The Exchanges

Q Do you want to double click on that history from the relational database of yesteryear or, you know, Oracle, not to pick on them, to document databases, to New SQL? What was the evolution?

A Yeah, there's lots of different threads that you could weave through the evolution of these systems. I think the Oracle, maybe as we start there, they certainly weren't the first of these relational operational databases. But they really did become ascendant through the nineties in the, in the early aughts. And, um, then I think where cockroaches story really starts is when the, the worldwide web came to prominence and all of a sudden there were use cases that were actually bigger than what you might call an enterprise use case where you had a certain number of customers for a big company. And all of a sudden you could reach most of the people in the world that had a desktop computer and then a mobile A mobile app of some sort a little bit later, but that actually opened up a gap between what the capabilities of the existing operational databases like Oracle or MySQL could provide for, and what the use case demanded. So I was at Google in 2002, and we kind of ran head first into this with their AdWords system, which very quickly grew beyond the capacity of a single MySQL instance, and so they started adding more MySQL instances, They divided the customers between the MySQL instances they had, and then they had to double that, and double it again, and double it again, and that actually started to create all kinds of other problems, and so Google started to innovate with database…

AI assessment note: “there's lots of different threads that you could weave through the evolution of these systems”

Q At the very beginning, and I guess still today, you were a very successful open source company. Do you think the world has evolved as well? You know, there was a time everybody hated open source as a business model, and then it switched to everybody loved open source, and open source was the only way. Do you think that has evolved?

A Yeah, unquestionably it's evolved. So when we started, we adopted what's called the open core business model. So the idea here is that You have an open source product that drives really broad adoption. So you get some level of ubiquity. Many, many, many people are using it because, hey, it's open source. It's very, very easy to download, to work with. You're not paying upfront for the software. You may eventually pay for support. That was sort of the Red Hat model for open source. But the idea with the open core model is that open source product would just be the core. And what you do when you started getting that ubiquitous adoption, You just start to introduce enterprise features, which would be a different license. Most people would adopt with the core, and then you'd upsell them to the constellation of enterprise features that, ah, essentially form the, the, the basis of your, um, enterprise offering, let's say. The, the, that business model, I think, lasted about four or five years. When we started the company, it was, it was, I think, a good bet that that's, that was the right way for us to do it, and we operated under that until it started to become clear that open source business models were under threat, in particular from some of AWS's actions. So they really went after Elasticsearch. That was one that they, I think, changed the nature of the open source business mode…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, unquestionably it's evolved. So when we started, we adopted what's called”

Q Actually, uh, can we double click just on that piece because that's a question that comes up all the time. You're a young startup. You're very technical founders. Who's your first Are they young with high slope? Are they experienced? Who are they?

A It's an interesting profile. You definitely don't want somebody that, you know, has been working at a scaled organization and really understands how to manage sales folks, scale the team, expects marketing to have a, you know, a certain amount of leads inbound and so forth. In those early stages, you need somebody that specializes, really, In an exploratory sales motion, because you don't know how much you can charge for your software yet. You certainly don't know what kind of messaging is going to work, who your ideal customer looks like. You're trying to figure these things out, so you need somebody that can go into any customer and really just listen. I mean, to be fair, that's always what you should be doing in a sales motion, but I think some people are really geared towards listening with their ears perking up When someone mentions something that just might have something to do with your product, right? Because you just don't know exactly what, what that motion looks like yet, and you have to figure it out, and there's a lot of things it could be, right? So that, uh, there is a certain kind of sales, early sales leader that specializes in that, but as soon as that person starts to figure out what that motion looks like, you're probably going to need to replace them, because the person that can figure that out is not usually the person that can Mentor other salespeople and…

AI assessment note: “you need somebody that specializes, really, In an exploratory sales motion”

Q lot of people are trying to do into the building companies. To support a customer, uh, in that scenario, what, what did you do, and what do you do? Do you, like, you take your engineers, and you assign them, or do you have a customer success team that's deeply technical? Like, who, who does this, and how does it work, and who do they report to in the organization?

A Well, obviously, like all things, this evolves. Just like I mentioned the exploratory sales leader, which then evolves into somebody that can scale the organization and run the enablement. The customer success side of the story also evolves. At the beginning, it's, it's literally the database engineers, at least in our case, that are, that are working on these things, because we didn't have a customer success team. But, well, it's pretty interesting customer success, right? I mean, certainly if something goes wrong with Oracle, you don't have the, the chief Oracle database engineer, like, working day and night on your problem. If you did, it would probably get fixed more definitively. So, you know, it's kind of like, that's something that you can actually bring into the early sales conversations. And like, well, you know, you are extremely important to us as a customer. You're a partner. You're going to influence our roadmap, and we care more about your problems than any other vendor's ever going to, right? So you, you can actually sell that. So in the early days, it really was, including me, like everyone would be on these problems and would be, would be working to solve them. But then you, you hire your first customer success. Uh, you know, your first, actually it was technical support that we hired first. Then customer success. And, you know, in terms of escalations, you hav…

AI assessment note: “At the beginning, it's, it's literally the database engineers”

Q go to market and, um, you know, in a, in a context of a shifting environment from open source to cloud and all the things. But so, um, how did you start? How did you get the first customers? What worked? What didn't? And then as you evolve towards more of a sales organization, What's, when did you do it? Why did you do it? How did you do it?

A That's a good question. You know, when we started Cockroach Labs, I realized that we'd probably be an enterprise software company, and that made me very nervous, because I'd never really dealt with that problem before. I'd, I'd built software at Google, for example, for Google engineers, and that was sort of more the, the, the mental model I was comfortable with, and the idea of having potentially hundreds or thousands of, of customers that, uh, needed to be supported was, was, um, It's something I had to get my head wrapped around. Um, I, I will say that it's, it's very easy when you're, when you're the sort of chief technical evangelist to go and talk to customers, and it's something you should do very early and often, and try to find those design partners. Um, it's very hard though to sell, especially to a larger organization. I, I quickly realized that, uh, the, the, the, the gulf between Um, being able to get somebody very interested in your software and actually getting an MSA and, uh, a signed contract and money in the door was, uh, not something that I was gonna cross on my own, and so we, we hired our first, uh, account executive and SE pair, and I watched how, uh, these two went after some of the customers that were interested in Cockroach, and...

AI assessment note: “we hired our first, uh, account executive and SE pair”

Q Yeah, and the, um, so the fundamental premise of CockroachDB is to be best of all worlds of like scalability and transactional reliability. What, what, what is the, like, the, What does a product do today, I guess?

A Yeah, so that actually kind of brings up a question that some of you might have bugging you in the back of your mind. Why would we call anything CockroachDB? It's not exactly a popular insect. It's really around survivability, and that was one of the key things that we, we sought to build into the product from the start, and it was one of the things that motivated Megastore at Google and then Spanner at Google. And this is an idea of like, hey, in the public cloud, things are just different. You have data centers just on the East Coast. You've got many data centers to choose from, and they're very close together, and if you can balance data across them, you could lose an entire data center and actually not miss a beat. No postmortems, no running around trying to get the things back online, potentially losing data. The thing can just continue maybe with a couple seconds of latency. So that was really cool. We built that in. The other big challenge we started out to solve was scale. So we really wanted to be able to support huge use cases, but you don't necessarily know whether your use case is going to be huge, and a great example of that is if you're trying to build a game, right? If you build that with the wrong back-end infrastructure that doesn't scale properly, then you're going to run into a success disaster if your game's popular, and so your thing's just going to fall fl…

AI assessment note: “It's really around survivability, and that was one of the key things”

Q Yeah. And building on this point of, um, self-hosted to cloud to serverless, if you were going to start a database company today, would you go directly to the cloud as the, as the market evolved that way?

A That's a really good question. I think maybe not, but my God, if you thought about having to build all the things that we've built over eight years, I don't know if I'd want to start the company. The reason I say it would be hard to imagine just going straight to serverless, although that would be the only way that you, you could think about doing it for the reason I just mentioned, but the reason that would be difficult is, well, there's, there's a lot of competition if that's the only way that you run, right? If you want to win, at least in 2022, the global 2000 as customers, you really do have to have a product that, that runs in a variety of different configurations. Because people are, ah, I think, reasonably hesitant to, to, to adopt a solution that only works in, in, in a single fashion. So, I mean, I'm not saying it's, it's not possible. I, I, I agree with you. We'd probably go directly to, to serverless if that was, ah, if we were starting today, but I'm glad we don't have to make that choice because the fact that we run in as many different, um, configurations as we do is extremely, Appealing to the high end of the market, which is, I think, where also the differentiators I mentioned, scale, resilience, multi-region, those are incredibly important differentiators to the high end of the market, little less to the low end, although you do see in the emerging companies t…

AI assessment note: “We'd probably go directly to, to serverless if that was, ah, if we were starting today”

Q And then, um, fast forward to today, you have, uh, more of a top down sales led kind of motion. Do you, or do you still get juice from the community and some bottoms up inbound? Uh, what does it look like at scale?

A Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a combination of a lot of different things. We, we definitely, we still get open source lift, which is interesting. We, we get it through increasingly a product led growth motion with our serverless Platform and we're, we're extending some of the principles and product led growth even to upmarket, uh, in terms of, for example, how, how is the product experience? Let's say a really big fortune 10 bank is betting on your product, you know, strategically, and it's being rolled out within the bank. You want all the individual teams in that organization to experience the benefits of a product led growth motion. And so, like, those principles apply. If it, if it's all top-down and sales-led, it's very hard to scale, very expensive to scale. So you, you do want to balance those, but it depends on your, your use case. With CockroachDB and probably any database that's operational, it's a solution sale. It's very involved. There's multiple stakeholders. Um, it's, it's, it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? If you, it can be very difficult to get past all the hurdles and all the technical evaluations and the, And the, the, just even the contracts and things, because this is, this is a very, ah, important part of the stack. If it goes down, everything goes down, right? So the contracts become more fraught as a result. So, um, you know, you, you do need to have …

AI assessment note: “We, we definitely, we still get open source lift”

Q Very nice. By the way, I love the design of the cockroach. That has to be the best looking cockroach I've ever seen. Uh, so where are you in the process of building all of this and launching and, you know, for anybody that wants to become an open source community contributor?

A So it's, um, it's still in the alpha stage right now, so I wouldn't recommend anyone put it into production. We've had like a tremendous amount of interest from especially free letter government agencies. And, and also from, um, uh, some big international companies, in particular in China. I think, um, you know, they're seeing a lot of use cases where just off the bat you're gonna have, you know, hundreds of millions of people, um, that you have to deal with. And also find in the international arena, um, even new companies are looking at, um, their potential customers in a very global sense. Everything just has to start international because they're not starting with, you know, such a huge built-in market like companies in the U.S. So, you know, they're, they're coming in with problems like, well, we have to, we have to, you know, have data centers all over Europe, and they all have to be, you know, fast for local reads, or they have to even be from Brazil to China and to Mexico. And so, you know, those kinds of use cases are ideally suited for Cockroach. Um, so, you know, interestingly, we've gotten a lot of help from those companies, too. We actually have, uh, um, you know, uh, open source contributors, like a whole team of 10 people from China, for example, And, ah, you know, some people from the US government, um, because, ah, you know, they're, they're so interested in it.…

AI assessment note: “it's still in the alpha stage right now, so I wouldn't recommend anyone put it into production”

Q Yeah. So let's get into that. So we started talking about this evolution of SQL to NoSQL to, you know, new SQL and category in which Cockroach arguably falls into. So you seem to be going towards this concept of a data cloud or where does a cloud fit into this? And then the next step after that, which is serverless, but let's talk about the data cloud.

A You hear a lot about the data cloud these days. I'm not exactly sure what it is. Uh, you know, one, one observation I'll have about sort of the idea of convergence and data infrastructure is that it's very, very difficult to build a piece of infrastructure that serves as an operational database, just like it's very difficult to build a piece of infrastructure that serves as a data warehouse or a data lake or an analytic system of some sort. In order to be the very best in that, you have to, I think, have a, A somewhat single-threaded focus in, in the product category that you're trying to compete in. Otherwise, you become a jack of all trades and a master of none, I think is the, the way people put it. And so, I, I don't see, I, I see consolidation in some products, but in general, the, the industry leaders in each product category will continue to have a, a more narrow focus. But, you know, I mentioned before, the cloud is fundamentally changing things and, and offering, Incredible opportunities to, to do things, again, faster, better, cheaper, right? Uh, the, the, the realization that we had is the cloud allows you to get resources almost anywhere, uh, programmatically and in seconds or minutes even. And that's, that was a fundamental change from the way the world used to work. And in fact, companies that still do have their own data centers struggle with this problem continu…

AI assessment note: “You hear a lot about the data cloud these days. I'm not exactly sure what it is.”

Q So one of your key customers, at least, uh, publicly is Netflix. I think it'd be really interesting to, um, use this as an example. How does a company like Netflix use Cockroach?

A Actually, that gets to another interesting point. So we have a number of different flavors of Cockroach because that's actually been necessary in our evolution as a company. We started off, and Cockroach was something that you ran yourself. We call that self-hosted. Because when, when we got started, that's how most of the, the bigger customers we had were insisting that they wanted to use databases. These are our operational databases. This is the thinking, right? And this is what we're, we're used to running these ourselves. This is storing our most valuable sort of crown jewels, the data for our operational use cases, and, um, if you're, if we're going to use a new technology, we're going to run it in our, Sort of information security envelope with the, the people and the processes that we trust. And so we had that self-hosted product. Uh, we, we quickly started realizing that there was a, the kind of new wave and certainly the future, even for those, uh, existing self-hosted customers was going to be to use a cloud product that was a service that was managed. Right? So in other words, the way that AWS offers their databases to all of their customers. Uh, and so we started building that cloud product. And then what we started realizing is that, uh, serverless was, was going to be an improvement on that, and we started building the serverless product. So we actually have a, u…

AI assessment note: “Netflix is one of these self-hosted customers. Uh, that's how they still want to run”