Felix Van de Maele
Co-Founder & CEO, Collibra. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientist
Felix Van de Maele is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Collibra. He previously conducted research in computer science before launching the enterprise data governance company.
2shows
2appearances
26statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Felix Van de Maele said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Centralizing enterprise data in one warehouse will never solve all data problems
“Data repositories, data warehouses, they all argue that just move all of your data in one place, and it's going to solve all of your problems. We've been hearing that promise for the last 25 years, and it's never solved all of our problems, and it never will.”
Van de Maele: Digitally native companies often lack orderly data
“You'd be surprised that some of those digitally native companies, very data first companies, you would think they have all of the data in order as definitely far from the truth.”
Van de Maele: Legacy data incumbents missed the cloud transition
“The second one is what I call the incumbents that I think have kind of missed the boat to the clouds. And I think you're going to be struggled there to kind of provide that experience.”
Van de Maele: Cloud hyperscalers fail to connect metadata to business context
“The hyperscalers, they're great at kind of managing within their ecosystem, right? If you're purely technical metadata within BigQuery or Snowflake or Databricks and so on. But then how do you tie it to the business? That's not something that they do.”
Van de Maele: Effective data governance requires a business workflow engine
“I think a core part of all of this is this kind of understanding that actually you need a workflow engine, like a business process engine to help people kind of work together effectively.”
Van de Maele: Metadata management must serve as data's system of record
“We believe kind of a new approach is, is required where where the metadata management kind of foundation You really built a kind of a, almost what we call a system of engagement of system of record for data.”
Van de Maele: Collibra had zero customers for two years before pivoting
“We want to do data integration better. We tried for two years had zero customers. And so that's when we kind of pivoted into kind of data governance.”
Van de Maele: Early-stage startup operators fail in structured corporate leadership roles
“Put it, put a pirate on Navy ship. That's not going to work. Put a Navy captain on a pirate ship. That's not going to work either”
Collibra replaced its entire original leadership team within three years
“And I remember the first leadership team I've built, I thought these are all amazing people and they all are amazing people. And I thought that was going to be your leadership team for the next foreseeable future. And two years, two or three years later, it wa…”
Van de Maele: Organizational scaling should mimic software API and SLA architecture
“Just like to have APIs and SLAs and a product, you need to do the same thing on the company level, right? You have to modularize, you have the components, you have to kind of org chart.”
Van de Maele hired Collibra executives without meeting them in person
“I had a few new executives as part of the executive team without having seen them in person ever.”
Founders have no extra managerial rights, only greater corporate obligations
“As a shareholder, as a founder, I don't have any additional rights as a manager. I only have more obligations, if you will, because I'm a founder.”
Collibra maintains an annual customer churn rate of 3% to 4%
“Yearly customer churn is really low. It's about three to four percent.”
Van de Maele: Data quality discipline originated from marketing mailings
“Originally it kind of, it came from how do we make sure that our marketing database that we send email mailings to the addresses are correct. That's where data quality came from, 20 years ago.”
Collibra was profitable and tripling annual revenue before raising Series B
“But then we started to bootstrap it until profitability. We were profitable tripling every year. And that's when we were, we raised our first bigger rounds, our series B rounds. About twenty million.”
Collibra raised a $50M Series C to reach $75M total funding
“In December, just last December, we did a fifty million dollar rounds series year round. All in we did about seven, seven seventy-five million.”
Van de Maele: Collibra aims to enable 'Amazonification of data' for enterprises
“What we want to get is to get to is that we call it the Amazonification of data, where ultimately users just shop for data like they are on Amazon. They put it in their data basket, so to speak, and then it goes to approval work workflows to actually get acces…”
Collibra sees an average annual contract value of $200K to $250K
“Yes, it varies, but right now it's about 200 to 250 K.”
Collibra maintains a sales efficiency ratio around 0.9
“It's around benchmark benchmark data around 0.9.”
Van de Maele: Collibra manages metadata without moving or storing customer data
“We don't move any data. So we have kind of connectors. We tie into all of your kind of data systems on-prem and the cloud. We capture all of that metadata. Table, schema, columns, files, and so forth. That's kind of how we built that metadata graph, but we're …”
The other half of the tape: Felix Van de Maele's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Felix'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 & CEO, Collibra | 1 | 13 | — | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Collibra | 1 | 13 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Top Founders → |