The Data Stack Show - 74: Kostas Respawns at Starburst, is Interviewed by Eric, and Reminisces About Winamp

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:Big News: podcast hits, Kostas’ career change (2:19)Kostas’ career start in data pipelines (4:09)The Winamp and Napster era (11:46)Starting an API gateway (16:56)Observing new technology from afar (23:43)Starting Blendo (32:38)Problems faced in architecting the product (37:12)Kostas’ role at Starburst (40:25)The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show. Each week, we explore the world of data by talking to the people shaping its future. You'll learn about new data technology and trends and how data teams and processes are run at top companies. The Data Stack Show is brought to you by Rudderstack, the CDP for developers. You can learn more at rudderstack.com. Welcome to the Data Stack Show. We are actually recording this together in the same room in San Francisco, which is super exciting. And Costas, I am interviewing you today, and we will hear

about why that is. And so I guess I'm the only one with a burning question today. And my main question is actually, what were the steps that led you into building an ETL company kind of at the time when a lot of interesting technology, both in ETL and warehouses, was emerging? So that's what I'm going to ask you. So now I have to come up with what I'm going to ask you. So now I have to come up with what I'm going to ask myself? What would you ask yourself if you were interviewing yourself? I need to call my therapist. I don't know. This will be a very

therapeutic session. I can guarantee you that. Yeah, yeah. It's a different episode. So I don't think it makes that much sense for me to talk that much on the intro, but I'm really looking forward to do it. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun. So let's, let's just do it. All right. Here we go. Yep. Welcome to the data stack show. This is a really special episode. So I'm in San Francisco, California with Costas. We're doing this together, which is super exciting. And you may notice something different about this episode.

We don't have a third person on as a guest because I am going to be interviewing Costas today. We've talked about this for a while. It's really exciting. And you know, what's going to be awkward is that we don't even have to do intros because everyone already knows this. Yeah, that's amazing, actually.

Yeah. Every time you have to think like what I'm going to do, like, ah, no, wait, we don't do the intros. Like our guest is doing the intro, but we are doing intros before that. Oh, that's right. We do that. Yes. We do that before. Okay. So two big pieces of news. One, the podcast hit 20,000 downloads, which is really crazy. So that's really fun. But part of the reason I'm interviewing you today is because you have some big career news. So share with the guests this big career news. Yeah. Yeah. So the news are that I'm not working with Rutherstack anymore. I moved to a different role in a different company. So I have started working as part of the product team at Starburst, which is, it was, we'll chat about it. I mean, it wasn't the

easiest decision, but it's quite exciting and very interesting. And yeah, it's been like about a week now since I started, still very early, but it's very interesting. The other news is that I will remain like at the podcast. So we will keep doing that. Yes. So it's sad for me because I used to work very closely with Costas, but we get to keep doing the podcast, which is really exciting. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the podcast has been an amazing experience. It was my first one. Have you done this before? No. Yeah. So it was like a huge surprise for me

in terms of whatever we've done through this podcast and the people that we've met, I would never expect this to happen. So it's awesome that I can continue doing that. It's great. It's great. Okay. So first of all, let's It's great. It's great. Okay. So first of all, let's have a snack.

Ah, yeah. Yes. We have to have a little treat here to celebrate. Okay. So this is what I'm interested in talking to you about. This is really fun because I get to ask you questions that we've kind of talked about before because we've worked together, but now I get to do it, you know, in long format with this being the only agenda, which is great. So you've spent, I guess, almost a decade working on data pipelines. Yeah. Which is a really long time. Yeah. And I think like a lot of other of our guests, like you've seen, I mean, over that past decade,

you've seen like an unbelievable amount of change in the data pipeline space. So here's my first question for you. How did you decide to work on data pipelines specifically? Like, was that an intentional decision or did you like uncover a problem or what's the story? Like, how did you start? Well, the short answer is that I didn't because we had to survive. That's the...

This is going to be good. But actually what is funny is that both me and my co-founder of Blendlight Photics, we were working in something close to what they call like congestion or an injection platform or pipelines. Like even before that, like I think we started like the first platform that we built for that was like in 2008, 2009, which had to do more about what we were calling back then metadata management. What were you building? So that's before the warehouse started. Ah, yeah. That's before the beginning of the era of warehouses.

So what was the architecture that you were building for? Actually, it was mainly like a way to manage and move around very, very structured data. That's why I said like metadata, not data. So the idea was that, okay, you have some assets, like images, right? Or like videos, or I don't know, like digitized version of books or whatever. And you have the digital form of these assets, but then you have like a number of metadata that describe what these assets are for, right? And you want to do like some interesting things with this data. You want to catalog them, you want to search them, you want to browse or like use them

as a way for, I don't know, like an application to go and like consume them and deliver this experience to the user at the end. Now, these kind of data models that are used for metadata can become extremely complex, right? I guess everyone is aware of MP3, right? Like MPEG-3. And then we had MPEG-4 that was MPEG-21. Not that far back in the past.

That was like a video format that was usedPEG-21, not that far back in the past, that was like a video format for that was used like in DVD. And then you got things like MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 and all these like they actually what they were trying to build like infrastructure to make information more accessible to people. And when we are talking about information, it's not just like, what's the title of the video or whatever we are talking about, like even very raw technical metadata that are needed for processing or whatever. So these schemas, as they were called, like data models, they were like pretty complex.

Now the question was like, okay, how do you communicate this information between different systems? So you needed to build some kind of like their property between different systems. And that's where you had to go there and do transformations. You had to transform the data's where you had to go there and do transformations. You had to transform the data. So you had to define a transformation between

a source data model and a destination data model. And then after you had that, you had to actually extract the data, apply these transformations and deliver this data to another system. Usually they were more about indexing this information and accessing this information systems like something like Lucene and stuff like that or databases like you would ingest it like in a database. So one of the first like the first thing that we've built together with Photis was like a system that you could actually create these mappings between some very hierarchical or like complex in general data models between them and do it like in a graphical way which means that it could be like with a ui yeah oh interesting which meant that like you could do that even if you didn't have like technical knowledge but you were domain expert

like you could understand the semantics of the cement always about the semantics. Always. So like they, even if the user wasn't an engineer, say, they understand like the data model and the metadata because they are an expert in the practical like usage of that data for whatever the downstream thing is. Interesting. Okay. And keep in mind, like back then, you didn't really have

a discipline like data engineering, right? Yeah. You had, in the best case, big data engineers that were trying to figure out how to do maplic use. And you also have dbAdmin, right? So if you wanted to somehow make systems that would operate on the data level, you had to create these kind of mappings and transformations. And you needed someone who has the domain knowledge to do that. So that was the first thing that we built. Did you build? Was that a company? It was part of academic research that we were doing.

Oh, really? At a university? Interesting. It was so successful that actually there was opportunity to commercialize the technology. We had some institutions and companies that came and they were asking how to

buy this thing and use it internally. And that's pretty much the time where I started thinking of, maybe I would like to start a business. Interesting. Okay. When, how did the companies who are interested in buying that technology find out about it?

Like, did you publish a paper or something? There were a couple of papers, but the main way that this technology got known in the European Union, it was because it was funded by the European Union. Interesting. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, the research is funded by the European Union. So usually the way that you does that is they try to create like consortiums around the projects that involve many different countries and many different organizations there, because it's one of the ways that, one of the tools that they have to build, let's say,

a common European market or like a cultural whatever. So that's, and they were like, okay, we were also spending money and going like in conferences and like talking about these things and like trying to, but nothing that's anything close to whatever you call like a go-to-market strategy or whatever right i think it's pretty hard i mean i'm not an expert but i think it's kind of hard to get you know ip out of the academic environment and into like a startup i would assume that depends

on the country okay greece is not the place to do that for sure but it's not easy yeah like the legal framework around that stuff i mean and, and because EU is also included, like actually the IP belongs to the European Union, right? Because they- Right, they funded the research. Yeah, which means that it belongs to the people of Europe, which means that you have to make it open source in a way, let's say. So what you can do is you can sell services around that like

that's the yeah now there are i think today at least some ways that you can do like create like a spin-off or something like that but i just it's been like a very long time since i was involved in the academia and business models around do you miss it no okay so before i haven't i have other questions but when you were talking about like the different types of mpeg files i couldn't help but think of winamp did you run winamp like oh yeah and like because you could you could really do a lot with the audio quality and like dialing that in and then like the different skins for winamp like i had such a modded winamp it was awesome yeah yeah yeah we know then you had like it was like an appster what was the napster yeah but that was like the winamp or at least like

man i'm trying to remember winamp was like the audio player and it was like very highly customizable. Yeah. And after it was like, I think it was like downloads. Yes, but it like blurred, it like changed over time. But then it became like the place to just get to download illegal files. Right. Yeah. And it was like a ton of music. And then, you know, video came like, I mean, it was crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, the first experience that I had with like downloading music and stuff like that was through irc like yes i think it was by the end of the 90s beginning of zeros there were like a lot of and that's like one of the main ways that i got exposure to the american culture because i've met many american people on IRC yeah yeah so okay

they were like these channels that you would join and people were building bots that they were like file servers and they had like commands so they would expose their whole like mp3 list through these bots and you could download them through DCC anyway amazing experience but what is crazy like the level of of automation with these technologies that we're talking about 20 years ago, right? And we had a lot of... I remember, it's funny. We had many problems with spammers that would join and spam the channels.

Yeah. And I remember that I created at some point a bot to help control the spammers. So I... Wait, like how did that, how did it, would it like detect them or? Yeah, yeah. So what was happening? I don't remember exactly the details. I have to think a little bit about it, but there was like a pattern with the IPs and

also the reverse DNS and like what kind of reply you would get. So, okay. Sometimes you would also kick some people that you shouldn't kick out. But most of the spammers, they had like this pattern with their DNS and the script or the bot, what was doing was like running these reverse DNS, getting the response sync, like, and based on that and some heuristics around it, was kicking you out. You know what's interesting? Thinking back to that era, I mean, I was just flooding memories

with Winamp and Napster, but the amount of innovation that people achieved just trying to like pirate huge amounts of music. I mean, I remember like back then, like gigabytes and gigabytes of music seemed huge, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah. And like it was taking a lot of time also to digitize these things. Like it wasn't like ripping a CD. Like, oh yeah.

It was like, it required dedication. Totally. Yeah. like oh yeah it was like it required education totally yeah i remember the uh i went to like a large state university here in the united states and the you know students ran the it department basically yeah right and i can't remember who someone made friends with one of them, but they set up a private like file share system on the internet. And it was unbelievable. I mean, it was like everyone's media, like, I mean, like people taking hard drives to them to upload to the file system. It was amazing.

Yeah. I was doing the same thing at the university. The other thing that was very fun, it was back then what we were calling like LAN parties. Yeah, I was doing the same thing at the university. The other thing that was very fun, it was back then what we were calling like LAN parties. Yeah. So because, okay, we're a big fan of like playing Quake Arena. Yeah, Quake. So one of the servers that I was hosting at the lab

that I was working back then at the EVE Zeros was like around like an arena server and we would I mean that was not allowed actually but in weekends or like Friday nights or something like that because we had the keys of the lab we would get people

bring their PCs in there and have like a LAN party and play with people from the US for example because only the university had like good enough latency to play competitively with someone from the United States when we were in Greece right? So yeah it was gosh it was nice. It is amazing the creativity that can come from people motivated to circumvent rules. Yeah and people that that instead of studying prefer to play games. Okay, thank you for indulging my little detour there to discuss modding out Winamp. Okay, so you're at the university, you started thinking about starting a company. Did you start Blend,

was Blendo the next thing? So what happened was at some point both me and like later my co-founder like photos were like okay we're done with what we're doing here we for that age back then we had saved like some small amounts of money that we would survive like for a couple of months at least without working so we're like okay let's stop doing whatever we're doing and try to figure out if we can. Okay, obviously, we had no idea what that means. But until that point, we were working, we're making money, but we were working as freelancers. Sure. Just doing engineering work, right?

And we're talking about like, okay, all these things are happening in in a country that it's like the opposite of healthy environment for entrepreneurship. Like we don't have this as part of our culture, like Greece, right? Like it's not something that you are encouraged to do. So we were trying to figure out what to do, actually. We didn't want to do exactly what we were doing at the university, like the research as part of our research. So we started at the beginning by building a product around, I mean, not a product, it wasn't a product, like a technology around API management.

So it was like an API gateway with a GraphQL interface, again, where you could do like some create actually like an API gateway and route all your API calls through that. I don't know why, but it surprises me that like the two, the first sort of two big, I mean, I know you probably built tons of stuff, but like sort users right and even if you were like a developer you would still the idea was like okay let's try and move away from the terminal or like using i don't know like something like the experience that you get with Emacs or VI or whatever. And that's like the time that all the ideas were developed. So I think it's both like a cultural thing. It also has to do with the maturity of the industry, right? Yeah.

We're talking about the period where, okay, being like a software engineer, it was special, but it's not like everyone was trying to become like a software engineer back then. Okay. So it's not like we had that many people to do these things. And the main way that the industry was trying to solve that was by creating tools that are very easy to use.

So the UI component was quite important. And we were still in the process of like trying to figure out actually like how we interact with machines anyway so yeah that was i think i'm trying to remember the exact era when like a bunch of the ftp like desktop apps came out you know to just make that yeah like a drop like you know whatever a drag and drop experience yeah and just make ftp like a lot? Yeah, 100%. It made sense. I think that's how, okay, you can't solve everything in an efficient way at least. But now that I reflect back to then,

I think it was very natural to try things this way. So, yeah. You leave all the front... Well, you left all the front-end debugging to me. I was always a very, very bad engineer, developer, whatever, when it comes to front-end. That's why it surprised me. You don't gravitate towards that naturally. No.

I hate it. I cannot do it. I'm almost blind. I think it's very funny when I work with designers, how many details like I'm missing all the time. I just can't see that stuff. Interesting. Yeah.

I thought you did a pretty good job. Okay. We just had like pretty good designers, I guess. Fair, fair. Okay. So API gateway. So we have that. We have like a demo.

We build the demo around this. And then we're trying to figure out how to, I don't know, what to do next. Like, okay, we have like the technology and so on. What? Like, how do you turn this into a business that's completely different? Sure. Kind of problem. Now we are talking about like 2013, right?

Keep in mind that we are post 2008. Yeah. Keep in mind that we are post 2008. Yeah. Which means that the rest of the world is recovering, but Greece is a mess, right? Financially. Right. But some, right. Okay. So, but the data space is now actually, now has some of the tools that we, you know, that have become,

yeah, the name brands of today are like just starting to, just starting to like be built and adopted. Correct. Correct. You have Snowflake starting. I think they started in 2012. You have Redshift. It was a little earlier than that, maybe. Yeah, I think Redshift was out there.

So the whole cloud data warehouse revolution started. I don't remember. Probably was a little bit later than that, maybe, anyway, or around that time. Databricks was there. I mean, Spark was a thing from like 2009, I think. At that point, I think they also started the company. Okay, it was still like a very Hadoop-oriented era, right? 2009, I think. And at that point, I think they also started the company. Okay.

It was still like a very Hadoop oriented era, right? Like it was the Cloudera era. Whatever. And most of the business noise was around BI. So you had Bluecare. Tableau. Tableau, I think was like older. Yeah, they were.

They've been around for a long time. Yeah. Crystal Reports. You remember that? I think it's like older. Yeah, they've been around for a long time. Yeah. Crystal Reports. You remember that? I think it's still around actually. IBM's. Oh yeah, like all that stuff, I guess. Yeah.

Still around. What else? Looker. We had Periscope data, Mold Analytics, Chart.io. Like all these companies like started like pretty much at that point yep and it's like also the period where you know y combinator started becoming

you know like the brand name that we know today so i remember like i think no dave like the ceo of he was i think it was like one of the first like cohorts that YC had back then. So it was still like early, even for like Y Combinator. Yeah. Okay. So question for you, what was it like to look at the emergence of both these technologies? And then also, I guess you could say, I mean, the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley is nothing new, right? I mean, it predated Y Combinator, I mean, the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley is nothing new, right? I mean, it predated Y Combinator, of course, but you were looking in on the emergence of things now that are just wildly influential, both tooling and startup.

But you were looking at that from the outside in Greece, and that's still like recovering from the you know the economic crisis what was that like because i i mean just being here in the states even though i've you know went through that on the east coast like it still felt my guess would be that it maybe felt closer i don't know what was that like actually it's a very interesting question that you are asking because back then I remember that I was telling to myself to how late I was for the mobile revolution, right? So this whole thing with like mobile apps and like all the hyper growth that you saw with all these applications, Like I missed that. Like I was just late enough that it didn't make that much sense,

especially for someone who was like from a broker. I was not here, right? Now, I don't think I could imagine back then that like the stuff that we were talking about and starting to build back then after like 10 years would be the equivalent of what mobile was back then right so yeah thank you for the question because you just made me realize like the that life is a cycle at the end like you know like you just need to be at the persistent enough and you will get like to you will get another opportunity i don you know like you just need to be at the persistent enough and you will get like to

you will get another opportunity i don't know like back then i couldn't understand anything to be honest like i was in an environment that was like super like depressing from a financial standpoint like greece was like in 2013 it wasn't like that bad but we were reaching the peak that happened in 2015 where we had the capital controls oh right yeah yeah so you were living in a country that everyone was depressed like both literally and metaphorically in the market in a financial market when it comes to venture capital that's like almost non-existent in greece and the vCs that existed were just very niche kind of like investors that had mainly to do with e-commerce, more B2C kind of business model.

And whatever I could realize was through the internet and like reading hacker news and the crunch and stuff like that. So it's not like I had any kind of sense of what Silicon Valley is at the end outside of whatever the popular pop media tried to communicate to everyone outside. So yeah, I had an idea actually. But at some point we had to move forward. Like we, because, okay, we had like the technology, we had like the stupid thing that we built, but we had to figure out a way to turn it into business. We didn't know how to do it. We knew that like, we cannot find people to help us in Greece because nobody knew how

to do that. So we started looking for opportunities to get some investment from abroad and see what happens. Right. I think I have applied to Y Combinator like times probably i don't know like really i never knew that oh yeah like i was applying to everything that could give you money actually i was just trying to yeah that's why i was saying yeah that's great i love it okay i never got to the point where i had an interview or something with y Combinator. Then I was trying to, we're trying to find money.

Like, okay, we tried, we reached out to all the... This is still for the API game. Yes. Yes. Trying to find people in Greece to invest. No luck. Also, we didn't have any kind of network, like, because that's important. I mean, no matter what they say, investment is a social process.

Like, it takes time and people need to trust you and you need also to trust them, you know, like to engage in this kind of relationship. So, okay. You don't just go open a door, get inside and like, okay, give me money and you get your money. Especially if you are someone who you haven't done anything in the past, like you don't have any kind of like track record well sure like venture learning how to raise venture capital isn't like a class that they teach in academic research yeah like yeah i mean they probably do now i don't know but it's it's

really hard for like you know like when you have been educated as an engineer like and in the classical way of engineering you think of everything as a in a like in the classical way of engineering, you think of everything in a very Boolean way, like everything is like black or white, right? It's either I have a solution or I'm still working to find the solution, right? And that's like a big shift that you have to make in order to become like an entrepreneur or like a product person or anything that has to do with like interacting with people out there and trying to find like solutions for the problem and it was like one of the biggest problems that I had the beginning because like I couldn't realize that so yeah we had built something but I wasn't feeling like like I was feeling super embarrassed

like to go and present this thing because it felt like broken. So it was hard. So we kept looking for money. The third co-founder who joined the company had some experience because he was working for a while for Motorola. Motorola in EMEA, I think their first headquarters were in Israel. Anyway, they had some very strong ties with Israel, which makes sense also because of like the engineering background of Israel and Motorola being like in telecommunications and stuff like that. So he knew a few people like in Israel. Back then, Israel started using a lot the whole brand name of startup nation and we have like startups and blah, blah, blah and all these things and trying like to expose like the country in a positive way to the rest of the world and he was like okay why we

don't also try to build an accelerator or like something like that to Israel and it was something that to be honest like although Israel is very close to Greece like it's an hour and a half trip like same time zone like it's very close i never thought about it because greece okay like until that time they don't have like very strong ties like with middle east and israel specifically i'm like okay sure why not i mean it's not like anyone else is accepting us so that was like an amazing experience because what happened was that microsoft had an accelerator in Israel. Microsoft Israel had an accelerator there. I sent an email there to get in contact with them. They replied. They're like, okay, what are you doing? I'm saying like, da, da, da, we're building an API management platform, blah, blah, blah,

whatever. They're like, oh, it doesn't fit with our theme for this year, but I'll connect you with some other people. That was like, wow, amazing. I mean, that's nice. Anyway, so by sending me from one to the other, which is a very beautiful thing that the Israeli culture has, we managed to find a small micro VC there with some young and very crazy people that were like, okay, let's give like some money to these silly Greeks and ask them to come and live here for a couple of months and see what

happens. And that's how we managed to raise our first capital. That was like, so such a small amount of money that like, if I tell the number, I think people will be like, okay, like, what the fuck is he talking about? And we took that money and we went to Israel and by the way the the period that we were discussing and the terms Israel was like fighting like it was crazy that was like another crazy experience that really exposed me to the real world and like so that like you know like things good things bad things can happen like at the same time so the fight stops on sunday or something like that and monday we were flying to tel aviv and we went there and stayed there for like a couple of months i think it was like a

little bit more than seven where we tried to build the company and that's when we moved from the api thing that we were doing into what blender became became with the pipelines. And it was mainly the result of feedback and our inability to sell the API platform. Interesting. For many different reasons. Back then, I was thinking that it's just a failed product, but it wasn't like a failed product. It was like the combination of timing and people was wrong. There were products like this. We just couldn't sell it and it was a very bad time in the market also because there

was a consolidation happening with that stuff. So there wasn't that much interest. So you started Blendo. When did you pivot from the API Gateway to Blendo? So 2014, we incorporated the company. So we could get, it was August, went to israel and we tried to sell this thing for like six months we kept saying no and at some point we were like okay we need to do something different if we want to move forward we need to pivot and we had a very interesting Very interesting conversation with the product manager from IFTTT back then, who came to IFTTT through an acquisition.

He had a company that got acquired by them. Was he based in the Valley? No, he was in the States. But the Israeli ecosystem always had very good ties with Silicon Valley. So one of the investors that we had knew the guy and sent him an email. And he was like, okay, this is what these guys are doing. Can you give them some feedback? And he was like, okay, looks fine. But I'm more interested about the data behind the APIs.

Oh, interesting. And not the APIs themselves. Because the APIs themselves, I'll manage them once and be fine. I'll create the integration there and that's it. It's not something that I have to manage that much or that often. But the data behind these APIs is something that I'm missing as a product manager right now. I need all this information from all these different tools

to go and do my analytics. And it's a pain in the ass right now to do it. I cannot access the data. So we were like, that sounds interesting. Close to what we were doing before in a way. So we had some experience on that from a technical perspective. So we're like, okay, let's pivot and let's do something that has to do with data.

Again, it started a little bit different than what Glendo became at the end. But whatever started that day is what actually I would recognize and identify as Blendo. Interesting. When you say it was different, because Blendo really was like,

you know, in the early days, head-to-head with like Stitch Data, Fivetran, you know, basically a direct competitor on... That's what we became when we started because, okay tran you know basically a direct competitor on that's what we became when we started because okay you know the problem with us was that we didn't really have access to the market okay like we got this information like from this person that's it like we couldn't even have like direct access to him because from what i understand the investor was a little bit embarrassed about us so he wouldn't connect us directly yeah seriously like he was like no no no i cannot let you go and talk to this person directly so we had no idea we

just had let's say direction right and then when you have a direction in science fiction i mean you build like funny things and we did. And because we were afraid to go to market, we were trying to avoid doing it, right? So we were not selling. Until we reached a point where we couldn't like sustain ourselves anymore. And we were like, okay, that's what we have right now. We put the website out there and we asked for people to subscribe and pay. And someone paid.

Like, what the fuck like wow my first 20 dollars well being an entrepreneur is easy and then yeah like i think the rest is like a bit of history in the sense that then you you set let's say all the things in motion that will push the company the product to some kind of direction right so after that it was much easier that's why like i think at the end it's like super important to go to market as soon as possible because especially if you are a first-time founder okay if you are more experienced probably like you can constrain yourself from doing like stupid thing and like stupid things like being too fantasized too much around what you should be building but going to market i think it's like probably the most important thing that you can do if you're like early,

if you're like a first time founder. Fascinating. I'm so glad that I got to hear the story about the founding of Lendo and what you built before that. Yeah. And the crazy thing is that like all these things happen like through the period with capital controls. Yeah. And because we were selling outside Greece, because of course, like Greece didn't have a market for ETL. Like it doesn't have even today. And we were forced to incorporate the company in the United States because we had to take money from Israel. We had a bank account in the United States and we didn't care about the capital controls.

That's so interesting. Okay. Well, we, I know this is a big surprise, but I think we've gone longer than we intended. Yeah. But okay. So two more questions for you, because I know we've spent a lot of time just hearing the story, which is great, but what's the hardest problem that you faced, like sort of technical problem that you faced in sort of architecting the product? Like does something stick out where, you know, whatever, it's like it was just very difficult to build or difficult to scale or something kept breaking as you were building Blendo?

That's an interesting question because I don't think that I can give you a technical answer to it. I don't think that we had give you a technical answer to it. I don't think that we had technical problems. We had human problems mainly. And I would say that this is probably the case with most of the things that I have seen so far. Like, okay, we are not sending Zange Web to the space, right?

Like, okay, we are solving like hard problems the main problem starts the main problem starts with when you have to scale i think most of the problems happen because of how fast you have to move and what kind of trade-offs you have to make there and but again the problem is not the technology it's the interaction with like people and how you can let's go back to what i said about engineers that you you keep thinking like in black and white right and you have to think like that like you shouldn't change that if you want to be like a good engineer now think that on one side you have like you are an engineer who's building a product that knows that it's not ready to scale and then you have a company that has to scale in order to survive

so of course like your go-to market teams are going to push towards that yeah now this balance between the two and making sure that like the teams are not going to collapse. It's the hardest part of building something new, in my opinion. I felt many times in this. I think I still keep failing. But I think that's the problem. It's not the technology itself. The technology that we have, actually, we're very spoiled. We have

so much capacity to do... We live in a period where we can scale just by burning money and throwing hardware into the problem not even optimizing the software necessarily right yeah technology is not a problem i mean unless we are talking about like i don't know like solving like cancer or something like that it's it's the humans that complicate things and make things interesting also right yeah that aligns so well with a theme we've heard on the podcast

throughout the episodes. I don't even know what count we're on, but, which actually feels very authentic because technically, you know, you're, I mean, you're a host of the show, but you're a guest on the show today and you're from a different data company. So it feels very authentic that you're repeating the theme. It's not about the technology. It's about the people. That's true. That's true.

But yeah, it is. I mean, you build businesses for people, right? Not for the technology. Okay. So that was one question I said I had too. What are you doing at Starburst? I'm doing products. So it's not that different than the things

that I was doing at Radarstack for a long time. I'm focusing more on like my focus because, okay, the product team there is like bigger than the team at Radarstack. My focus will be more on the core technology. So Starburst is built on top of Trino. We had Justin, the CEO on the show. So the company is actually bringing to market

a commercial version of the open source version of Trino. And my focus is more on the core technology, Trino itself, the query engine, the optimization of the query engine, some stuff like materialized use and some product use cases on top of that. So that's my focus, at least this week. That's your first week. I think that's pretty good for your first week.

Awesome. Well, I'm personally very excited to just hear from what you learned there. And I think it'll bring a great new perspective to the show. So I'm super excited for you. And I can't believe I didn't say this. Congratulations. It's an exciting new adventure. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. It was, as you say, like I've been like building pipelines, infrastructure for quite a while. I needed some change and actually like torture my brain with like new problems. And I wanted to go a little bit farther down the data stack, closer to storage and database systems. So a query engine like Trino was an ideal opportunity for me. And query engines, I feel, especially now with the emergence of data lakes and lake house architecture, are to become like even more important. And they're like a very hard also engineering problem,

especially if you want like to optimize them. So there's a lot of opportunity for me to get in front of like new problems and see how we can productize these problems. So I think it's going to be like an interesting journey. Well, as we say so often, we'll have to have you back on the show and learn more about your experience working on a federated query. Unfortunately, you cannot avoid that. All right. Well, thank you for joining the

Data Stack Show with Kostas and I in the same room in San Francisco. I'm so excited for you as a colleague and more importantly, a friend. And I'm most excited that we get to keep doing the show together. A hundred percent. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to see also what's going to happen this year with the show. Like it's been like, it's been like a crazy one year for the show. I mean, we announced today that we did like 20,000 downloads, right?

Like the show is out there for like almost a year. Yeah. It's crazy. It is wild. Yeah. Okay. This is, I'm just going to ask you another question, you know, because like the debrief is weird with a host interview.

What is it like to have like a clean inbox just starting a new job? That's, I mean, that's happened. I'm sure to like our listeners and to like me a couple times throughout my career yeah and it's like crazy you start a new job and you're like your calendar is so open and your inbox is so empty yeah man it's like too stressful it always feels like something is wrong i the first day i was like no like something's wrong just because you spent 10 years with like an overloaded inbox and a schedule yeah yeah I mean

one of the things that I did was like I went to my personal email but I never cleaned and I cleaned it so just to feel that like okay I have many emails yes yeah the good thing is that it doesn't last for too long I mean the good and bad thing, but it's a very weird sensation. That's true. Yeah. All right. Well, that's our outro. We hope you enjoyed the show and we hope you enjoyed Kostas and I being in the same room. We'll definitely do this again as we have opportunity and we'll catch you on the next show. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Data Stack Show. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified about new episodes every week. We'd also love your feedback.

You can email me, ericdodds, at eric at datastackshow.com. That's E-R-I-C at datastackshow.com. The show is brought to you by Rutterstack, the CDP for developers. Learn how to build a CDP on your data warehouse at rutterstack.com.