The following interview is a conversation we had with Ajay Kulkarni, CEO and co-founder of Timescale, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: The Story of Timescale ($1 Billion+ Valuation)
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Ajay Kulkarni
Sure. I’m Ajay Kulkarni, CEO, co-founder of Timescale. Professionally, I’m a former engineer turned product manager turned entrepreneur, started Timescale with my co-founder and former college roommate Mike Friedman, whom I’ve known for over 25 years. But I would say at my core, I think I’m really like a builder and an optimist who’s always curious to learn something new.
Brett
Nice. I love that. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. As a founder and entrepreneur, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s so many CEOs that I admire and that I’ve learned from. I think what’s interesting is I feel like every successful CEO has probably something you could learn from. I think if I were to pick one, I think I’d actually pick my father. So my father is also a tech entrepreneur. He started in the mid 80s when the PC market was just starting and about 30 years older. And I’ve learned so much from him. I’ve learned how to stay positive, how to stay curious, how to stay young at heart, if you had him on this podcast, you would think he was the younger one because he has so much energy. But I think probably the main thing I learned from him is really how to solve problems with optimism and perseverance.
Brett
And from watching your father, then, did you always know that you were going to end up in tech or where did that come from?
Ajay Kulkarni
It was honestly in the mid 90s when I was in high school applying to colleges. I was a runner. I’m a runner, really into fitness, really into health. I did really well in AP bio. I thought it was going to be come a position. And I think when I first applied, I think early, I think I applied as a premed. And then I think I was working at my dad’s office and just not really working, but kind of just helping out here and there. And was really exposed to the Internet for the first time like 1996. And I remember thinking, I don’t know what this thing is, but it’s just really interesting, it’s like really exciting and got into computer science and so I think my path will probably naturally ended up becoming an entrepreneur. But it was never like a set goal, it was more just like entrepreneurship and tech was always which is kind of just drew me in.
Brett
And I see that you started, I believe it was your first company there in 2009. Is that accurate?
Ajay Kulkarni
I started my first company, it’s not on my LinkedIn profile. My first company I started in 2003 was a chocolate company. I started with two friends and that didn’t get very far, but we learned a lot doing it. My first tech company that started was in 2009 since Sobey, we ended up building the, what was at one point the leading address book for BlackBerry devices and 2009, 2010, it’s like at the peak of probably BlackBerry when the iOS App Store just launched. And I mean, look, I learned that it doesn’t matter if you’re like the tallest person on a sinking ship, you’re still going down with the ship. So whatever happening is like we saw the writing of the wall, we saw BlackBerry and Rim were kind of doomed and ended up navigating to an Aqua hire. A soft landing with another startup, this group messaging company called GroupMe, which was then acquired by Skype, then acquired by Microsoft.
Ajay Kulkarni
So it ended up working out okay, but that was my first kind of tech company. This is the second, but this has been by far the more successful one.
Brett
And can you talk to us about the early days of that first tech company that you sold then? Because you started in 2009, so that was right in the middle or towards the end of the financial crisis. So I think it could be interesting just to talk through what was happening at that time period and how you felt building a company. Because I think there’s probably relevant insights for founders who are just starting to build their company today in this crazy market.
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, I think every market is different back then. In 2009, I remember a Series A was like a two on a four, which isn’t even a seed today, maybe that’s a micro seed, even the current climate. So everything is different. The key lesson is like I think there’s no good or bad time to start a company in the macro sense. I think if you have a great team and you have this problem, you’re kind of just itching to solve, I think just go for it. And it’s never going to be easy. When markets are good, yes, it’s easier to raise money, but there’s more competition. When markets are bad, it’s harder to raise money, but there’s less competition. So I think I’d pay less attention to the macro and just focus on the fundamentals, which is building a great business, solving a real problem, and working with great people.
Ajay Kulkarni
And that’s probably in the opposite order. I start off with working with great people and then solving a real problem and then building a great business will flow from that. I think that’s probably the key lesson, is like, don’t sort of can’t time anything.
Brett
Yeah, I can see that and makes a lot of sense. Now, what about books? I know we spent some time chatting about books in the pre interview, but it was all about my book. So let’s talk about your book. So if you had to pick a favorite book, what would it be? And this can be business or personal or it can share one for each.
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, let me start with a personal one because I think that’s probably the more interesting one. I’m a huge fan of the Alchemist. Have you read the Alchemist?
Brett
I’ve not yet.
Ajay Kulkarni
But you’ve heard of it?
Brett
Yes.
Ajay Kulkarni
Paulo Coelho, originally written in, I think, Portuguese, I think is Brazilian and then translated to many languages. The Alchemist, it’s like this I’m not going to give anything away, but it’s essentially this story of this andalusian shepherd boy who has a dream about treasure early on, and then he goes on a journey to find the treasure. And a lot happens in that journey. And the key lesson that at least I took away from the book is that the journey is the destination. Like the journey is the reward. And I actually think about that a lot as an entrepreneur because there’s so many ups and downs, there’s so many curveballs that get thrown your way. You’re always navigating stormy seas. But what I’ve learned is to just embrace that, because that’s the point. The point isn’t the exit. The point isn’t the IPO. I think the point is this journey and how you get to work with great people and you get to work on interesting problems, serve customers and build something awesome.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I always think about at some point I’ll have to probably retire or whatever, and then I’ll probably miss the ups and downs. So that’s probably one book that’s had a great impact on me, is The Alchemist.
Brett
Nice. That definitely resonates with me. One of my personal core values is to enjoy the ride, which I have to remind myself of every single day. It’s very difficult to do, but it’s there. It’s the aspirational core value. So that definitely sounds like an interesting and highly relevant book. So I’ll check that one out. What’s? Another book?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, on the business side, there’s so many that I love competing against luck. Clayton Christensen, one of his classic books about the jobs to be done framework. He has another book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which I think is what kind of put him on the map. That’s also a classic blue ocean strategy. Good strategy, bad strategy. These are all really great classic books. They talk about how to build great products, how to build great business strategy. I can’t talk about them enough. There’s another book that’s also kind of businessy called The Infinite Game by this author, Simon Sinek. I think I’m pronouncing the name right and it kind of goes really interesting. It kind of explores a really interesting question, which is most games, like sports games, have an end and there’s a score if you won, if you lost. But like businesses and really life in general, there’s no score.
Ajay Kulkarni
So then how do you like, sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. And especially a business that eventually outlasts its founders, ideally, how do you define how well you’re doing? How do you stay motivated? And he talks about that in The Infinite Game, and I thought it applied a lot to entrepreneurship as well, and business on how to think about building something that’s bigger than you and obsessing more about the problem and not about the competition. Yeah, so I’m not sure if that’s too many books to list, but those are the ones that I’d recommend.
Brett
Hey, I’ll take it as many books as you can possibly share with us. And does that come naturally to you? So if you’re looking at Simon’s book on The Infinite Game, did that way of thinking come naturally to you? Have you always had that or is that like an internal skill and a personal skill that you’ve really had to try to develop and nurture?
Ajay Kulkarni
Oh, no, I mean, I had to develop that. I think in the beginning, especially with my last company, sinceobe I remember, anytime anyone would announce something that was remotely competitive to the company, it would like freak me out. You’d be like, oh no, we’re ruined, we’re doomed. This other company, this other company. And I think with this company, with timescale I kind of had the benefit of this and so big experience, we realized that, hey, there’s so much noise in the market, you can’t get distracted. And it’s really about obsessing about the problem and obsessing about your customer and maybe staying aware of what other people are doing, but don’t get rattled by it, don’t even pay attention to it in terms of who’s announcing what. And at the end of the day, it’s like if you obsess on your customer and you solve a big problem, you will be successful regardless of what other companies are doing.
Brett
Absolutely. And one other question then, on that first tech company, were you disappointed with that outcome, with going through an Aqua hire? I’m guessing when you started there were bigger ambitions than that. So what was your kind of personal state of mind when you exited that company or when that was sold? And yeah, how did you balance that with the aspirations to build a big, huge company?
Ajay Kulkarni
I mean, it’s really humbling, right? Like you think you’re really smart, you have these big visions and aspirations, and I’m not sure if we even raised any money. I think we bootstrapped it. I think we tried to raise money. We couldn’t raise money. We bootstrapped it. And then I’m having, I think, an okay soft landing. And I remember looking at all these people who would raise bigger rounds, build bigger businesses, employ more people. And I’m not sure if you’re a music fan at all, but there’s this Kanye West line. And I’m not a Kanye fan anymore, at least, but there’s Kanye West line that I empathize with, which is I’m going to not quote it verbatim, but to paraphrase it’s something like, hey, are these people that much better than me? And I remember thinking that I’m like, wow, I thought it was smart, but are all these entrepreneurs that much better than me?
Ajay Kulkarni
They’re raising bigger rounds, they’re employing more people, they had better exits. And I kind of felt like I had so much more to prove. And I almost felt like, I don’t know, like a big chip on my shoulder just to prove to myself that they weren’t better than me. I think that’s probably what fueled me with timescale, is just like, to be like, hey, that exit, I could do so much better than that. I’m smarter than better than that. And yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sure if I did. I think that experience was very humbling. But God, I think, again, the journey is the destination. There’s nothing more valuable than hunger. I don’t know if you have kids. I have two young kids, and I’m kind of like I just want my kids to feel the hunger, physical hunger. But the drive to do something, to prove something, I think everyone should have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder because I think that just drives you.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I think the best entrepreneurs probably have an insatiable drive to prove something. It didn’t create that, but it probably fostered more of that inside of me. Yeah.
Brett
And I think a lot of the best entrepreneurs, it seems like, especially in tech, it seems like they really do have a chip on their shoulder. One that comes to mind is Travis Kalanick. And yet, I think everyone would agree, obviously controversial founder, but he has a chip on his shoulder. He’s talked about that a lot. One thing that I think he talked about with Uber was that it was his revenge business for the previous one that hadn’t worked out as planned for you was time scale the revenge business.
Ajay Kulkarni
I’m not motivated by revenge. I’m not really motivated by fear or negative or I try not to be motivated by these negative emotions. I’m more motivated by positive emotions or like this desire to build something, to really prove it to myself. So it wasn’t a revenge business. But I think to be a successful entrepreneur and I’m not saying I’m successful, but I think in order to be a successful entrepreneur, I think you have to have some type of irrational thing driving you because otherwise you would have quit, like, a long time ago. It’s not a rational thing to do. There’s so many even the act of starting a company is irrational because it’s kind of like, hey, I think I know something that no one else knows.
Brett
Really?
Ajay Kulkarni
Do you really? Probably not. But if you do, if you happen to be right, then it’s a huge upside. And so I think you need something irrational. I mean, I don’t know, they’re probably sports analogies, too. Like, there’s that whole god, I forget the name now, but that Michael Jordan documentary series where you realize that, hey, Jordan. The reason he didn’t stop after one championship is because he had this irrational desire to just be the best. And he would create grievances. If he didn’t have something motivating, he’d create grievances to drive him. I’m not saying that’s healthy, but I think that’s one reason why he end up winning so many championships and becoming so good. Because at some point you’re going to just hang up your sneakers or exit or quit unless you have this irrational, insatiable thing kind of just driving you.
Brett
Yeah, I watched that documentary when it first came out, and it was so good. But a few things that stuck out to me, and I think you were just touching on that was I don’t know what game it was, but someone had said, Nice game, Mike, after he lost, apparently. And he used that to power himself and to just basically crush this guy and go on and win the game or I think the next game or the playoffs, whatever it was. And in the end, he admitted that he had totally made it up. The guy had never said anything to him in the first place, but he needed that fuel to drive him, which I thought was just fascinating. But the extra, like, in my opinion, it was almost depressing in that big speech that he gave, it didn’t really sound like someone who was the top of their game or one of the world’s greatest athletes.
Brett
It sounded very almost insecure when he was attacking all of the people who had doubted him and listing them by name. That just kind of surprised me. And it seemed like internally, he may not be the most happy person if that was his state of mind when he goes up there. And I think it was his hall of Fame speech.
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah. I think everyone is inherently flawed in some way. Jordan has his flaws. Kanye has his flaws, I’m sure. I know I have my flaws. I also think they’re like different motivational structures. There’s, like positive ones and negative ones, and I think, like revenge or creating grievances, it’s kind of like the dark side of the force. It’ll fuel you, but it’s going to wear you down, man. It’s going to wear you down. It’s going to make you really angry, bitter person. And I feel like I try to prescribe more to maybe something more like the light side of the Force, which is to be inspired, to be motivated to build something for the greater good, to build something new in this world. Like life is short. So make the most of your time to add to the world and make the world a better place because you were here.
Ajay Kulkarni
That motivates me and I feel like that’s a lot healthier and I don’t know. Yeah, those things are probably decoupled. I think to build something big, to be an entrepreneur, you probably need some type of irrational thing driving you. But that thing could be the dark side of the Force or the light side, and it’s up to you. But I agree that some of these things, some of these motivational structures are unhealthy and I don’t subscribe to them.
Brett
Yeah, agreed. All right, let’s switch gears here now. And you’re talking about building there, so let’s talk about what you’re building. So for those who don’t know, can you just share the origin story behind Timescale?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, let me start by talking a little bit about Timescale, then I’ll share the origin story. So we’re a database company, as you said in the intro. At a high level though, our mission is to what we say is we want to help build the future of computing and by doing so, build the next great database company. And if you think about what’s our infinite game, it’s to help build a future of computing. We do that by offering a database cloud that’s optimized for what we call data intensive applications. And I can talk more about that. Essentially, it’s like, hey, these software applications that capture and make use of a relatively large amount of data. The origin. We actually started off building a slightly different company. It was a company in the IoT Space Internet of things. And I had spent the previous decade in mobile and as we talked about with Sobe and BlackBerry and then with Group B and mobile in 2008 felt like the next big thing.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I remember when we started this company, it kind of felt like IoT felt like the next big thing, like the success of the mobile, the next wave of computing. And we started off saying, okay, well, the computing is going to become more ubiquitous. It’s going to get embedded in all these different things like your home, your car factories, farms, et cetera. And there’ll be a lot of data generated and these companies will need a data analysis platform. So the first company we built was a data analysis platform for IoT. It was moderately successful. We had paying customers for tracking over 100,000 devices and we needed a database to store that data. And so we ended up, this is 2015 ended up using a few off the shelf databases and I would name them, but they didn’t really work for us. And we’re like, oh, man, I guess we have to build our own.
Ajay Kulkarni
And so we kind of built our own for our own use case. And it took a little bit longer than we expected, but in 2016, were using it, and we essentially found that when were selling the IoT platform, customers would just ask a lot of questions about the database that we had built. And we’re like, oh, this is solving a much bigger problem than this IoT thing. And so we relaunched in early 2017 as Timescale, thinking, oh, this is the way we solve the IoT problem, is not through a platform, but through a better database. And very quickly, the reaction was a lot bigger than we saw the reaction a lot bigger than we expected. And over the next few years, essentially, as we kind of built momentum and saw the market, and even today, we keep seeing usage that we just wouldn’t expect, and we realized that our opportunity is even bigger and bigger than we thought.
Ajay Kulkarni
Like, initially, we thought it was IoT. Then we thought it was this thing called time series, which is like, IoT and finance tick data, and maybe it metrics data. And then we saw all these use cases like gaming and music analytics and marketing tech email analytics, and new Internet protocols that were like, okay, this is not like classic times here. What is this? And what we essentially discovered is that as Compute has gotten more powerful and storage has gotten cheaper, developers are just building more applications that capture large amounts of data and make use of it. And we call them data intensive applications. But the basic idea is that this isn’t your basic Crud app. This is like an application. Like, I don’t know. Okay, yes, your IoT is a subset of that. So maybe you’re collecting a lot of sensor data to help. Maybe you’re manufacturing electric batteries, which is one of our customers, and you want to see how your battery, how your manufacturing line is doing.
Ajay Kulkarni
That’s a data application, but maybe you’re actually a music label, another one of our customers, and you’re actually tracking in real time, spotify and SoundCloud, listens and plays to see what’s trending in real time for your artists and other agents. And in the beginning, we struggled for a long time to understand what the common theme was for these applications. And we kind of realized two themes. Like, the first theme is that these are data intensive applications across every industry. But number two, these trends, compute getting more powerful, storage getting cheaper. They’re only continuing. This is the future of computing. The future of computing are these applications. And that’s what timescale is.
Brett
Powering one thing I wanted to zoom in on there, can you talk to us about that? Pivot how many years into the company did you make the pivot.
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, we launched the IoT platform early 2015. It was probably mid 2016 is when I started to think that we needed to pivot. And then it was like, I think the fall of 2016 that we actually made the Pivot, but it still took like three to six months to kind of relaunch, and we relaunched in April 2017.
Brett
And what was going on internally as you were making that pivot, both internally in your brain and internally in the company, was that a hard decision to make, and was that a hard call to make, or was the market just pulling you so strongly in that direction that it was a no brainer?
Ajay Kulkarni
I think one of our strengths as a company, and especially myself and Mike as founders, we try to be very thoughtful and have opinions, but we also believe intellectual honesty and clarity, and we try not to be stubborn. And a year into the IoT platform, we’re like, Why isn’t this thing more successful? It’s successful. It’s almost the worst. I think bad ideas are easy to kill, great ideas are easy to recognize. But when you have a good idea, you’re like, Why isn’t it great? Or should we kill it or not, right? And so I think that’s what kind of gave us pause. We’re like, hey, either we’re building the wrong thing or we’re building the right thing but at the wrong time or the right thing at the right time, but we’re the wrong people to build. And we’re like, we’re not sure what it is, but something feels off about the traction being good, but not great.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I think another one of our strengths is just really listening, super hyper listening to when you talk to customers or developers or to the market. And it was really remarkable. When we talk about the database, people would literally kind of lean forward and be like, oh, hey, wait, what was that thing? Can you tell me more about that? Because we’re using, like, Cassandra or Mongo or whatever, and it’s like, it’s not working. And that sounds useful. And after a while, were like, no one’s getting that excited about our IoT platform. Maybe the database, maybe that’s the thing to do. So that’s how we did it. But honestly, I think it’s kind of built upon intellectual honesty and not being afraid to admit that maybe you made some wrong assumptions or wrong decisions. And also really hyper listening to your customers.
Brett
Interesting and super useful insights for our audience. Now, let’s just say if one of your customers is at a conference, they’re sitting around a bar and they’re talking with their friends and they’re saying, wow, Timescale is epic. It solves this problem for me, and it brings these benefits. How would they articulate that in bar talk? In simple language, how would they explain the problem that you’re solving and the benefits that the product brings?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, I’ll share how Adelers talk about us on Twitter or social media. They’ll say it’s magical. It’s magical because it’s postgres. It’s postgres, but somehow it’s a lot faster than postgres. It’s a lot cheaper than postgres because they have native compression. It’s faster because of other optimizations that we’ve made. It has the other things that make it easier to use. But they’ve built all this without sacrificing anything of postgres. Like, it’s not a fork, it’s just mainline. And so, yeah, essentially it’s postgres, but better, faster, cheaper.
Brett
And can you talk to us about growth and any numbers that you’re okay with sharing? I see on the website that it’s 3 million plus active databases and growing. Is that your North Star metric or what’s that primary metric that you look for to determine growth and the velocity of growth.
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, I think we have a few North Star metrics. Let me share some other metrics. So I think were founded like, six years ago. Since then, we’ve raised over 180,000,000 in funding from some of the best investors. Benchmark. NEA redpoint Tiger Icon. Two Sigma Ventures. Today, we have over 1000 customers. So that’s one North Star metric is how many people are we serving our community? So we’re an open source company. Our software is free. We only monetize through our cloud service. So a lot of people use our free software. We consider them part of our community. Our community is 50 times bigger than our customer base. In terms of usage, what’s great, you create a huge pie and you capture a slice of it. And our team, our company has over 150 people in 25 countries. I mean, there are two different North Stars, and especially this company has gotten more sophisticated.
Ajay Kulkarni
Every team has different things. They look at sales, pipeline, efficiency, how many activated signups regenerating month. But I think in terms of traction, those are some of the numbers that I find most exciting. Thousand customers, an even bigger community, a reasonably sized team, and enough funding to really control our destiny. That’s actually one that I keep sharing with the team, is that, like, hey, we have this amazing opportunity, we have this momentum, we have a great team, and we have runway to make the most of this. What more do you want? You want someone to hand you the success. And so I feel really good about our position. I think we ended up really finding a really rich vein, if you will, like a mining vein, like a vein of value, and it ends up this thing is even bigger than we expected. It’s not just IoT, it’s not just time series.
Ajay Kulkarni
It’s really about building the next great database company.
Brett
A vein of value. I’m going to steal that one. That’s a good one. Now take us back to those early days and let’s talk about two different things here. So how did you start growing the community, and what were you doing there? And then on. The customer side. What were those first few deals like for you? The big deals where you were super stoked, super excited about landing them. What was that like and how did you manage to pull that off? In the early days?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, early days, first couple of years of the company, we did not really think much on monetization and really focused on building the community. And so everything we built was open source, everything was free. The way we built it is we just tried to really help. First, we provide a lot of value. We had an active, we still do, but early on we launched our Slack channel where we provide free support. And myself, my co founder, would be really active in it, our engineers are active in it. And so it’s kind of like, hey, let’s build something for free, build a community and provide a ton of value and then we’ll figure out how to monetize it. And we had some hypotheses. So that’s how in the beginning we kind of built the community. But to build a business, we had a couple of false starts.
Ajay Kulkarni
First we thought, oh, open source company will sell support. And at this point, I think postgres is mature enough that it is hard to make much money on support and timescale was really easy to use. So this is where selling support actually a good product works against selling support. And then we said, okay, well, maybe we’ll just sell large on Prem enterprise to enterprise customers, large on Prem installations. And we did that in 2019 and it was okay. But in parallel, we launched this cloud product in 2019. And I remember at the end of 2019, I had this on Prem business and this cloud business and the on premises bomb Prem business was bigger, but the cloud business was growing like a weed and weren’t even paying attention to it. And were like, oh, this feels different. And it kind of felt like were being stretched in two different directions.
Ajay Kulkarni
And so we ended up just going all in on cloud like three years ago, early 2020. And that’s when I think the business started to click. So I think the first deals I was really excited about. I was really excited about when went all in on cloud and very quickly had 100 customers and we could see their usage, we could see what they were doing, we could talk to them. And they were these innovators that I talk about building the future of computing. I don’t think this applies to everyone, but we definitely took this kind of bottoms up PLG approach. And I think that’s what maybe when I started really feeling like this business was starting to click was at that.
Brett
Point and how do you approach making these big decisions? So just from our brief conversation here, it really sounds like there’s these almost landmark periods for you where you have to make a decision to go down one path or another. How do you go about making those very big and pretty serious business decisions? Just rock, paper, scissors with your co founder?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, one thing I hate, there’s often this, like, I think negative behavior. I think there’s this failure mode where people say, oh, this isn’t working. We have to rethink everything. And I actually don’t believe, despite all these big changes we made, I don’t think success is about finding these silver bullets. I think success is about the grind. I think it’s about the grind, and I think most people don’t appreciate that. And I found that a lot with sometimes people at times, so people who haven’t lasted the company, it’s like, no, this stuff is hard. It’s really more about tactics than strategy. But that said, I constantly try to pop my head up, especially the company’s got bigger. I feel like it’s almost my job, pop my head up and be like, hey, like, five years from now, what am I going to say? I’m going to look back and say, oh, man, that thing we did was dumb, or were so late on that, or we didn’t.
Ajay Kulkarni
What could that be? And I’m always exploring these things, and most of them are just explorations, and every now and then, I’ll bounce something off of my co founder or someone else in the company that has feedback I want. And I think when you have a great team, the decision feels obvious. And that’s what I’ve noticed. If it doesn’t feel obvious, and if it’s a one way decision, then maybe pause on it, but often it’ll feel obvious. And I’m not saying you have all the data to prove it. And I think that there’s a Jeff Bezos quote that if you wait to have all the data to make a decision, you waited too long, like, you’re too late. But I think with these big decisions, when it’s time to make them, it just feels right. So I think one thing I do now maybe is and I’m also thinking about some big decisions right now is I’ll socialize them in the company, and I’ll just kind of test the waters.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I always preface it by saying, hey, I’m not trying to convince you. Just like, poke holes into this idea, poke holes into this theory, and every now and then you get something that people say, oh, yeah, of course, right. And I think maybe that’s how you identify the things to really pivot on. But you’re right. I think business is about the grind, but making a few really key decisions at the right time.
Brett
How do you define the grind?
Ajay Kulkarni
I think it’s like the perseverance. It’s like, let’s say your marketing campaigns stop working, right? An easy answer would say, hey, we got to change our strategy. Our top of funnel is not big enough because our strategy is wrong or something. And what’s? Like, well, wait a minute. Have we fully penetrated our market? Probably not, unless you’re like a trillion dollar company. Okay, so we haven’t fully penetrated our market. Why aren’t our campaigns working? I don’t know, but let’s think about it. Let’s have some hypotheses. Throw them on the wall. Let’s test them. Let’s iterate let’s measure let’s make kind of decisions on qualitative data if we have to. And you just keep iterating, and you keep forming hypotheses. And I guess it’s a combination of the scientific method plus just like, hard work. Talk to, hey, is this thing useful? I don’t know. Talk to like, 50 customers.
Ajay Kulkarni
Well, I can’t find 50 customers. We’ll find them. I don’t know. I don’t love that definition. So I’m not sure what you think about it, but it’s really about perseverance. Like, God, sometimes I just worry that especially at Timescale, sometimes we’re just like I always worry when I feel like we’re trying to be too smart. And sometimes the answer isn’t like, let’s think about this at a high level. As soon as the answer is like, hey, let’s just keep running up against this wall, but let’s try from different angles and different approaches, and then something will break through.
Brett
So that’s one of the challenges that you face internally, it sounds like. What would you say keeps you up at night?
Ajay Kulkarni
I think our biggest risk is not strategy or market or funding or team. I think it’s just execution. And not that we’re dumb or lazy. No, we’re hardworking and we’re smart, but even then, sometimes it’s got to be working on the right things. Are some things taking a month to be decided? That when they could have been decided in 1 hour meeting, that’s what I worry about. One of our operating principles at Timescale is shortened the cycle. And we kind of have this assumption that says, hey, I assume you’re working as hard as you can because you’re a Timescale we hire the best and the brightest, and everyone is just hustling. So I’m assuming that I don’t want you to work every hour of every day. You’re just going to burn out. That’s not sustainable, but I’m assuming you’re going to hard work as hard as you can.
Ajay Kulkarni
But if we want to move faster, how do we shorten the cycle? Are there some things that take a month that should take a week and they take a week? Take a day. Now there’s some things that we’re debating that are totally reversible. Like, if it’s a reversible thing, then you don’t have to debate it, just try it. And if it doesn’t work, just revert it. I’ve been guilty of that too. I remember at one point I was kind of debating something with my co founder, and he was like, hey, Ajay, what’s the downside if we get this wrong and revert in a month? I’m like, yeah, not much downside. Yeah, so that’s what I worry about. It’s like, hey, are we just working on the right things? And are we kind of being as like, are we shortening the cycle as much as we can?
Brett
And I’m guessing that becomes very difficult to do right with the team. The size that you have, given that you are remote, how do you make sure that people are working on the right thing?
Ajay Kulkarni
I think everything and you probably hear this a lot, Brett I think everything flows from hiring great people, and we’re a fully remote company, and so we hire the best and brightest across almost every time zone. There’s some time zones in Asia where I think it’s a little too hard to schedule, but almost every time zone in the world, and I think, number one, you hire great people. If you don’t hire great people, I think nothing else I think everything else falls apart. You hire great people, then it’s like, okay, everyone is motivated, everyone is smart, everyone is hardworking, then how do you keep people aligned and inspired? And I think those are the key things. And alignment, especially in a startup, when you’re trying to be nimble and adapt to the market, alignment can be tricky. And alignment sometimes just means that, like, hey, you just say the same thing over and over and over again until you’re sick of saying it, because when you’re sick of saying it, maybe at that point, you’ve reached everyone in the company.
Ajay Kulkarni
It’s also periodically just checking in with the random people in the company or the team and just making sure you’re aligned. But I think the inspiration piece is also key. It’s like, hey, it’s not about like, yes, we want to hit these quarters numbers. Yes, we want to hit this year’s numbers, but we’re trying to build the next great database company. What does that mean? What’s the next five years of time scale could that look like? What can the next 1020 years of time scale look like? So I think you hire great people and you kind of communicate what you’re looking for and really the problems that you want to solve as opposed to what you want them to work on, the problems you want to solve, and you inspire them. What I found is your team will often suggest things that didn’t occur to you.
Ajay Kulkarni
That like, I remember right before our Series A, we had some community traction. And I had told the team, hey, to raise our Series A, we need community traction. We also need a few enterprise logos. We need some companies using us, our product, that we can talk about in the pitch so that investors believe this is, like, a real company here, not something for just hobby projects. I remember one of our engineers saying, hey, I know you want me to work on this feature, but, like, Bloomberg and Bloomberg is one of our early users, bloomberg is actually looking to use this, and they’re stuck on this thing, I think I should spend the next week just helping them. And I’m like, yeah, dude, that’s totally sure, you’re right. That’s amazing. And so it’s kind of like I found as like, try not to be overly prescriptive.
Ajay Kulkarni
And even if you think you know the answer, it’s like, really pose. Hire great people, pose questions, and then let them come up with solutions and then keep inspiring.
Brett
Have you ever been tempted to have people in the office and get rid of the remote culture? Or is remote something that’s very important and central to the company?
Ajay Kulkarni
We used to not be remote. Pre pandemic, we’re about 60% in an office in New York City and 40% remote. Early on the pandemic, we left that office and became fully remote and just hired fully remote. I’ve had people debate this with me. I don’t really care about this topic. I think it really depends on your company. I think for us, yes, the ideal solution is that we would all live in the same city and go to the office together, and the office would be right outside our front door. But the reality is that if you pick any geographic area and you require people to go into an office, even if it’s like, one day a week, then you’re limiting your hiring pool to people who live within, I don’t know, like, a two hour radius of that area, which is incredibly limiting. I think our most limited resource is time and talent.
Ajay Kulkarni
Right. And if it takes you a long time to find great talent, then you’re losing. You’re already losing. So what I always say is, yeah, I agree, the best scenario is, like, this dream scenario, but that doesn’t exist. So the question is, would you rather be headquartered in New York and have some A players and some B players because you’re limited to the New York area? Or would you rather be fully remote and just have A players because the pool is so much bigger? And I don’t think anyone would say they’d want B players.
Brett
Right.
Ajay Kulkarni
But then you might ask Brett. It’s like, okay, then how do you make sure people have empathy for each other, trust each other, feel like they know each other on a personal level, not just the professional level? And what we’ve done there is really encouraged team level off sites. And we have off sites all over the world. Like, we’ll get together in New York and Bay right now, there’s an off site in Turkey that we’ve done off sites.
Brett
Hopefully not in the earthquake area.
Ajay Kulkarni
Berlin, barcelona. Yeah. You know, the offset is going on right now, and I didn’t even know what was happening. I was like, Hope you all are safe, but it looks like they’re all safe. But that earthquake is really a huge tragedy. It’s really sad.
Brett
Yeah.
Ajay Kulkarni
And it’s at the team level, so it’s really easy to coordinate because you just flights and hotels for like 1012 people. Yeah, so I don’t know, but I don’t know. Every company is different. We’re a very engineering heavy culture, and engineers work well. Remote. If were like a sales heavy culture, especially if we had like, junior inside salespeople, remote would probably totally fall apart.
Brett
Yeah, that’s my favorite response to that question. When I ask people about remote company, I think it seems like some people view it as this like, binary thing where it’s either you’re all in on remote or you’re not. But I think your answer makes the most logical sense, right? Where it depends. It depends on the company, depends on what you’re doing, depends on a lot of factors. So that resonates.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I can’t even tell you, Britt, how many times I went to the office just to sit in the conference room all day on the phone. I was like, what was the point? What was the point?
Brett
Another thing I wanted to ask about are just your views when it comes to market categories and category creation. Do you view it as Timescale? Is creating a new category? Is it just transforming that existing legacy category? Or how do you think about category creation?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, I listened to some of the other podcasts and I heard this question. I really like this question, so I don’t have a preference. I think it depends on your market. But what we’re doing at timescale is we’re redefining the database category. And I think databases have been around for 40 years. I think the rise of the cloud has made some parts of the database operations easier, but I still feel like it’s kind of V one, and I think there’s an opportunity to really rethink the database in the cloud. And I think that’s somewhat what we’re doing right now with Timescale. Like we have our cloud service, for example. It has a database offering, but it also integrates with S Three for object storage. And at that point you can have postgres tables that can be infinite in size, like whatever the size of S Three is.
Ajay Kulkarni
So is that a database? Is that a data warehouse? I don’t know. So I think we’re redefining the database category by really taking advantage of the cloud and really focusing on the developer and the job to be done. In particular. I don’t know, I think we have this view that I think is quite powerful, that every company today is either a software company or is becoming a software company or is getting replaced by software company. You can see this maybe in Media. Like Netflix is a software company. Disney maybe one could argue, is becoming a software company with Disney Plus. And maybe all these companies that are launching crappy online video apps are getting replaced by software companies. So every company is becoming a software company. Great software is built on great databases, and databases are hard. There’s actually a lot you have to worry about.
Ajay Kulkarni
But if I’m a developer, think about the jobs to be done. Framework. Clayton Christensen.
Brett
Right.
Ajay Kulkarni
Competing against luck. If I’m a developer, I don’t want to think about the database. I want to focus on my application. I want to focus on my user or on my customer, and I want the database to work. Like, I just want a place where I can write data, store data, analyze data that’s I don’t know, reliable, scalable, fast, easy, cost effective so that I can focus on my application. And I think databases today accomplish it to some degree, but I think we fail. I think every database company fails in general, and one thing we’re doing is kind of rethinking that category to really focus on the job to be done.
Brett
And when it comes to reimagining that category, how aggressively are you targeting analysts and engaging with analysts to try to have them share that same view for what the future is of the category? Or do you not view analysts as mission critical to your efforts there?
Ajay Kulkarni
I think analysts can be helpful. It depends on the type of business you have. If you’re a top down go to market, I think you need analysts early on. We’re more bottoms up. We’re more PLG. We just added our first sales leader at the end of last year, so we got this far without a real sales team. Right. So really PLG, really bottoms up. And so for that, we’re really targeting an individual developer who cares more about what their peers say on hacker news and Twitter and Reddit than what, I don’t know, Gartner says now as we move up the we are starting to engage with analysts, but it hasn’t been a big part of strategy so far, but it’ll become bigger as we go on. Now, if were a top down company, I’d have a totally different answer.
Brett
Super interesting. That makes a lot of sense. Now let’s talk a little bit about funding. So I know we’ve touched on that a few times. Anything over 100, I consider fu money. So you’ve reached that status. I think your blog post said the Year of the Tiger, so you’ve raised a lot of money. Some super impressive investors there. What do you think they’re so excited about? And why are they investing so much money into what you’re building here? Yeah.
Ajay Kulkarni
I mean, you’re the tiger. I mean, this is kind of wild. That was our Series C. We announced it a year ago, and our mascot is the Tiger. It was the lunar new year was the Year of the Tiger. I think that’s changed now, but that was the Year of the Tiger, and the firm that led our round was Tiger Global. This is wild. Is this a coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidence. It’s meant to be. And so that’s pretty wild. But our investors really on NEA benchmark. Redpoint icon, two sigma. I mean, the others. They’ve all been such great supporters in the beginning. And I think what they saw, especially in the beginning, was just like they saw a team as super committed and dedicated to solving this problem. And that a team that really was trying to think clearly, but then had a really big vision.
Ajay Kulkarni
And I think our investors, all of our board members, they’ve already had their big successes. They could have all retired a long time ago. Talk about this and it keeps driving you. They’re not in this anymore for the money. They don’t have to prove it to anyone, but they just want to build foundational businesses. And from the beginning, Mike and I said that, hey, if we’re doing this, we want to build a foundational company. We’re not looking for a simple exit. We’re trying to build something for the next great database company for the future of computing. And the pitch is a bit more detailed than that, but I think that’s what they latched onto. And it’s kind of like, hey, this seems like a solid team and they have a really clear vision. And yes, every startup is a low probability of success, but you look at the expected value and the expected value of a low probability types, a huge vision is pretty big.
Brett
And for the last question, let’s talk about that vision. So let’s zoom out five years from today. What does the company look like? What does your day to day life look like within the company and what’s the impact overall for your customers?
Ajay Kulkarni
Yeah, I think fundamentally, again, we believe every company is becoming a software company, and databases are the foundation for great software. But in particular, at Timescale, we believe that postgres provides a great starting point to build a great database. And so we believe that by building a really great database platform, we can build a fundamental building block for every company in the world. What’s it like five, six years from now? Again, I think the database needs to be reimagined. I think the database in the cloud will look very different. You’ll see some stuff for us in the next few months, the next couple of years that reimagines the database experience. In five, six years, I think you’ll see, like, the next evolution of the database paradigm. I think you’ll see us super focused on the customer building the next wave of computing, the future of computing.
Ajay Kulkarni
I think also at Timescale, I think one thing I want to share is we’re optimists. We talked about earlier. What motivates you? Is it the light side, the dark side? And we’re not like angry people motivated by revenge. We’re optimists that are motivated by this belief in the power of technology and software to make the world a better place. We have companies building battery list sensors that reduce waste. We have companies who are helping manage global recycling systems. We have companies building new Internet protocols. We have companies building again like electric car batteries, we have electric car manufacturers who use Timescale. And I just think it’s amazing that we can have play a part in how they are making the world a better place. I think in five years you’ll see Timescale not as a time series company, maybe not even as a database company, but as something really providing a data platform for the future of computing.
Brett
Amazing. Well, that is a great place to end. I think you left us wanting more, but I know we are up on time here, so we’re going to have to wrap before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Ajay Kulkarni
So Timescale.com is our website and our Twitter handle is Timescale.
Brett
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat at Talk about the Vision here. This has been one of my favorite interviews, probably my favorite interview so far. So thanks again for taking the time, really appreciate it.
Ajay Kulkarni
Thank you, Brett. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
Brett
Keep in touch.
Twitter
facebook
linkedin