Astronomer

“And this funny thing started to happen where we tell customers what our product was powered by, and they'd be more interested in that than the product itself.”

“Getting to the first million definitely took over 18 months. After we got to that, it definitely went faster, but it was a slog to get there.”

“In the tech landscape, a really good guidance point for that is to do it with a, based on the salary of an engineer, right? You can say, hey, is this going to be worth half an engineer's salary to you? And you kind of put a number on that, or is this going to …”

“So astronomer focused on the airflow company started in 2018, and it kind of grew out of previously astronomer. The company had started before, and we were focused on something else. We were building a clickstream product. So if you know, like the company segm…”

“The first version we built of that product, we built that backend orchestration piece. We used a cloud native service for that, something called SWF, Simple Workflows. And that was good, but what we found was we needed something a lot more dynamic, and we need…”

“We needed to show traction in a way that was set at a higher bar than if we were based in San Francisco, or if we had had the creator of the open source project on our team.”

“In the early days, Airflow was used for very, what I call analytics workloads, as in the sense that it would move data around, and ultimately, the end result would be a number in a dashboard... What ended up happening is Airflow still does those analytics work…”

“In the early days, it's really about going into conversations with your biases turned off. It's like, hey, I want to focus on the problem this customer is bringing to me. I don't want to focus on trying to find some sort of Confirmation bias for preconceived i…”

“When you look at kind of what we did for the rest of that quarter and coming into the next quarter, not only did we have our biggest quarter in company history after that, we also made major strides from a business perspective in terms of the product and servi…”

“Running open source technology is like adopting a puppy. Right. Like it's free to get, but it's a lot of work once you got a puppy. Right. And that's kind of where this idea of commercial open source comes in. It's like doing all of the things that you don't w…”

“And in that stage for us, the way you think about price and value is completely different because you're not thinking about, hey, what is the cost of an engineer doing it, right? You're thinking about what is that problem worth to a business and how would a bu…”

“In fact, now that you're saying it, I think our most successful email campaign was the subject client was Don't open this email unless you use Apache Airflow. Like, that was the subject line we used.”

“Airflow has downloaded over three hundred million times last year, and there's 80,000 plus companies using it. And that includes everyone from Siege State Startups to The biggest banks in the world to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that are building incre…”

“You know, I think the most exciting part for me from all that is throughout all of that, right? We do not lose a single customer or a single employee.”

“Somewhere in the hundred to 400 range.”

“Segment was very good at what they did. And we were always playing catch up. And when your job is to play catch up, you know, that's not something that makes it feel very sustainable. It doesn't really give you that much room to innovate.”

“Because we didn't have a bunch of astronomer t-shirts we could give them, one of the things we'd do is like, we'd look up who we're visiting, find out what they majored in college, and we'd go to like the used bookstore and get a book about that topic. Because…”

“Like you could have every internal conversation that you want. You can kind of debate things to no end. You can look at studies about market size and so on and so forth. But when people who are willing to pay say, I will pay you if you can give me an easy butt…”