 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined once again by the co-CEO of MemSQL, Raj Verma. Raj, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much, Lisa. Great to see you as always. Always great to see you as well. I always enjoy our conversations. So I wanted to start off because something that's been in the news the last couple of months besides COVID is one of your competitors, Snowflake, confidentially filed IPO documents with the SEC a couple of months ago. Just wanted to get your perspective on, from a market standpoint, what does that signify? Yeah, firstly, congratulations to the Snowflake team. I have a bunch of friends there. You know, John McMahon, my ex-boss is on the board. And I remember having a conversation with him about seven years ago and it was just starting off. And I'm just so glad for him and Bob Mowgli and as I said, a bunch of my friends who are there, they've executed brilliantly and I'm thrilled for them. So we are hearing as to what the outcomes are likely to be and it just seems like it's going to be a great outcome. And I think what it signifies is firstly, if you have a great technology and if you execute well, good things happen and there's enough room for innovation here. So that is one. The second aspect is I think, and I think more importantly, what it signifies is a change of thought in the database market. If you really see, and you know, my memory serves me right in the last two decades or probably two and a half decades, we just had one company go public in the database space and that was Mongo. And that was in, I think, October, 2017. And then two and a half years or three years, we've seen another one. And from the industry that we know, there are going to be a couple that are going to go out in the next 18 months to 24 months as well. So the fact is that we had a iron grip on the database market for almost more than two decades. It was Oracle IBM, a little bit of sidebase and SAP HANA. And now there are a bunch of companies which are helping solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology of tomorrow. And that is Snowflake is a primary example of that. So that's good, change of guard is good. I do think the incumbents are going to find it harder and harder going forward. And also if you really see the evolution of the database market, the first sort of workloads that moved to the cloud were the developer workloads. And the big benefactor of that was the NoSQL movement. And one company that executed in my opinion the best was Mongo and they were the big benefactor of that sort of movement to the cloud. The second was the very large but noisy database, data warehouse market. And a big benefactor of that has been Snowflake, BigQuery is the other one as well. However, the biggest sort of tsunami of data that we are seeing move to the cloud is the operational data, which is the marriage of historical data with real-time data to give you real-time insights or what we call the now or now. And that's going to be much, much bigger than both the NoSQL or the developer data movement and the data warehouse movement. And we hope to be a benefactor of that. And with the shakeup that happens in the database market and with the change of heart that's happening, there isn't a winner take all market anymore. And that's good because you don't then have the stranglehold that Oracle had and some of the ways that it treated its customers and held them to ransom, et cetera. Yeah, giving customers choice so that they can choose what's best for the business is going to be great. And we are going to see seven to 10 really good database companies emerge in the next decade. And we surely hope MemSQL is one of them. We definitely have the potential to be one of them. We have the market, we have the product, we have the customers. So, as I tell my team, it's up to us as to what we make of it. And we don't worry that much about competition. You did mention Snowflake being a competition. Yeah, sure, we do compete on certain opportunities. However, their value proposition is a little more single threaded than ours. So they're more in the data warehouse space. Our vision of the world is that you should have a single store for data, whether it's data warehouse, whether it's developer data or whether it's operational data or GP data. And watch this space for more as we make some very exciting announcements. So taking to that a little bit more because some of the news and the commentary, Raj, in the last maybe six weeks since the Snowflake IPO confidential information was released was is the enterprise data warehouse dead? And you just said a couple of interesting things we're talking about now, we're seeing this momentum. Huge second database to go public in two and a half decades, that's huge, but that's also signifying to a point you made earlier, there's a shift. So MemSQL is it, we're not talking about an EDW, we're talking about operational real time. How do you see that? If you're not looking in the rear view mirror at those competitors, how do you see that market and the opportunities? Yeah, I don't think the data warehouse market is dead at all. I think the very fact that Snowflake is going out at whatever valuations they go out, which was tens of billions of dollars is a testimony to the fact that it's a fancier mousetrap, right? Which is what it is. I mean, data warehouses have existed for decades and there is a better way of doing it. So it's a fancier mousetrap and that's great. I mean, that's way to make money and it's clearly being demonstrated. Now, what we are saying is that I think there is a better way to manage your organization's data rather than having them categorized in buckets of data warehouse data, developer data, OLTP or transactional data, analytical data. Is there a way to imagine the future where there is one single database that you can query for data warehouse workloads, for operational workloads, for OLTP workloads and gain insights? And that's not a fancier mousetrap. That is data strategy we imagine. And that's our mission. That's our purpose in life right now and we are very excited about it. It's going to be hard. It's not a given. It's a hard problem to solve otherwise it can be solved before. We have the goods to deliver and the talent to deliver it. And we are trying it out with some very, very marquee customers. So we feel very excited about it. Well, changing the guard as you mentioned is hard. The opposite is easy. The opposite, ignoring and not wanting to get out of that comfort zone. That's taken the easier out in my opinion. So it seems like we've got in the market this significant changing of the guard, not just in some of your competition is doing, but also from a customer's perspective. How do you help customers, especially institutions that have been around for decades and decades and decades, pivot quickly so that the changing of the guard doesn't wipe them out? Yeah, I actually think slightly differently. I think changing of the guard, wiping out a customer is if they stick or are resistant to the fact that there is a change of guard. And if they hold on to, as we said in our previous conversation, if you stick on to the decisions of yesterday, you will not see the sunrise of tomorrow. So I do think that changing of the guard is a symbolism, not even a symbolism, is a statement to our customers to say, there is a better way of doing what you are doing to solve tomorrow's problem. It then doesn't have to be the oracles and the DB tools and the side basis of the world. So that's one aspect of it. Second thing is, as I've always said, we are not really that obsessed about competition. The competition will do what they do. We are really very focused on having an impact in the shortest period of time on our customers and hopefully a positive impact. And if you can't do it, then I've had conversations with a few of them saying, maybe we are not the company for you. It's not as if I have two sort of softwares, a good one I supply to the successful customers and the bad to the unsuccessful customers. The fact is that in certain places, there isn't an organizational alignment and you don't succeed. However, we do, again, we have in the last 14 months or so made tremendous investments into really ease of use, a flexibility of architecture, which is hybrid and multi-cloud and shrinking the total time to value for our customers. Because if I believe you, if you do these three things, you will have an impact, a positive impact on the customer in the shortest amount of time. And you'll endear yourself. And I think that is more important than worrying needlessly about competition and the competition will do what they do. But if you keep your customers happy by having a positive impact, success is only a matter of time. And customers and employees are essential to that. But I like that you talked about customer obsession because you see it all over the place. Many people use it as descriptors of themselves and their LinkedIn profiles, for example. But for it actually to be meaningful, you talked about the whole objective is to make an impact for your customers. How do you define that so that it's not just, I don't want to say marketing term, but something that everyone says their customer obsesses. Showing it, right? Put in the pudding. It's easy to say we are customer obsessed. I mean, organization is going to say, we don't care about our customers. So, of course, we all want our customers to be successful. How do you, that's easy. Having a cultural value that we put our customers first is easy, but we didn't choose to do that. What we said is, how do you have an impact on your customer in the shortest amount of time? That is a virtue of MemSQL. And we have now designed every process in MemSQL to align with that virtue. If there is a decision that we have to make, we essentially lens it through the fact of what is in the best interest of our customer and what will get us to have an impact, a positive impact on the customer in the shortest amount of time. That is the decision, which is a great decision for us to make. A lot of times it's more expensive. It's a lot tougher. It stresses the organization and the people in it, but that's what you have to do if you are, if you are, as they say, customer obsessed. It is a term which is easy to use, but very difficult to adhere to. And we want to be authentic about it. We are going to continue to learn. It's not a destination, it's a journey. And we continue to take decisions and refine our processes to, as I said, have impact on our customers in the shortest amount of time. Now, obsessiveness a lot of times is seen as a negative in the current society that we live in. And there's a reason for that because the way we view obsession, the way we view obsession and incursion is there is a punishing impression, which is really akin to just being cruel, leading by fear and all the rest of it, which has no place in any organization. And I actually think in society at large, not think I believe doesn't have any place in society at large. And then there's something which I term as instrumental impression, which is this is where we were, this is where we are, this is where we are going. And how do we track our progress on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? And if we aren't sort of getting to that level that we believe we should get to, if our customers aren't seeing the value from us in the shortest amount of time, what is it that we need to do better? Is that obsession or instrumental aggression is what we are all about? And that brings with it a level of intensity which is not for everyone. But then when you are challenging the institutions which have ruled the rules so as to speak for decades, it's going to take a herculean effort to house them. And we basically believe that instrumental aggression and intensity, having an impact on customers in the shortest amount of time is going to get us there. And we are glad to have people who actually believe in that. And that's why we admit tremendous progress over the course of the last few years. So instrumental aggression, interesting how you talked about that. It's a provocative statement, but the way that you talk about it almost seems it's a prescriptive, various strategic, well thought out type of moving the business forward, busting through the old guard. Because let's face it, the big guys, the oracles, they're there, they're not easy for customers to rip and replace. But instrumental aggression seems to kind of go hand in hand with the changing of the guard. You've got to embrace one to be able to deliver the other, right? Yes, it does. I think even if you were inventing something new, I mean, yeah, it just requires instrumental aggression, I believe is a anchor or core to most successful organizations, whether in IT or anywhere else. There is a, there is a site to that obsession. And I'm not talking about instrumental aggression here, but I'm really talking about the obsession to succeed, which gave rise to what I think someone called as brilliant jerks and all the rest of it, because that is the sort of negative side of obsession. And I think the challenge of leadership in our times is how do you foster the positivity of obsession, which leads to change of the garden? And that's the instrumental aggression as a tool to go there. And how do you prevent the negative side of it, which says that the end justifies the means. And that's just not true. There is something that's right and there's something that's wrong. And if that is made very clear that the end does not justify the means, it creates a lot of trust between us and our customers, us and our employees. And when their inherent trust happens, then you foster, as I said, the positive side of obsession and get away from the negative side of obsession that you've seen in certain very, very large companies. Now, the one thing that instrumental aggression and obsession brings to a company is that it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And this is what I continue to tell our employees and my colleagues is be comfortable being uncomfortable because what we are trying to do is hard. And it's gonna take, as I say, a Herculean effort. So let's be comfortable being uncomfortable and have fun doing it because how many people get a chance to change industry, which is dominated by a few players and have such a positive impact not only on our customers, but society at large. And I think it's a privilege, pressure is a privilege. And I'm grateful for the opportunity that's been afforded to me and to my colleagues. And the- That's a great way. Sorry, that's a great way of looking at it. Pressure is a privilege. If you think about, I like what you said, I always say, get comfortably uncomfortable. It is a, in any aspect, whether it's your workouts or your discipline, working from home, it's a hard thing to do to your point. There's a lot of positivity that can come from it. If we think of what's happening this week alone and the US political climate, changing of the old guard, we've got Kamala Harris as our first female VP nominee in how many years, but also from a diversity angle, from a women leadership perspective, blowing the door wide open. It's great to see that we have someone that my daughters can look up to and say that, yes, there is a place for us in society and we can have a meaningful contribution to society. So I actually think that Senator Harris's nomination is a symbolism of change of guard for sure. I have no political agendas here at all and we'll see how it pans out in November. But the one thing is for sure, that it's gonna make a lot of people uncomfortable. A change of guard always makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I was reflecting back on something else and everything that I've actually achieved which is something I'm proud of, I had to go through a zone that I was extremely uncomfortable. Growth only happens when you're uncomfortable. Growth never happens in your comfort zone. Now, whether it's running MemSQL or having a society to change, if you stick to your comfort zone, you stick to your prejudices and biases because it's just comfortable. There is a warmth and mediocrity. And I think that that essential change of guard, as I said at the cost of repeating myself, will make a lot of people uncomfortable. But I honestly believe we'll move the society forward and yeah, I couldn't be more proud of having a California senator be nominated and she brings diversity multicultural. And what I loved about it was, we talk about culture and all the rest of it and she was talking about how our parents who were both at Berkeley when she was growing up would put her in a pram, not what I'm gonna call it here, I can store her, what have you. And she'll be in a pram going to protests and rallies. So it was just, it was ingrained in her to be able to challenge the status quo and move the society forward. And she was comfortable being uncomfortable when she was in a pram and that's good. I think we sort of, yeah, let's see what November brings to us, but I think just a nomination has changed a lot of things. If it's not this time, it'll be the next time or the time after that, but we will have a woman president in my lifetime. That's what I'm convinced about and that's just great. Well, I should hope so too. And there's so many, I know we've got a wrap here, but so many different data points that show that technology actually companies, excuse me, with women in leadership position are significantly 10, 20% more profitable. So the changing of the guard is hard, as you said, but it's time to get uncomfortable. And this is a great example of that as well as the culture that you have at MemSQL, Raj. It's always a pleasure and a philosophical time talking with you. I thank you for joining me on theCUBE today. Thank you, Lisa, for this pleasure. Stay safe and long. You as well. For my guest, Raj Burma, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation.