Shawn Wang: belief

Transcript context

…In college, as a first-generation Indian kid, I basically had two options. I had already told my parents I wasn't going to be a doctor. They're both doctors, so only two options left. Do a PhD or work at a big company. After my sophomore year, I worked at Microsoft, and it just wasn't for me. I realized that the work I was doing was impactful. I was working on Bing and the distributed compute infrastructure at Bing, which is actually now part of Azure. There were hundreds of engineers using the infrastructure that we were working on, but the level of intensity was too low. It felt like you got work-life balance and impact, but very little creativity, very little room to do interesting things. I was like, okay, let me cross that off the list. The only option left is to do research. I did research the next summer, and I realized, again, no one's working that hard. Maybe the times have changed, but at that point, there's a lot of creativity. You're just bouncing around fun ideas and working on stuff and really great work-life balance, but no one would actually use the stuff that we built, and that was not super energizing for me. I had this existential crisis, and I moved out to San Francisco because I had a friend who was here and crashed on his couch and was talking to him and just very, very confused. He said, you should talk to a recruiter, which felt like really weird advice. I'm not even sure I would give that advice to someone nowadays, but I met this really great guy named John, and he introduced me to like 30 different companies. I realized that there's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening in startups, and maybe I could find this kind of company that let me be very creative and work really hard and have a lot of impact, and I don't give a shit about work-life balance. I talked to all these companies, and I remember I met MemSQL when it was three people and interviewed, and I thought I just totally failed the interview, but I had never had so much fun in my life. I remember I was at 10th and Harrison, and I stood at the bus station, and I called my parents and said, I'm sorry, I'm dropping out of school. I thought I wouldn't get the offer, but I just realized that if there's something like this company, then this is where I need to be. Luckily, things worked out, and I got an offer, and I joined as employee number two, and I worked there for almost six years, and it was an incredible experience. Learned a lot about systems, got to work with amazing customers. There are a lot of things that I took for granted that I later learned at Impira that I had taken for granted, and the most exciting thing is I got to run the engineering team, which was a great opportunity to learn about tech on a larger stage, recruit a lot of great people, and I think, for me personally, set me up to do a lot of interesting things after. Yeah, there's so many ways I can take that. The most curious, I think, for general audiences is, is the dream real of SingleStore? Should, obviously, more people be using it? I think there's a lot of marketing from SingleStore that makes sense, but there's a lot of doubt in people's minds. What do you think you've seen that is the most convincing as to when is it suitable for people to adopt SingleStore and when is it not? Bear in mind that I'm now eight years removed from SingleStore, so they've done a lot of stuff since I left, but maybe the meta thing, I would say, or the meta learning for me is that, even if you build the most sophisticated or advanced technology in a particular space, it doesn't mean that it's something that everyone can use. I think one of the trade-offs with SingleStore, specifically, is that you have to be willing to invest in hardware and software cost that achieves the dream. At least, when we were doing it, it was way cheaper than Oracle Exadata or SAP HANA, which were kind of the prevailing alternatives. So, not ultra-expensive, but SingleStore is not the kind of thing that, when you're building a weekend project that will scale to millions, you would just spin up SingleStore and start using. I think it's just expensive. It's packaged in a way that is expensive because the size of the market and the type of customer that's able to drive value almost requires the price to work that way. You can actually see Nikita almost overcompensating for it now with Neon and attacking the market from a different angle.…

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