 From theCUBE 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. And today joining me is CUBE alumni, the co-CEO of MemSQL, Raj Verma. Raj, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa, it's great to be back and it's so good to see you. Likewise, so since we last saw each other, a lot of changes going on everywhere. You're now the co-CEO of MemSQL. The CEO's role is changing dramatically in this year and the last few months. Talk to us about some of those changes. Yeah, where do I even start? I was just listening to something, watching something and it said, in leadership, one thing that they never tell you is, you don't find the event, the event finds you. And it was four and a half, almost five months ago, we were at our SKO in Half Moon Bay. And if someone had said to me then that we'll be quarantined for five months following that and more likely seven months, I probably wouldn't have believed them. And if I did, I would have burst out crying. So it's been sort of a lot of change for us. The one thing is for sure is the CEO have probably made more compelling decisions in the last four months than I probably made in the year prior to that. So there is a lot of decisions, important decisions that are being made now. I think the thing that's impressed me the most about just the human race per se in the last four and a half, five months is the resilience, how the adaptability of just the community and the race at large. There is a lot of goodness that we've seen happen. I think there is a greater appreciation for the life that we sort of had. And I think when everything does, one day come back to normal, we would be a lot more appreciative and nicer just as individuals. Now, as CEO, I think the first order of duty for me was to embrace our employees and my colleagues. It's a trying set of circumstances for them, worrying about their health, the health of their raised parents, of their families, their well-being and whether they have a job or not and how the economic environment would pan out. So I think it was just my number one priority at the start and continues to be till today with the, with our colleagues and the employees at Men's Seafoam. And the first few decisions that we made were 100% employee centric. None of the big ones was taking the pledge of no retrenchments or no workforce reduction for 90 days to begin with. And we've continued that. We haven't really reduced any employee headcount at all. The second was to go in turn embrace our customers and deliver to the promise that we had in normal times and help them get back to as much of a normalcy as they could. And the third was to do whatever we could to use our technology and efforts, our resources to help society at large, whether it was to track and tracing projects that we did for a large telco or, you know, telco in the Middle East or telco in Asia. And we put our resources there. Or it was just using a platform to heighten the public awareness around Juneteenth and other sort of social issues. Because I think in times of almost societal isolation, using your platform and being a voice for what you stand for is more important than ever before. And those were really the three things that stand out apart from just normal decisions, normal decisions that you make to make sure that you're well-capitalized, that you have enough cash to run your business, that all the fundamentals of the business are sound. So yeah. So lots of decisions on a massively accelerated scale, more than in the last 10 years, but big strategic decisions made in a quick time period for employees, for customers, for how do we use our platform? What is the key that you need in order to make those decisions as strategically as you can, like that? Yeah. You've got to lens it through what is the why of the organization. Our advice is very simple. We want to be the platform of decision-making or what we call the platform of now, where we can marry historical information with real-time operational data being streamed in to your organization and be able to deliver up reports and insights that you need for quick decision-making in other organizations. So delivering up the now. Internally, when sort of presented with options to make decisions, the lens that I've used is, what's in the best interest of our employees, what's in the best interest of our customers and what is in the best interest of our investors and stakeholders. And if you apply that lens, the decisions aren't actually that difficult. You will never have 100% of the data that you need to make a decision. So, you know, lensing it through your priorities becomes extremely, extremely important. The other aspect is that having data though, having said that having data now to make decisions is more important than ever before because you do not have the, you know, sort of physical cues to depend on or clues to depend on. I'm still finding it hard to read the digital clues on Zoom or Google Hangouts or Teams or what have you. So you just have to have a very steeped in data decision-making, marrying it with what is it that you stand for as an organization. And the third vector that we've put to this is very simple. We as an organization stand for authenticity. We like to simplify rather than complicate. And we need to do, you know, demonstrate courage, overcome fear. And those are the other vectors that we use to make prior, you know, majority of our strategic decisions. So if data for years, you know, you've heard this all over the tech circuit, Raj, data is the new gold. Data is the new oil. Now you're saying it's even more important than ever in this unprecedented time. How does MemSQL help customers get access to as much data as they can to make really fast strategic decisions to not just, you know, survive in this mode, but thrive? Yeah, I think two questions, you know, the, what is the, you know, data and the value of data? And you're absolutely right. The value of data now is more than ever before. And also the amount of data that is now being produced is more than ever before. So it's actually a pretty, pretty non-trivial issue to solve. And I think the first thought is that you can't solve the problems of tomorrow with the technology of yesterday. You cannot solve the problems of tomorrow using a technology that was built for a different era, which was built 45 years ago, 25 years ago. And, you know, some of the tenants of the technology are still steeped in, let's just call it heritage. So first and foremost, the realization that the problems of tomorrow need the tools of now and the talent of now and the management of now and the leadership of now to have to solve it is paramount. What we do as a technology company and a lot of companies in our genre called hard tech is exactly that, it's hard tech. It takes a lot of talent, it takes a lot of time, resources, money, clarity of thought to build something which will solve the problems of today and of tomorrow. And today the challenges that we actually have is the real-time nature of decision-making, of interactions, of experience, of security, of compliance are more exaggerated than ever before. And how do you marry real-time information with historical information in the cheapest, easiest to deploy flexible architecture is of paramount importance. And that's exactly what we do, Lisa. We give you a database that is arguably the fastest in the world from a query speed standpoint. It scales more than any other database in our genre. It has data governance by virtue of us being SQL. It's hybrid, multi-cloud, so it doesn't lock you in. And it's among the easiest to use. So, I don't know what the future would bring, Lisa, but one thing I can assure you is these, there are five things which wouldn't change which is you would, developers would prefer fast over slow, cheap over fast, flexible over rigid, ease of use over complexity of use, and a secure, safe platform versus the alternative. And that, if you have those five tenants, I think it'd be pretty well-versed with solving the problems of today and tomorrow. So you mentioned real-time and minute ago, and that's, I think right now during the COVID-19 crisis, there's nothing that highlights the urgency of which we need information real-time. It's not going to help us if it's 24 or 48 hours old. How does MemSQL deliver real-time insights to customers, whether it's a telecommunications company looking to do contact tracing or a bank? Yeah, so let me start with a couple of examples. A very large telephone provider, telecommunication provider in the States uses us for, or uses us for network telemetry. So, you know, how many calls did Lisa make? How many texts did she send? What time, without, of course, the privacy attached to it, when did she experience a call drop? What's the coverage at her home? Is the sort of mobile tower close to her place going to go down and what would be the inconvenience? All of that. So copious amounts of data are required to really deliver a customer experience and it's a hard enough problem because the amount of data, as you can imagine, is extremely, extremely, extremely large. But when COVID-19 struck, the data became that much more important because now it was a tool that you could use as a company to be able to describe or follow cohorts of subscribers in hot beds like New York at that time and see which states they were actually, let's call it fleeing to or moving to. And to be able to do that in near real time was not good enough because you had to actually do it in real time. To be able to track where the PPEs were in near real time was not good enough. It had to be real time. And, you know, to track where the ventilators were in near real time wasn't good enough. You just needed to do that. And, you know, I think that probably is one of the biggest and examples of real time that we have in the recent past and something that we are most proud of. How do we do that? We built this hard tech based on first principles. So we didn't try and put a lipstick on a pig. We didn't try and re-architect a 45-year-old technology or a 15-year-old technology. We just said that if we actually had a plane sheet of paper, what would be, what would we do? And we said the need of the future is going to be fast over slow, as I said, you know, cheap or expensive, flexible over rigid, safe over the other alternative and ease of use. And that's what we've built. And the world will see the amount of difference that we make to organizations and more importantly to society, which is very near and dear to my heart. And yeah, that's what I'm extremely proud and optimistic about. Talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you're having now. I've known you for many years. You're a very charismatic speaker. As you were saying a few minutes ago, it's hard to read body language on Zoom and video conferences. How are those customer conversations going and how have they changed? A lot has changed. I think there are a couple of aspects that you touch upon. One is just getting used to your digital work day. You know, initially we thought it was two weeks and it's great. You don't have the commute and all the rest of it. And then you started to realize and the other thing was everyone was available. There's no one was traveling. There were no birthday parties. There's no picking up a kid from baseball or school or swimming or what have. So everyone was available. And we were like, wow, this is great. No commute, everyone's available. Let's start meeting and interacting. And then you realize after a while that this digital work day is extremely, extremely exhausting. And if you want deliberate about it, it can fill your entire day and you don't get much done. So one of the things that I've started to do is I don't get on a digital call unless of course it's a customer or something extremely, extremely important. Till 11 a.m. that's my thinking time. It's just eight to 11 is in thoughts and people I want to call rather than my calendar describing what my priorities should be. And it's the same thing for our customers as well in a slightly different way. They are trying to decide and come to terms with not only what today means to them but what the realities of today means for tomorrow. I'll give you an example of a very, very large bank in the United States, which Consumer Bank, which is essentially believed in the fact that customer relations were the most and customer relationship managers were the most important role for them. They are thinking about moving to bots. So the fact that you would be interacting with bots when you reach your bank is going to be a reality. There is no if and then buts about it. Very, very large company providing financial services is now trying to say, how do you make the digital platforms more responsive? How do you make analytics faster, more responsive and collaborative? Those are really the focus of C-suite attention rather than which building do we call after our company and add towers to it? Or what coffee machine should we buy for the organization? Or should we have a whiskey bar or a wine bar in our office? Now, just the mundaneness of those decisions are coming up. And now the focus is, how do we not only survive to your point, Lisa, but thrive in the digital collaboration economy when it's going to be about responsiveness, it's going to be about speed and it's going to be about security and compliance. At the end of the day, kind of wrapping things up here, COVID or not, the customer experience is critical. It's the lifeblood of what your organization delivers, the success of your customers and their ability to make major business impacts is what speaks to MemSQL's capabilities. So a customer experience I know is always near and dear to your heart. And it sounds like it's something that you are, have modified for the situation, but really MemSQL focused on, not just the customer experience, but your employee experience as well. Well, that's exactly it. And I think if you do right by the employees, they'll do right by the customers. And I would any day put the employee first lens to any decision that we make. And that's paid off for us in spades. We've got a family environment. I genuinely, genuinely care about every single employee of MemSQL and their families. And we've communicated often. We have listened, we have learned. These are unprecedented times. There isn't a manual to go through COVID-19 work environment. And I think the realization that we just don't know what tomorrow would bring is actually very liberating because it just frees you from rinsing and repeating and further feeding your prejudice and biases to getting up every day and say, let me learn as much as I can about the current environment, current realities, lens it through our priorities and make the best decision that we can. And if we are wrong, accept it and correct it. Nothing too intellectual, but it's in the simplicity that sometimes we find a lot of solace. Yeah, simplicity in these times would be great. I think you're, I like how you talked about the opportunities. There's a lot of positive COVID catalysts that are coming from this. And we want to thank you for sharing some time with us today talking about the changing role of the C-suite and the opportunities that it brings. Raj, it's been great to have you on theCUBE. As always, Lisa, it's a pleasure. Thank you. For the co-CEO of MemSQL, Raj Verma, I'm Lisa Martin. 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