Building the Cloud Native Future – Why I Joined Yugabyte

I am incredibly proud and honored to be taking on a new role as CEO of Yugabyte. When I started talking with Yugabyte’s founders, Karthik, Kannan and Mikhail, about joining the Yugabyte executive team, I was hooked. I immediately felt a strong alignment between my experiences and goals, and the opportunities ahead at Yugabyte. A lot goes into finding the right role at the right time, but three things in particular really stood out and inspired me to join Yugabyte.

The first thing that stood out was our shared beliefs for what makes a strong, successful company – earn the trust of your customers, invest in people, and build a company that is so special, it is one of the best places to work in the industry. I’ve learned the importance of these values (including what to do and what not to do) over the course of my 35 years working in enterprise software and data infrastructure.

The second thing that really impressed me about the opportunity at Yugabyte was that the founders are among the most accomplished and respected in the database space, and the technology industry more broadly. In the short time since its founding, Yugabyte has built credibility among its developer community and enterprise customers. Needless to say, it is a unique situation for a company so young to have such a broad base of customers, community members, and enterprise engagements; it’s a testament to the powerful platform the Yugabyte team has built and the talented team that delivers and supports it.

The third thing I was struck by is the enormous market opportunity that distributed SQL presents. Cloud native is no longer a trend, it’s here to stay and yet the biggest database players on the market are struggling to adapt. So, why aren’t there more cloud native relational databases to choose from? Because building such a database from the ground up is a hard problem to solve that requires a highly talented team of engineers to pull off. Despite the inherent challenges of developing a cloud native, distributed SQL database, Yugabyte has managed to successfully build an enterprise-grade database that is used to power highly resilient, geo-distributed applications, at internet scale with billions of operations per day.

In my role as CEO at Yugabyte, my goals are threefold:

1. Continue to build a talented and diverse team of people who want to join us in solving hard problems.

2. Accelerate the adoption of Yugabyte Platform in the enterprise and double down on making Yugabyte Cloud the simplest and most scalable way to develop cloud applications that require data resilience and geo-distribution.

3. Remain committed to open source software, collaborate with our community, and help our existing customers expand their use cases for YugabyteDB.

I live in San Francisco but as a Michigan native, I have not forgotten my roots: hard work, respect, and commitment is what gets the job done. I’m excited to work with Kannan, Karthik, Mikhail, and the entire Yugabyte team in meeting our goals as an organization and building an enviable company culture that supports the best talent in the industry.

I’ve had some incredible experiences helping companies scale through massive growth opportunities and Yugabyte’s trajectory is truly unmatched in the industry – our potential is limitless.