Jun 13, 2024 · 49m · mad
How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of The MAD Podcast, host Matt Turck interviews ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz about how ClickHouse evolved from an open-source database into a fast-growing real-time cloud data platform powering major enterprises like Netflix, Spotify, and Uber. Katz discusses the platform's columnar architecture, unconventional product-led growth strategy, expanding role in AI infrastructure, and his personal career journey from Salesforce and Elastic to leading ClickHouse.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Matt holds 20% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Matt as informed peer 3.5 Guest teaching 3.6 Guest disagreement 0.8 Matt pushing back 0.7
speaking balance: gold is Matt, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:56 Dismissing SDR and CSM roles as organizational crutches
Aaron forcefully challenges conventional SaaS organizational wisdom by arguing that SDRs and CSMs often serve as crutches hiding underlying flaws in product quality, marketing, or sales execution.
Hardest push from Matt ▶ 16:33 Challenging open source adoption limitsMatt refuses to accept a general narrative about open source dominance, asking Aaron why open source hasn't successfully disrupted the application layer in the same way it transformed infrastructure.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 24:39 Reframing competitive landscape by workloadAaron directly corrects Matt's attempt to identify a single head-on competitor, educating the host on how database competition is strictly segmented by specific workload requirements rather than a single direct rival.
Matt holds his own ▶ 34:26 Connecting sales methodology to Frank SlootmanMatt demonstrates his deep knowledge of tech leadership tactics by immediately identifying Aaron's lean GTM philosophy as the 'Frank Slootman school of thought' and pressing on the exact operational mechanics of cradle-to-grave reps.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Matt as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Matt pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Origins and Creation of ClickHouse | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Matt opens with a broad introductory prompt asking what ClickHouse is. Aaron delivers a comprehensive overview of ClickHouse's origins at Yandex, its open-source adoption, columnar architecture, and cloud strategy. | |
| Key Use Cases for Real-Time Data Processing | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Matt demonstrates industry context by bringing up real-time trends over the last decade and mentioning Confluent and Kafka. Aaron details three primary customer use cases including B2B SaaS analytics, cloud data warehouse migrations, and observability. | |
| Building ClickHouse Cloud and Cloud Data Strategy | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Matt asks about the transition from open source project to ClickHouse Cloud and how it moved so quickly. Aaron explains skipping the traditional enterprise support phase to build a serverless cloud offering straight away. | |
| Rapid Product Execution and Product-Led Growth | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Matt observes that ClickHouse Cloud launched in record time compared to typical infrastructure startups and asks what enabled this. Aaron credits an experienced engineering leadership team, significant initial R&D capital, and a self-service product-led growth motion. | |
| Open Source Disruption and Application Layer Dynamics | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Matt probes into why open-source disruption has been dominant in infrastructure but much less prevalent at the application layer. Aaron acknowledges the insightful question and uses his Salesforce experience against SugarCRM to explain how bespoke application business logic creates defensibility. | |
| Self-Hosting, Bring Your Own Cloud, and Global Expansion | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Matt inquires about self-hosted deployments, bring-your-own-cloud strategies, and the product roadmap. Aaron shares details on supporting enterprise setups like Netflix, partnering with Alibaba in China, and expanding into Japan. | |
| Real-Time Data Stacks and ClickHouse in AI | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Matt showcases his modern data stack knowledge by naming specific ingestion and visualization partners like DBT, Fivetran, Looker, and Rill Data. Aaron gently pushes back on the modern data stack buzzword framing while explaining ClickHouse's role in AI workloads as a feature and vector store. | |
| Competitive Landscape and Workload Migrations | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 | Matt asks Aaron to name ClickHouse's head-on competitors, specifically referencing Snowflake. Aaron rejects the single-competitor framing, clarifying that competition varies entirely by workload across OLAP databases, transactional databases, hyperscale data warehouses, and logging backends. | |
| Go-to-Market Framework and Global Scaling | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Matt outlines the operational complexity of scaling GTM globally across various verticals and customer sizes. Aaron responds with a structured three-dimensional GTM framework covering internationalization, industry orientation, and market segmentation. | |
| Lean Sales Operations, Cradle-to-Grave Reps, and Events | 6 | 5 | 4 | 2 | Aaron takes a strong contrarian stance by declaring that success means avoiding SDRs and CSMs, calling them crutches for broader product or marketing issues. Matt recognizes this philosophy, explicitly tying it to Frank Slootman's playbook, and presses on how support and sales responsibilities overlap. | |
| Hyperscaler Partnerships and Category Leadership | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Matt shifts the topic to Aaron's personal career trajectory from sales leader at Salesforce and Elastic to CEO. Aaron shares an entertaining backstory about failing business school applications, working in a Lake Tahoe restaurant, and getting hired by Marc Benioff at early-stage Salesforce. | |
| Navigating Global Distribution and Culture at ClickHouse | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Matt asks how ClickHouse maintains cohesion across a distributed workforce spanning San Francisco, Amsterdam, and 15 countries. Aaron explains how an experienced executive team leverages the benefits of remote talent without relying on return-to-office mandates. | |
| Long-Term Vision and Growth Strategy for ClickHouse | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Matt asks about the five-year vision and definition of success for ClickHouse. Aaron draws an analogy to Salesforce's historical strategy of dominating its primary core product line before expanding sequentially into adjacent categories. |
Statements from this episode (26)
Aaron Katz saw Elastic lose prominent workloads to ClickHouse
“When I was at the previous company that I worked at another open source technology company, we started to see click house pop up in the wild. And we actually started to lose some pretty prominent workloads to the technology.”
ClickHouse counts Spotify, Netflix, Disney, and Uber as customers
“We are taking this very powerful analytical database that's used by companies like Spotify and Netflix and Disney and Uber and eBay and Cloudflare, and we're building a managed service in the cloud that we're calling ClickHouse Cloud.”
Snowflake was not engineered for low-latency, high-concurrency workloads, says Katz
“Snowflake is a columnar, a data store with the separation of compute and storage like we have with our cloud service. But I don't believe that it was originally engineered to power these extremely low latency, high concurrent analytical workloads.”
ClickHouse Cloud accumulated over 1,000 customers in its first year
“We launched our cloud service a little over a year ago, and we had this phased release where we had a private preview and a public beta, and then made it generally available, and over the course of that year, we've now accumulated over a thousand customers on …”
Katz: ClickHouse workloads are split evenly across SaaS analytics, warehouse migrations, and observability
“Somebody that needs very low latency, high concurrent analytical workloads, typically to power, let's say a B to B SaaS application. That's about a third of the use cases that we see. Another third would be traditional cloud-based data warehouses that are not …”
Katz: Instacart uses ClickHouse for cost control, fraud, and A/B experimentation
“Instacart's a very prominent one and one of the more recent ones that have talked about their use of ClickHouse and in an effort to obviously control their spiraling data warehouse costs, they've looked to ClickHouse to help solve that problem, but also in ter…”
Aaron Katz: ClickHouse skipped enterprise licensing to go straight to cloud
“Having been through that journey, I just decided to skip that first step and go straight to cloud.”
Aaron Katz: ClickHouse has ~170 employees with over 80% in technical roles
“So we currently have about a 170 employees. And 80 plus percent of those are in technical roles or in engineering roles.”
Aaron Katz: ClickHouse intentionally delayed sales team expansion until reaching PMF
“We didn't want to build on the go to market side until we had established product market fit and had referenceable customers.”
Katz: Open source struggles in applications because business logic is too bespoke
“I think the applications are so purpose built that the business logic behind them is so bespoke”
Katz: ClickHouse has nearly 500 companies on Azure waitlist pre-beta
“We have almost 500 companies on the waitlist for our Azure offering. It hasn't even been released in Public beta yet.”
Katz: ClickHouse partnered with Alibaba Cloud on multi-year revenue share agreement
“In China and other parts of Asia, we've partnered with Alibaba, specifically all the cloud for them to redistribute our cloud binary as an enterprise version. And we'll, we have a revenue share agreement in place with them for the next few years.”
Katz: Sony is a customer of ClickHouse Cloud in Asia
“One of the largest, you know, electronics manufacturing companies in the world is, is a customer of ours on cloud specifically in Asia and not even in Japan yet. So and that's Sony.”
Katz: ClickHouse has been used as an AI feature store for years
“And so the reality is ClickHouse has been used for in AI applications or to power AI applications as a feature store for years.”
Katz: Lyft migrated off Druid and onto ClickHouse
“Druid is an example where Lyft recently, the ride-sharing company, migrated off of Druid and onto ClickHouse.”
Katz: eBay migrated off Druid and onto ClickHouse
“EBay is another example of a company that migrated off of Druid and onto ClickHouse.”
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.”
Over half of ClickHouse's revenue comes from outside the US
“And already over half of our revenue comes from outside of the United States.”
ClickHouse plans to add 100 employees over the next year
“We went, basically went from zero to a 150 employees in two years, and we're gonna add another hundred in the next year.”
Aaron Katz: ClickHouse currently lacks an outbound sales motion
“We really don't right now. We should, we don't.”
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.”
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…”
Aaron Katz: ClickHouse support engineers handle pre-sales alongside post-sales
“Our support engineers are as involved in pre-sales As they are in post sales.”
Katz: ClickHouse will not mandate a return to office for distributed employees
“We're not going to have some return to work mandate for people that are obviously distributed.”