Hitchcock: Technical startups cannot rely on engineering quality without brand identity
Tobie Morgan Hitchcock · Building The Database That Can Do It All | Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO of SurrealDB · Oct 3, 2024 · at 51:22
Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the co-founder and CEO of SurrealDB. He discusses how balancing tech excellence with strong branding is essential for enterprise database adoption.
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“In any organization, but also importantly in a startup as well, you can't just focus on the brand, or you can't just focus on the tech, you have to focus on both. For Surreal to be successful, we have to be an incredible technological product, and we have to have a good brand to go with it.”
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“What you'll see with other databases is they then design parts of it in Rust, and then gradually more and more that becomes Rust over time, and maybe some of it doesn't, but it's much easier when you go forward from the basis of everything is built in Rust.”
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“And actually, if you're doing that, With three or four different database backends that can become incredibly complicated, The performance can degrade over time as well, or just be harder to reach because you're working with different platforms.”
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“Everyone built microservice-based architectures because that was the easiest thing to do. It meant that you could keep components of your code small, and you could, you build up your application from there. But it also led to a large, massive amount of complex…”