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DeVaris Brown

CEO & Co-Founder, Meroxa · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutiveoperatorinvestor@devarispbrown ↗LinkedIn ↗meroxa.com ↗

DeVaris Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Meroxa, a real-time data infrastructure platform, and co-founded the social platform SPILL. He previously held product leadership roles at companies including Twitter, Heroku, VSCO, and Zendesk.

11statements → 5claims → 0claims resolved → 3.73/5average certainty → 2.27/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓

5 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 4 assertions · 3 opinions · 2 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 5 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 DeVaris argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

254 words/min while actually speaking · 32.6 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for DeVaris Brown: only 1 usable question→answer exchange 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: 4,013 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 DeVaris Brown said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Data engineering complexity is caused by bad tooling obfuscating the process
“If you really break down what a data engineer is, at the end of the day, that their job is to get data from one place to the next, right? So all you really need to know is three things. Where my data's coming from, where my data's going, and what format does i…”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 15:51 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Opinion
Open-source data tool creators fail to prioritize product experience
“The open source ecosystem exists, But those people don't necessarily think about like the product experience around how does this technology actually interact with, you know, the goals that people are trying to achieve.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 17:40 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Meroxa's workforce is 60% Black/Brown, 40% women, and 90% underrepresented executives
“Right now we're, 60% black and brown. 40% women. Our executive staff is 90% underrepresented. We got one white guy out of 10 people.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 18:56 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Insight
Founders who only think about team building after starting are too late
“If at the point you are only thinking about building a team when you start a company, you're already too late.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 20:17 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Opinion
Running the JVM at scale is a pain compared to Golang
“Running the JVM at scale is a pain in the ass, and Golang is much more research efficient, and so you can do all these cool things from a single binary.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 24:08 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brown: Data tooling market consists mostly of batch point solutions
“The tooling landscape looks like a bunch of point solutions that run in batch and not in real time.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 1:01 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Disclosure
Meroxa bypasses data warehouses to transform data on every real-time event
“What we do this differently is that we act off of every single event. So every time there's a database transaction, somebody calls your API, they interact with your website that, that makes the API call that talks to the database. We can then transform that da…”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 6:00 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
DeVaris Brown: Meroxa will evolve into a real-time application ecosystem
“Once, you know, real-time data is table stakes and everybody's able to use it at a fashion, then we evolve from just a real-time data platform as a service to now we can be a real-time application ecosystem.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 17:54 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
All but four of Meroxa's 27 employees came from Brown's direct network
“We got 27 amazing people on staff. I think all but four of those people came from my direct network.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 20:05 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Opinion
Plumber provides more granular stream introspection than native Apache Kafka
“It essentially gives you the ability to introspect streams, and it's super, super granular, super detailed, and it gives you know, better, better information than what you would get natively from Kafka.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 23:54 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
/dev/color has 1,100 Black engineers; Black PMs has 400-500 members
“DevColor has 1100 Black engineers of all skill levels. Black PMs is, I think, like, 405 hundred product managers that are out there.”
DeVaris Brown Jun 21, 2021 ▶ 21:50 Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)

The other half of the tape: DeVaris Brown's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Nick Schrock 1

Every mention by year

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2021 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Fireside Chat: DeVaris Brown (Founder & CEO, Meroxa) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark) Jun 21, 2021 18m
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