From AWS to Founder: RisingWave Labs’ Journey to Reimagining Stream Processing

Ten years is a long time to be obsessed with one problem. For RisingWave Labs founder Yingjun Wu, that obsession with stream processing shaped his entire career trajectory, from academia through AWS and eventually to founding his own company.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Yingjun shared how his journey from AWS engineer to founder revealed both the advantages and pitfalls of big tech experience. “Over the last ten years, my entire life is about stream processing, database systems,” he explained, highlighting a dedication that would ultimately lead to spotting a crucial market gap.

The seeds of RisingWave Labs were planted during Yingjun’s time at AWS Redshift. While building one of the world’s leading data warehouses, he encountered a fundamental limitation in how businesses process data. “Think about well, if you have a bank, it runs a query every single night so that you can see the result of yesterday, but you cannot see the result of, let’s say, last five minutes,” Yingjun noted. “So you cannot get a real time insight. So it’s really hard for people to make real time decisions based on real time data.”

This insight led to founding RisingWave Labs in early 2021. But rather than following the traditional enterprise software playbook, Yingjun’s AWS experience shaped a different approach – one heavily influenced by Amazon’s customer-obsessed culture.

“In Amazon, people care most about is to make customers happy, to be customer obsessed,” Yingjun shared. “Jeff actually mentioned a lot about, okay, you probably don’t need to focus too much about what your competitors have done… That the thing you should do, and the thing you should focus on is the customer. You should always put the customer first.”

However, the transition from big tech to startup founder wasn’t without its challenges. Despite his technical expertise, Yingjun had to unlearn certain assumptions. At AWS, resources were abundant. At a startup, tough choices were necessary.

“Every single people, every single user asking for different things,” Yingjun explained. “Some of users will ask about, okay, whether you can have integration with this system or that system… and some people will ask, okay, do you have, let’s say, GCP support? Do you have Azure support? There are so many questions and there are so many things we can do and there are so many features we need to develop.”

With limited bandwidth and a small team, they couldn’t build everything. This forced them to make tough decisions about product direction and market focus. The solution came from applying Amazon’s customer-first philosophy in a startup context.

Today, RisingWave Labs maintains this focused approach while pursuing ambitious goals. “We hope that within the next three to five years when you talk to all customers, our customers should tell you that we are so customer obsessed,” Yingjun shared. “We want to be focused… We will not do AI and we are not do RAM… We will have focus.”

For technical founders transitioning from big tech to startups, RisingWave Labs’ journey offers valuable lessons. Technical expertise from big tech is valuable, but must be adapted to startup realities. Cultural lessons – like Amazon’s customer obsession – can transfer successfully, but implementation needs to match startup constraints.

The key is taking the best of big tech experience while recognizing when to forge your own path. As Yingjun’s story shows, sometimes the most valuable lessons from big tech aren’t about technology at all – they’re about maintaining unwavering focus on customer needs, regardless of your company’s size.