Summary: As you’ll hear from this discussion, data is the new oil. It is what runs businesses and the amount of data that is created daily is exploding. Every business is trying to figure out to harness and leverage this data and there are a never ended amount of use cases. Justin’s entrepreneurial journey has focused on helping companies with this challenge. While at Yale, where he received his MBA, he connected with a team that went on to create Hadapt, which focused on Hadoop and was acquired by Teradata. His next company is called Starburst which is on a mission to modernize big data access and analtyics. The company raised $22M in Series A funding towards the end of last year and it is centered around an open source SQL query engine called Presto. Starburst is providing enterprise grade features and services around this open source initiative, which is certainly a business model that has been successful for other companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and many others. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A discussion around the massive growth of data and how it affects businesses. * Justin’s career path which started out in engineering and moved to product management. * How Justin got into entrepreneurship while at Yale and the story of Hadapt. * All the details on Starburst and how they were able to achieve significant traction before raising capital. * Lessons learned from his first startup that he has been able to apply the second time around. * Advice on selecting the right VC’s to partner with when raising funding. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.
