent…”
Katz: ClickHouse's Anthropic spend is up 100x this year
“Our anthropic spend is up a hundred times from what it was at the beginning of the year.”
Katz: Anthropic and OpenAI Outpace Open Weights on Application Harnesses
“Anthropic specifically and open AI have the benefit of being both a model provider and the harness provider that the open weights models right now are behind in.”
Katz: Tesla ingests one billion events per second into ClickHouse
“Tesla, for example, is ingesting a billion events per second into ClickHouse.”
Katz: Anthropic chose ClickHouse after asking Claude for a recommendation
“If you ask Anthropic how they chose to use ClickHouse, they'll tell you they asked Claude, what technology should we use for this specific observability use case? And Claude suggested ClickHouse.”
Katz: AI token volume will split 50-50 between open and frontier models
“Well, the easy answer is fifty-fifty in the same way that what percentage of enterprise software today is open source versus proprietary. I think it's a pretty even distribution.”
Katz: Enterprise indemnification requirements will limit open-weight model adoption
“I don't, because I think it, especially in the enterprise, they want provisions and protections that potentially open weight models, especially those that come out of China, cannot provide. Around indemnification, for example, and output inference, and it's go…”
Katz: ClickHouse extended its financing despite having $1B on its balance sheet
“And so we did a financing earlier this year, and then we extended it and brought in some strategic investors like yourself and David Sachs and Michael Dell and JP Morgan. We didn't need the capital. We had a billion dollars on the balance sheet.”
Katz: ClickHouse raised at a $2B valuation with zero revenue
“The Series B that Cotu and Altimeter jointly led at two billion felt expensive. We had no revenue. We had no product. We had control of an open source database. We had no customers. We had 15 employees.”
Katz: AI customers represent less than 12% of ClickHouse's revenue
“The basket of AI companies that's using us in nearly every AI companies built on ClickHouse from Harvey, Sierra, Decagon, Anthropic, OpenAI, et cetera, represents less than 12% of revenue.”
Katz: Companies Should Not Manufacture Internal Adversity or Enemies
“I worry about creating adversity inside of a company. Well, you have so much adversity outside of your company, right? You've got to deal with competitors, disparaging yourself and the company. You've got to think about how you stay ahead of the competitive la…”
Katz: Software Engineering Graduates Will Face an Uncertain Market in Four Years
“If you're studying software engineering, I think you're going to be entering a market that's very uncertain in four years time.”
Katz: AI token management jobs will be made irrelevant by self-governing agents
“And then that job will be made irrelevant five years from then, because AI agents will govern themselves.”
The other half of the tape: Aaron Katz's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 4 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2Alex Bouaziz 2Martin Casado 1
Statements about Aaron Katz, by other people (2)
Bouaziz: ClickHouse can build an iconic business competing with AWS
“ClickHouse is led by Aaron Katz. He's a savage in every way. He's really, really good. You should probably talk to him. They are, I think they can build an iconic company that can properly compete with AWS.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 5
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Aaron's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, ClickHouse | 2 | 42 | 92% 11/12 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, ClickHouse | 1 | 37 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |