Viraj Parekh
Co-founder & Field CTO, Astronomer. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer
Viraj Parekh is a co-founder and Field CTO at Astronomer, an enterprise data orchestration platform built around Apache Airflow. He helped guide the company's early pivot from an analytics tool to an Airflow-focused platform, helping scale the company past $1M ARR and raise over $350 million in venture financing.
2shows
2appearances
25statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Viraj Parekh said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Parekh: Non-SF startups face higher traction bar than Silicon Valley peers
“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.”
Astronomer lost zero customers and zero employees after CEO viral controversy
“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.”
Parekh: Playing catch-up to Segment left Astronomer no room to innovate
“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.”
Parekh: Customer willingness to pay beats market size studies
“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…”
Parekh: Founders need 5 to 20 discovery calls daily to build resilience
“Unfortunately, the only way I found to get myself be able to do it and other founders I've talked to be able to do it is Just to do it nonstop. You really have to get yourself to get like five, 10, 15, 20 calls a day. Most of which you're getting bad news on a…”
Parekh: Anchor enterprise tech pricing against engineer salary multiples
“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 …”
Parekh: Value pricing shifts from labor cost to business risk
“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…”
Cloud data warehouses enabled modern multi-tool data architectures
“Architectures like this really have only become possible with the rise of folks like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, and this idea that as a data practitioner, I can have infinite compute at the kind of tips of my fingers without having to go outsid…”
Bypassing Git simplifies source control for non-software data teams
“The fact that I can take my skill set and have a source controlled pipeline without actually having to learn Git makes all the downstream people on my team's lives so much easier because they know exactly what I did and what I changed and they still get that r…”
Seeing manipulated data directly increases data engineer productivity
“I just think that as a data engineer, if you have to actually go ahead and maintain a pipeline, being able to see the actual data manipulated really increases your productivity.”
Astronomer posted its biggest quarter in company history following CEO controversy
“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…”
Astronomer Originally Launched as a Segment Competitor Before Pivoting to Airflow
“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…”
Astronomer First Used Airflow as Hidden Backend Infrastructure
“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…”
Parekh: Prospects Were More Interested in Astronomer's Airflow Backend Than Its Product
“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.”
Parekh: Astronomer had $100K to $400K ARR before Airflow pivot
“Somewhere in the hundred to 400 range.”
Parekh: Running open-source software is like adopting a puppy
“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…”
Parekh: Suppressing confirmation bias in early discovery yields better willingness-to-pay insights
“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…”
Airflow shifted from analytics dashboards to mission-critical operational workloads
“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…”
Astronomer: Most successful cold email targeted Apache Airflow users directly
“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.”
Astronomer gifted used college-major books to sales prospects instead of swag
“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…”
Parekh: Astronomer took over 18 months to reach $1M ARR
“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.”
Parekh: Airflow Logged 300M+ Downloads and 80K+ Company Users Including OpenAI
“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…”
Data scientists do the 'sexiest work' on data teams
“And lastly, you know, your data scientists who, in my opinion, are kind of doing the sexiest work when making business predictions based off of data, their needs are also different.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Viraj's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-founder & Field CTO, Astronomer | 1 | 19 | 100% 2/2 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
 MADLEDGER | Co-founder & Field CTO, Astronomer | 1 | 6 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |