 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. Today talking with the co-CEO of Men's SQL, Raj Verma Raj. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. Good to see you again as always. You as well. So we're living in a really strange time, right? There is disruption coming at us from every angle. We're used to talking about disruptors and technology as technology innovations like cloud, for example, but now we've got this other disruption, this catalyst for more disruption in COVID-19. I wanted to ask you though, was we see so much changing in the business world for long story businesses filing for chapter 11. What, why do companies get disrupted and how can they actually become, how can a company become a disruptor? I think disruption is a tale of innovation really. Innovation from the incumbent or lack thereof and the fact that, you know, incumbents become a lot more inward focused. They become more about doing more of what got them to be successful, more process focused and outcome focused. And the disruptors are essentially again, all about innovation and all about solving customers problems for today and for tomorrow. So I do think disruption is at its very core, two tales of innovation, one cautionary and the other sort of legendary. And we see that in the Valley all the time. You know, we see the, the favorite innovators of a decade ago are just limping along now and just being completely leapfrogged by the innovators of today. And that's really what the Valley is known for. I do think that a big part of being a disruptor or being disrupted, as I said, you know, two sides of the same sort of coin or a double-edged sword really, is that for a disruptor, it's all about challenging the status quo. And to be effectively able to challenge the status quo, you need a team which is united in purpose and in passion about waking up every morning and trying to, you know, as I said, challenge the status quo and not accept just because things were being done the way they were being done. And that's what tomorrow should be. And I think that's really important. And I think there is a third element to being disrupted or, you know, aiding the disruptors which is a catalyst event of any sort that might be. You know, it was the internet for a son. I mean, son really called itself the network as a computer. One of my favorite companies and Scott McNeely, someone that I greatly admire and I've got to know over the years and they were preaching this gospel for 15 years and then the internet hit and they just went, they became a rocket ship. Cisco, the same thing happened. A lot of companies and one in particular that we even worked for together, Lisa, got completely disrupted and blindsided by the cloud. I do believe that one such disruptor right now or one such catalyst which will disrupt business and you alluded to that a little while ago is COVID-19 and the data diluge or the tsunami of data that accompanies it. You know, I was just talking to a friend and he said, you know, we are now living really in 2023. COVID-19, four months of living in COVID-19 has kind of propelled us three years forward in terms of the problems that we had three years to solve. We need to solve it now. And I think, yeah, the innovation, our team that challenges the status quo and a catalyst is what disrupts companies and what disrupts us. You brought up a really good point though that there's such a huge component of the team to be able to not just react quickly but be creative enough and confident enough to challenge that status quo. There's a lot of folks who are very comfortable in their swim lanes. MemSQL has been a disruptor in the database space but I think that team that you hit on is really essential. Without that and without the right folks really focused together, the disruptors are going to be disrupted. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think I often say at downhills or in private meetings that we are in the talent business. We are only as good as our team is. No ifs and buts about. If you're not united in purpose and mission have immense diversity of thought and be okay to change our minds when presented with empirical evidence of something different. We will never succeed, we will never disrupt. I think majority of the population wakes up and looks for evidence that further makes them comfortable in the prejudices and the biases that they have. And now whether that's in your professional life or in your personal life. That's majority of the population. That's why majority of the population does not in a way. If you have the courage to say that I was wrong that the status quo is just not enough. There is a better way out there. It's hard but there is a better way out there and that it's going to add phenomenal value to our customer base, to the world at large. That's the kind of people that we are looking for and we are very lucky to have. And if you are one of them and if you really do want to make a dent in the database universe, I know a company. So give me a call. Well, challenging the status quo is hard, like you said. Because getting up every day and just assuming things are going to be the same in a line with your thought process, that's easy. But being willing to, as you said, be courageous is a whole other ball game. And as right now, data from yesterday is too late. Not only are we living in an on-demand culture but now with the disruption, the microbial disruption, data from yesterday isn't good enough to help solve tomorrow's problems. Neither is yesterday's technology. How is MemSQL helping your customers even break the status quo? Lisa, that's really most of the conversations I tend to have with CIOs and CEOs. And given the digital work environment that we live in, there is a lot more availability because of lack of travel and other social obligations. So I have a number of these conversations with CEOs and CIOs on a weekly basis. And one of the things that most CEOs and CIOs ask for is, Raj, how can I get them now, now? As I was saying that the COVID-19 crisis, so as to speak, or event, has really spurred and catalyzed a lot of these digital innovations and something that could wait for another year, another two years, maybe even three years needs to be done now. And the need for the now has never been greater. Whether it be the responsiveness of your AI ML tools or how close can we actually put a transaction to your AI ML layer for near real time or rather real, real time insights as to what's going on in the business because the one data point that you have which can help you make informed decisions in this digital world is data. So how do you do it at speed? How do you do it at scale? How do you do it in a flexible environment? Is the need for the hour? Now, another aspect that they talk about is don't give me a fancier Mausra as my CPU, the gentleman that we just hired from Google BigQuery is one of the founding members and had their engineering and product management team. And he actually put it really well. He said, I haven't come here to build a fancier Mausra. I've come here to build a novel new way of solving a customer's data problems and delivering the now when the customer needs us as I said in the fastest, most economical, flexible, secure manner. Now, that is in my opinion, the biggest need for the hour and someone who can deliver that is going to be extremely successful in my humble opinion because let me ask a question of any CIO or CEO or whoever is watching here that if we could say that we would juice up your AI ML dashboard reports, real time dashboards, 4x in four weeks, how many of you are gonna say no? How many of you are gonna say that from a response time of 15 minutes if we could give you sub-second response times like we've done for many of our vendors in the last three to four weeks, how many of you all would say no? I'd stick to my slow dashboard. And that's what we are enabling Lisa and that's why I am superbly excited about where we are and where we are headed. So companies that can work with innovative technology like MemSQL, whether it be a retailer or a telco for example, or healthcare organization, the companies that are gonna be able to get the data to get the now now, are those the next disruptors? Beyond out, beyond out. And we are already seeing like you and I were talking about before the show that we are seeing a lot of bankruptcies, amazing amount of bankruptcies for companies who did not have the infrastructure for delivering the now now. And they essentially were feeding their own prejudices and biases by saying, oh no, I made the decision on Oracle 15 years ago and I'm just gonna stick by it because they're the biggest, baddest database graph. Well, they can solve the now problem and guess what happened to your company? And those who were courageous enough to say, yeah, it solved the problems of yesterday. If we are in unprecedented times and it will take a very hard and deep look and something which will shake up the status quo to be able to deliver the tomorrow for our company, to see the sunrise of tomorrow, we have to be courageous enough to question our prejudices and bias. And those are the companies with that will not only survive, but they will thrive. We were talking to, you know, naturally I have a lot of conversations with investors here and you know, the SaaS technology area is the new gold now. I mean, that's one segment of the market that's held up because that is what is enabling the courageous enterprises to deliver the tomorrow and help the employees and the customer see the sunrise of tomorrow. And those who don't, they just don't see the sunrise tomorrow. I know working and talking with customers is near and dear to your heart. How do you help businesses? Like you mentioned, a whole bunch of really big brands have filed for chapter 11 recently. Brands that we've all known for decades and decades, maybe it's, you know, team. That's just not innovative enough. Like you said, Oracle, we're going to use it. How does MemSQL come in? How do you, when you're talking with those customers who might be on the brink of not surviving, how do you help them from like a thought diversity perspective to understand what they need to do to not just survive, but thrive? Yeah. You know, I wouldn't like to take too much of the credit here that we can be saviours of companies. The company and the executive team needs to know their why and we can deliver the how and we can deliver it faster, cheaper in a more secure fashion. But the courage of saying that if we don't change, we will die and we will not see the sunrise of tomorrow has to come from the organizations. And I think that's the starting point. And we give them enough empirical evidence that there is a better way out there. We were working with a very, very large electronic retailer and for their retail telemetry, as you pointed to, they could only get telemetry of their stores all over the world on a everyday basis. I think they ran their report every 16 hours and that was just not enough of them and they've got a very involved CEO and they wanted sub-second response times and the team actually thought it was not possible and continued to say that to the executive team till they came across us and we showed that the 16 hour time difference was now 0.8 seconds and they jumped on it. And now their dashboards are powered by MemSQL and instead of running reports every 16 hours, they run it every second if you so want, you can query your retail telemetry every second. And those kind of courageous asks and a team saying just because I made a decision two years ago, now is the time actually for those teams to say it was a different world. I made the right decision two years ago, but in the new world, there is a better way of doing things and better way of securing our future and delivering the now and that's where we come in and we've helped a number of customers and I actually urge a lot of the organizations who are looking for the now to have that introspective conversations internally. So how do you advise companies, whether it's your prospects, your customers or even MemSQL to build a team that's poised for disruption? Is it generational? Is it more than that? I don't think it's generational at all. I don't think it's an ageist issue of seeing the future or having the ability to seek honors. I think it's ultimately, and I know I'm using this term a lot, it is I've always felt that very bright, intelligent, self-aware individuals have the ability to question their own prejudices and biases and requires courage and intelligence and all the rest of it. But I think that is the key. There isn't that much more and what greater impetus or reward would a company want than survival? Sometimes survival is a great impetus for innovation and we are seeing that happen a lot and those that aren't then don't do that. However, that said, teams which have focused from early on on diversity of thought on different perspectives, just their DNA is more open to challenging the status quo. And that's where the organizations who've had the right cultural values of it's okay to question the status quo. It's okay to have diverse opinions even though they drive a knife through your prejudices and biases both at an organizational level and at an individual level. That DNA helps companies is coming in and paying off in spades because that cultural thought think tank is driving the new age of innovation and in doing so survival. So I do think that companies that invested in the right cultural values, the right virtues, that's paying off in spades. And I think that those teams we are seeing and those organizations with that kind of culture are jumping on the bandwagon questioning the status quo of using the technology of tomorrow to solve tomorrow's problems and not be steeped in heritage. And we will see those companies and we can see who they will be naturally become mentioned but they would survive. And we are clearly seeing a whole host of other companies who are so still sort of steeped in justifying that their original thought was the right thought. And I'll bet my bottom dollar, they don't survive. Last question for you. How have you been able to build your executive team at Memsuguil, been able to build that diverse culture and how has it shaped your leadership style? Yeah, you know, I don't think we've, it's not as if we've gotten there. It's a constant journey. And it's just something that starts off by saying, you know, we are not going to have a know it all culture but we are going to have a learn it all culture. You know, we are going to listen and we are going to think, consider and respond. For me, diversity was a given. You know, I sort of grew up around diversity. Some of the influences of my life that have made me, the person I am today came from a viewpoint of, you know, of women. You know, I've had some very, very strong female influence in my life. And as I've said repeatedly, I wouldn't have been who I am or half the person I am today without that influence. So for me, it's a very natural sort of progression to have that diversity of thought and opinion as a, you know, we've been to the very fiber of any organization that I've been a part of. And we do that in a manner where we, it's not just good enough to say, we will hire the best candidate. I don't think that is the way that you are going to sort of address the historical imbalance which has resulted in very single threaded thought cultures in organizations. We make it a point that at the top end of the funnel, of course we'll hire the best candidate, right? However, at the top end of the funnel, we almost, you know, legislate that there has to be X percentage of candidates who are, you know, diverse candidates. So, you know, candidates from minority minorities and then let the best, you know, candidates sort of get qualified. And also if there are two candidates who are, you know, equally qualified, then, you know, we encourage someone with a lot more diversity and, you know, to come on to the team. And ultimately that drives a lot of thought leadership in the organizations and helps us manage our blind spots a lot better. And I have so many examples of that. The amount of innovation that happens because of these working groups which are very diverse working groups is just, you know, unmeasurable. And we've been extremely clear about the fact of what candidates would survive, thrive and enjoy being at Mems Equal. And those are the candidates who are here to build something, build something for the ages, do right by each other and by the customer. You know, we don't accept the unacceptable. Challenge the status quo. If you feel strongly about something, stand up. And your voice would be heard. You know, just because things were being done a certain way doesn't mean it has to be done the same way. And I'm very proud, very, very proud of the team that we have built and the one that we are building. And, you know, it's a team that is united in purpose and very diverse in thought. And I have become a better person and a better professional with all the diversity of thought and the learnings that we've had as a consequence of that over the last, you know, year and a half or so. And that is the cornerstone of what we are building here at Mems Equal. And Lisa, you and I work with one such individual who's just made an unbelievable difference in our organization. And lastly, I think, you know, just on a personal note, the diversity angle becomes that much closer to my heart. I'm, you know, a father of two lovely girls and two lovely boys. And I just, you know, it's personal to me that if I can't leave the tech industry a better place for my daughters than I found it. For that matter, even for my sons. But I think, you know, the daughters had a historical, you know, debt to pay. Then I don't think I would have really achieved the success that we are, we all as a team are hoping for. So yeah, this is extremely personal. Thank you for sharing all your insights. You tell a really interesting story. You know, we started talking about disruption, disruptors, how not to be disrupted, how to become a disruptor. And really some of the things that you talk about all really kind of comes down to the team, the DNA of the organization, and that thought diversity being courageous to break this status quo. Raj, I wish we had more time because we could keep going on this, but thank you for sharing your insights. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thank you, Lisa. It's been great to see you. Stay safe and well. Likewise, for my guest, Raj Rurama, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation.