I’ve been meaning for a while now to write a post after wrapping up my 8 year hortonworks – cloudera adventure declaring why I joined Starburst. I joined at the beginning of the 2022 and was crowned not only our first ever Educational Engineer (meet me in the comments section to discuss what that means), but formally Employee # 300. We all know what 300 focused individuals can do — what a powerful image that is!
On our way to doubling our staff by end of year, we cleared the 400 employees mark in under 4 months. Wow! I figured no better time than right now to share why I made the move. There are many reasons, but so many of them come back to this one word…
To give this term, and how we use it at Starburst, its due justice I invite you to listen to our CEO at this podcast. In a nutshell, optionality is the ability to adapt (as much, or little, as you want/need) to the reality that all of your data WILL NOT live in a single tool, database, object store, cloud vendor, etc for a myriad of reasons. Optionality does not give up on the goal of a single source-of-truth, but concedes the benefits of a single point-of-access. Especially one with a MPP SQL engine, built on Trino, focused on performance.
And… if you are one of those folks who has not accepted that the “perfect vision/implementation” will not ever happen, I invite you to read the book titled recrEAtion to open your eyes. It was a tough read for me, a fella who had leadership roles in 3 different EA teams in my career, but I’m better for it. I digress…
In addition to optionality, there are many other factors that played into this choice. Here are a few of them:
- Laser-Focused (open-sourced, of course!) Product — we aren’t trying to be all things for everyone; we are the BEST SQL engine to access your data, wherever it lives
- Multiple Deployment Options — we offer several ways to get going with Starburst as installable software; including deploying on k8s
- Cloud Strategy — our SaaS offering, Starburst Galaxy, is live and production ready, but we are cognizant that customers need to pick the right solution for themselves and we are not pushing customers to move to the cloud if not right for them
- Rational & Reasonable Leadership — we are gritty work-horses (not unicorns because they don’t exist) with leadership, from my manager up to the CEO, who know what it takes to make aggressive AND attainable goals (again, please listen to this podcast)
- Startup Mindset — one of my favorite things about startups is that you can get a decision made quickly (even it isn’t the one you wanted) and oh my… I got some sweet stock options to boot!
If I whet your appetite to give us a look, surf over to the careers page and definitely let me know if I can help in any way.
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