I’ve officially joined Firebolt as General Manager, in charge of developing our US HQ & Global field team, amongst a myriad of other things. After almost 9 years of being part of the founding & executive team building Looker and integrating it into Google Cloud, I couldn’t be more excited for this new adventure. The Looker journey was the most rewarding chapter of my career for many reasons, and I joined Firebolt because I know it has so many similar characteristics that made Looker so special.
When you get Lucky, Take Advantage
First off, I believe great things are born from hard work and lots of luck. While we can all manufacture hard work, luck doesn’t happen as often, so you have to take full advantage of it when it does. I was lucky enough almost 15 years ago to meet one of the co-founders of Looker, Ben Porterfield, and almost 12 years ago to meet Lloyd Tabb, the other co-founder, and become very close friends with both. When they asked me to join the founding team to build the field & GTM part of Looker, a few months after they started, I knew I had to take advantage of that lucky opportunity.
Fast forward almost 7 years and I meet Eldad Farkash & Saar Bitner, the founders of Firebolt. Once again I am lucky enough to become an early investor in Firebolt. After almost two years of knowing each other and being a small part of the early Firebolt journey, they asked me to join. I knew I had to trust my instincts again and realize how lucky I was to get the opportunity to join up with another set of amazing founders, building something very special.
Building Special Things with Special People
One of the most amazing things that came out of Looker was the opportunity to participate in building a company that was truly special & positively affected hundreds of A+ humans. Seeing the friendships, camaraderie, and career opportunities that were created for our global Lookerers was one of the most rewarding parts of my career. It truly was life changing for everyone, including myself.
This type of opportunity doesn’t just happen, it’s created by founders who actually care about more than just building and selling a product. The lessons I learned from Lloyd & Frank (our CEO) will stick with me forever, and I am forever grateful. After many months of conversations with Eldad & Saar, it’s very clear they are building and will continue to build a company that is just as special because at their core, they also want to see amazing people join forces and win together.
Carve Your Own Path
Thirdly, we had a vision at Looker that we could build an analytics platform that would address the needs of the modern analytics workforce better than anything else on the market. We didn’t just follow the current leader, we carved out our own path and built what we believed was right for our customers (not theirs). Fast forward and Looker is one of the most widely used BI platforms among modern data analysts, building data experiences in the cloud. Although its massively eclipsed in usage by PowerBI & Tableau, it never strayed its path and is the best damn data platform for modern data analysts.
At Firebolt, we are also carving our own path. At its core, Firebolt is the fastest and most scalable cloud data warehouse available, but what that allows customers to do is the unique part. Every part of Firebolt was built with the modern data engineer in mind — the current landscape they are working in, the myriad of data challenges and workloads they need to solve to meet organizational demands, and the fact that the value you can extract from data isn’t growing nearly as fast as the size of data teams need to analyze and store. First and foremost, we are building an analytics engine that meets our customers where they are going, not where they’ve been.
Teamwork is Dreamwork, Baby!
Lastly, it’s all about the Ecosystem! Since the beginning of Looker, we knew in order to thrive with our approach, and give our customers choice & flexibility on how to build their modern data infrastructures, we were going to need to be at the center of the next generation of data companies — Snowflake, Fivetran, Snowplow, Segment, DBT, and hundreds more.
At Firebolt, we’re focused on building the best platform for the modern data engineer and that involves an even deeper integration and ecosystem strategy than what we could do at Looker. As we continue to innovate, you’ll see many many exciting product announcements that will bring the ecosystem even closer together with Firebolt.
Come Check it Out Yourself
There are so many other things I’m extremely excited about at Firebolt, but you’ll have to join the adventure in one way or another to find out more (hint: go get a demo OR go check out our careers page)! So here’s to an amazing journey, the opening of a new chapter in life and a new chapter in data.
