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Ajay Kulkarni

Co-founder & CEO, Timescale · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@acoustik ↗LinkedIn ↗timescale.com ↗

Ajay Kulkarni is the co-founder and CEO of Timescale, the creator of the time-series database TimescaleDB. He previously founded Sensobi, which was acquired by GroupMe, and later led mobile engineering at GroupMe following its acquisition by Microsoft.

14statements → 7claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.14/5average certainty → 2.29/5average debate potential →

4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 assertions · 2 opinions · 4 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 3 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 Ajay 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

Assertion Supported
Kulkarni: Elastic filed for IPO making $160M in revenue, more than MongoDB
“I think Elastic, which is Filed Furnace for a IPO, is an example of that. I think they're already making a hundred and sixty million In revenue, which is more than Mongo's making already, which is crazy.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 16:46 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% 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

How they sound: speaking style how? →

265 words/min while actually speaking · 36 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ajay Kulkarni: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,941 words across 1 episode 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 Ajay Kulkarni said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Kulkarni: The big data era is over and the time series era has begun
“The big data era is over, and in fact, we're now entering the time series era for analyzing the past, understanding the present, and predicting the future.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 6:55 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Ajay Kulkarni: All data is fundamentally time-series data
“It's actually because we believe that all data is fundamentally time series data.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 10:42 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kulkarni: 3 TimescaleDB nodes outperformed 30 Cassandra nodes at 1/10th cost
“For time series data, three time scale nodes was able to outperform a 30 node Cassandra cluster at one 10th the cost.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 9:23 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kulkarni: TimescaleDB delivers query speeds 100x-1000x faster than MongoDB
“Given the same hardware, we're seeing not just higher insert performance, but hundreds to thousands of times faster queries.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 9:10 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Ajay Kulkarni: Non-time-series data storage discards valuable state information
“And in fact, I would argue that not storing your data as time series is throwing away valuable information, because then you're losing how your data changed in the past, how it would be changing today, and how it might change in the future.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 11:05 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Kulkarni: Elastic filed for IPO making $160M in revenue, more than MongoDB
“I think Elastic, which is Filed Furnace for a IPO, is an example of that. I think they're already making a hundred and sixty million In revenue, which is more than Mongo's making already, which is crazy.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 16:46 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Opinion
Kulkarni argues KDB fails to scale due to its proprietary Q language
“Where the problem with KDB is that, well, number one, it's not open source. But number two it, it's not really, it's not a sequel database, right? There's a really arcane language called Q that's built in APL, which is, you know, looks like Greek, right? And o…”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 19:13 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Time-series databases became the fastest-growing database category from 2016 to 2018
“So over the past 24 months, Time Series has emerged as the largest growing, fastest growing category of databases, ah, in the industry.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 6:34 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Kulkarni: Open source is the dominant way to distribute software infrastructure
“I firmly believe that, you know, open source has become the, I think, the dominant way to distribute, you know, software infrastructure, you know, whether it's you know, something like Kubernetes, or it's a database.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 14:26 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Kulkarni: Popularity of Kafka will not replace traditional databases
“Like, I don't think the popularity of Kafka means that, that, that databases, you know, go away.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 21:06 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
TimescaleDB surpassed 1 million downloads in its first 18 months
“We've passed a million downloads in 18 months,”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 1:15 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Connected internet devices outnumbered humans in 2017, excluding phones and PCs
“The number of connected machines, these are machines connected to the internet, not including smartphones and computers last year outnumbered the number of human beings on this planet for the first time.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 3:38 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Kulkarni: Web eventing and machine learning inferences are time-series data
“Web and mobile eventing data, again, is, is time series data, and even machine learning inferences are a source of time series data.”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 10:08 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Timescale pivoted from an IoT platform into a time-series database
“We have close to a 100,000 devices on our platform, and we need a place to store them, and, you know, and we tried a bunch of databases. It didn't work. Long story short, we just built our own time series database but we're still in the IoT business, and we fo…”
Ajay Kulkarni Sep 17, 2018 ▶ 15:01 3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
3 Heretical Ideas on the Future of Data // Ajay Kulkarni, TimescaleDB (FirstMark's Data Dr Sep 17, 2018 17m
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