 Everyone, welcome to a special CUBE conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, the CUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, the host of the CUBE. We're here with this very special guest and the new CEO of a hot startup, Christine Heckard, CEO of Scalar. Welcome to the CUBE. Great to see you. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for coming on. So, you're the new CEO of Scalar that is CEO transition. Super great founder, great engineering team. Hot startup, a lot of finance and a lot of customers. Tell us about Scalar. So Scalar was founded by a guy named Steve Newman. He is a serial entrepreneur. Scalar is his seventh company. His sixth company was called Rightly and it got bought by Google and is what we all know and love as Google Docs today. So, when he was inside Google building out Google Docs, he had the same problem that a lot of engineers do right now, especially if they're on a modern stack. It's really hard to troubleshoot. It's hard to figure out what's running well and if there's a problem where it's at and fix it quickly. And so, he left in 2011 and he founded Scalar. And so, the company has how many employees, just give us the quick numbers. Employees, funding, venture involved, customers, give us the quick numbers. The company has a little over 50 employees. It just took a series A round about a year, a little over, a little under a year and a half ago, led by Shasta Ventures. There are 300 paying customers. We grew the core customer base last year by 170% revenue. So, it's growing very quickly. We more than doubled the employees in the last year. So, like you say, it's on fire and we're trying to scale up ourselves as we help our customers scale. So, growth is obviously rocket ship growth as an attractive, enticing opportunity for you. You've been there, done that. What else attracted you to the opportunity? What made you make the move to take the leadership helm as the chief of Scalar? The thing that attracted me most to Scalar is that the world runs on code right now. And for companies for whom the code is the company, downtime is money, it's critical. But in these modern stacks, it's really hard to figure out where the problem is. Everything's been so abstracted. And if you're cloud-based, if you're moving to serverless, if you're on Kubernetes or some kind of container platform trying to do orchestration, any of that makes it faster and easier to build the service but a lot harder to figure out if and where there's a problem within the service. And Scalar's designed by engineers for engineers on modern stacks to help them figure out where that problem is and get it solved very quickly. So, also the new, the wave is the cloud. Cloud native is super big opportunity, it's converging. What's the market opportunity? What are you guys going after in terms of, look at the marketplace, what's the segment you're going after and lay that out? What segment are you in? Is it just cloud? Is it a piece of cloud native? What's the market opportunity? We serve customers who have applications built on a new stack, a cloud-based stack. And typically the people who use us most and who love us most are the site reliability engineers responsible for keeping it up and running, DevOps, True Developers. One of our largest customers is a company called Solando. They're an older company that did a digital transition so they do online e-commerce now, one of the largest in Europe. And for their engineers, 25% of their engineers use the product daily, 50% use it weekly. So it's part of the workflow. It helps them do their jobs and do their jobs better. So it's a utility and the founder, you said worked at Google, obviously he saw the scale there. They have a site reliability engineer concept, SRE, they run a huge infrastructure. Is that the kind of the market you're going to have to DevOps, SRE types? So we're an observability tool and there's kind of two camps of observability. We started in the logging space. So what we're really known for is the fast logging tool. And the reason why we're known for being fast is unlike all the other architectures that were optimized for the more traditional stack. We've been written and optimized for the new stack and we're the only architecture that doesn't use keyword index in order to do that search. And that's what makes us fast, but it's also what makes us more affordable. And it contributes to the architecture, contributes to the simplicity of how you can use the tool and how the tool is written. So the core tech is under the hood would be what's the core tech? Cause speed obviously means you got some technology there. What's the core technology that makes that speed work? So we're a true multi-tenancy product. We run on Amazon ourself. It's a multi-tenancy system. It uses massive parallel processing. And basically we can ingest any data. In fact, we're designed for machine data, for logs, for things that don't, you know, they're not full documents. It's not like a video or something on the worldwide web. These are little tiny events that come in and there's lots and lots and lots of them. Scalers, the name of the company, we scale up and we scale out. And what we do is when you go to run a query, we throw every processor in our system at every query that comes in. And the reason why that becomes important in this multi-tenancy architecture is the more customers we have, the more data that we ingest, the more servers we have to throw in every query for every customer. So as we grow, the service gets better, it gets faster, it gets more affordable for all customers. And that's the best thing about the cloud. You can bring that compute to bear. So you have a little flywheel of acceleration. Talk about the role of data because it's interesting. One of the core problems we hear a lot in cloud-native world is, you know, there's so many now sets of services being deployed. Kubernetes is becoming, you know, the de facto standard for orchestration around microservices, containers. Obviously there are standard as well, which means there's more instrumentation, right? So I can almost see how the founder saw this future because he lived it. He lived the future and now the real world's going, hey, we have that Google-leg problem. We have this tons of services playing around, but it's not just logging and getting a query back in minutes. These are services that are talking to applications to each other. This is like mission critical. Very mission critical. Is this what you guys are doing? Right. If you are running in a traditional environment and you're running sort of traditional applications, there are really good logging solutions out there for that. That's what Splunk was found and on there amazing at doing that. But nobody had built and optimized a logging system and an observability system for the new stack. And that's what we're designed to do. And, you know, you use the, you said in minutes. And minutes is what it takes for most log queries in a traditional environment. 96% of all of our queries happen in less than a second. We're a fast. So this is really what the agile teams need. DevOps teams. Yes. When code is money, when it's the company, when every second of downtime, or even a service that's impaired. It might not be hard down, but it's not running the way it should. That impacts the customer experience. It impacts how many customers you can get if you're a real time business. It impacts revenue. It's important to get that service up and running quickly. So you guys are reimagining logging, which this is more mission critical rather than, okay, where the breach is, where it's going on in the basic logs like Splunk used to do. So talk about the product. Who's the target persona? How is it consumed? You mentioned on the cloud. Is it SaaS? How does someone get involved? They just download it. They just get a console. What's the product and who the target audience is? So it is SaaS. It's delivered by SaaS. We don't have an on-prem service today or an offering. And typically it's the site reliability engineer, the architects, developers themselves, dev ops for sure, cloud ops. They're the ones that are using the tool day to day. And it's a beautiful dashboard. A lot of it is just point and click. You can go in if you want to add English language query. You don't have to learn a special query language to use this. That's why people say it's so fast and easy to learn to use. And I think that's why we get the kind of daily usage we have. You don't have to be an expert in the tool. It's very intuitive. You get a dashboard, you can just keep clicking down off of a chart and get all the way to the code. In fact, we can link you from where the problem is straight into the code that underlies that. So you can then go and solve the problem. So it's really easy to get into. Very. So I don't need to, I'll do any elaborate configurations. You don't need to do elaborate configurations. And as importantly, you don't need to learn a new specialized query language. Which again, in the more traditional systems, you find that there's only a few people that really know how to use the product because you have to learn the query language. It's kind of like CLI or something in networking. And so there's a few specialists and they're very good. But if you're an engineer and there's a problem and you want to use the tool, you don't have time to become an expert. You got to just use it. And so even though it's designed to search machine language, you can use English. It's pretty easy to figure out how to write that query. And it comes back so quickly. If you didn't get it quite right, you can just refine and do the search again and narrow down. I can see why the VCs like this, venture capitals, because it markets good, big wave, cloud native, a lot of growth there. Certainly, hyper scalars, enterprises are coming next. So I can imagine that's more headroom. Products, consumable SaaS in the cloud, technology that's fast, compelling. You're good. You can be on the pitch team. Final checkboxes, customers. So how many customers do you have? We have 300 paying customers that doubled in the last year. And we have some big names in a lot of small companies. So some of the fun ones are Giffy. My kids love that. My husband, right? Using them every day. NBC Universal kind of on the other side of that. Companies for whom the application is the business. And it can be a traditional company that's trying to launch new digital transformation initiatives, or it can be companies that were born in the cloud. And that's only going to get better again in the market. It's more companies going to the cloud. Talk about multi-cloud. Because we had conversations in the past before you came on Scala around multi-cloud. That's only going to increase the sets of microservices and the role of data, not just code, because code is data. Data is code. It was going to be a whole data ops movement coming soon. We see that tsunami coming. How does the multi-cloud fit into all this in your mind? Is it too early? Is that coming later? Or is it available now? For your customers that have the multi-cloud? For our customers, if they are in a multi-cloud environment today, we're an ideal tool for them, because we can run on any of their clouds. Most customers are not yet in multi-cloud, but they're trying to get there. Just like most customers are not yet fully containerized, but you want to pick a tool today that will grow with you and get you to tomorrow. And that's where Scala comes in, because we are designed and optimized for that environment. And there's kind of no scale too big for us. The company was named very deliberately. We can scale up. We can scale out. And we can continue to be simple and fast as your business scales. Christine, you've had a track record. You had a great career. You've seen a lot of ways of innovation. You've been working with a big company. You've done the startups. Now you're back at the startups. So I got to ask you a personal question. How does it feel? What's it like back into the trenches? And you've got a hot startup here. One month on the job, what's going on there? I really love it. It's, you know, there's 50 people in the company. Every one of them is high energy. They're so committed to the cause. You know, when the world runs on code and you help that code run better, you're making an impact on the world every single day. These people know it. They feel it. They're very committed. And unlike some of the much bigger companies I've been at, you can innovate so quickly. So I just finished, you know, my first 30 days on boarding. I have talked to our big customers, you know, a couple dozen of our really big customers. And one of, so they all say a couple of things over and over again. Like there's just some consistent themes. Fast always comes up. It's usually the first word. Simple comes up. Affordable, which is nice. People pay a lot of money for these tools and they don't always feel good about all that money. We can come in and be much more affordable and they appreciate that. But the thing that kept coming up over and over again was the customer service and the customer support. And nobody, like, you know, I come from worlds where nobody ever raves about customer service and customer support. So it was like odd and I dug a little bit. And there were two pieces to that. One, because we're 50 people, when somebody has a problem, like we're all in, it gets solved quickly. A lot of times we can sort of flag that problem for the customer because we're keeping track. But the other thing that was brought up is when they need something that maybe we don't deliver today, they ask for it. And a lot of times we can give it to them pretty quickly. There's not some, you know, big, huge, long roadmap process. And we're a small company. We can't always do it quickly. But a lot of times we can turn stuff around and it's great. Well, you're hitting the ground running, you get your running shoes on. Sounds like a great opportunity. You got a lot of work to do. What are some of the priorities? I'm sure hiring is big. Yes. Take a minute to give the plug on for any hires you have. So we're just moving to brand new facilities in downtown San Mateo, couple blocks from Caltrain. And that is because we doubled the company size last year. We need to double it again this year. So we are hiring. If you know of any great people, please send them to us. The big, so we announced some new things at Amazon re-invent late last year, one of which is new distributed tracing. We're on the very leading edge of this trend. And it's an important one. It's probably a conversation maybe with Steve himself. Love to see. Yeah, he's very knowledgeable. And it's a fascinating area because the APM systems, again, kind of the traditional, if you can say that for APM, have all been built for the front end, for the websites. But once you move in these container environments, you need that same kind of capability for the back end. And so you need something called distributed tracing. It turns out that if you're born in the logs, like we are doing that distributed tracing, which links them together and gives you a picture kind of systemically of what's happening and how you link the events for a fuller picture. We're kind of uniquely good at that. So we've got that coming out later this quarter. That'll attract some engineers because that's a hard problem. It's a hard, like a lot of the problems we solve are hard, interesting problems. And they're problems for the new stack and they're problems at scale. And smart engineers like to work on that. You know, state's a big one. Stateless application, state is a huge problem. I'm sure you guys are on this with the tracing kind of place in. That's exactly. Final question for you before we end is competition. Certainly people who are in the new world going to cloud native, they get it, they get the complexity, they get the opportunity as well. So there's a lot of investment there. For the folks that are looking at scale like, what's the competitive landscape? How do you answer that? What's your response to different, being different from the competition? So there's lots and lots of observability tools and even logging tools in the market. And from that standpoint, you could say there's tons of competition. They're all built on keyword indexing. So they're all optimized for looking back for yesterday's world. We're the only ones that are built on this very new architecture designed for the future stack, designed for the new stack. And we're the only ones that don't use keyword indexing. And what we have is this amazing multi-tenancy columnar-based approach that gives you these advantages of fast, simple and affordable. So you're sticking the ground in the marketplace of speed, sub-second response, two queries for run-time applications that are commission-critical business, is that right? Said very well, thank you. So we do here at theCUBE, we figure it out. We get the data. Christine, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the new role. We'll be following you guys. Love the name, Scaler. Scaling is table stakes now in the cloud. If you don't compete at scale or operate at scale or develop at scale, then you're probably going to be in trouble. So theCUBE's covering it as well, Waze. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier.