Aaron Katz

Co-Founder and CEO, ClickHouse · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

42statements → 20claims → 12claims resolved → 92%fully supported → 3.98/5average certainty → 1.74/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources →

11 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 8 not checkable as stated how the 20 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 18 assertions · 3 opinions · 4 insights · 15 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 20 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 12 are resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Aaron argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Katz: ClickHouse will build a multi-tenant cloud-managed service
“And at the same time in parallel, we are going to build A multi-tenant managed service in the cloud, which will inevitably be deployed on a variety of different cloud platforms, whether it's AWS, GCP, Azure, whether we go to China, like I've done in the past a…”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 16:00 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
94% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 3.9 · coherence 4.4 · precision 4.3 · compression 3.6

redirected or did not address 4 of 14 assessed questions (29%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

246 words/min while actually speaking · 25.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 12,446 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Aaron Katz said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
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 Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 32:56 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 25:48 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Insight
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 Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 33:22 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Opinion
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…”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 20:04 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Opinion
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 3:15 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Insight
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”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 16:40 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 19:03 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Assertion Not checkable as stated
ClickHouse is seeing reacceleration across nearly every level of the business
“We're seeing reacceleration almost at every level of the business.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 47:41 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
Katz: ClickHouse will keep its Apache 2.0 open-source license
“We feel that today the right decision for the community is to stay with an Apache two license, and we're excited about that. Like I said before, you know, we're not moving away from open source, quite the contrary.”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 15:39 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Prediction Held up
Katz: ClickHouse will build a multi-tenant cloud-managed service
“And at the same time in parallel, we are going to build A multi-tenant managed service in the cloud, which will inevitably be deployed on a variety of different cloud platforms, whether it's AWS, GCP, Azure, whether we go to China, like I've done in the past a…”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 16:00 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Disclosure
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 1:44 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
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 Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 10:15 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 14:09 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 20:01 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Assertion Supported
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 21:12 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Assertion Supported
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 25:08 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Assertion Supported
Katz: eBay migrated off Druid and onto ClickHouse
“EBay is another example of a company that migrated off of Druid and onto ClickHouse.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 25:16 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
Aaron Katz: ClickHouse currently lacks an outbound sales motion
“We really don't right now. We should, we don't.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 31:53 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 34:59 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Disclosure
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.”
Aaron Katz Jun 13, 2024 ▶ 45:56 How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Aaron Katz predicts convergence between OLAP and OLTP database technologies
“I think we're going to see this convergence between the two.”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 2:28 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Insight
Katz: Data storage is being commoditized as stack value shifts
“I think storage is quickly being commoditized and, you know, the value on the stack is both on the front end and on the back end.”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 3:35 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Katz: eBay ingests one billion events per minute into ClickHouse
“EBay, for example, who is ingesting literally a billion events per minute into Clickhouse and then running very complex queries against that data set.”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 4:50 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Opinion
Katz names Mike Volpe and Peter Fenton top open-source VCs
“And I believe, and there's a lot of very smart people that are deploying capital in this category, specifically open source and infrastructure, but my belief, and I'm biased obviously, is that they are the top two or, you know, two of the top five, let's say.”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 9:50 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

Show 18statements(18 left)

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHous Jun 13, 2024 36m
Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMa Nov 16, 2021 25m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.