cloudera/stanford ee203 (entrepreneurial engineer)

EE203: The Entrepreneurial Engineer

Amr Awadallah (Stanford EE PhD, 2007)Founder/CTO, Cloudera, Inc.Stanford University, EE203Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Amr Awadallah, Cloudera Inc 2

Outline

▪About Me▪The VivaSmart Story▪The EIR Experience▪The Cloudera Story .. so far▪What is Hadoop?▪Open Source Business Models▪Lessons Learned & Advice


About Me

▪I got BS and MS from Cairo University in Egypt.

▪I came to US in 1995 to get my PhD from Stanford, with goal to go back to Egypt and teach.

▪I got infected by the Entrepreneurship bug, it is rampant at Stanford, hopefully you’ll get infected too

▪In 1999 I took a leave of absence from PhD to start VivaSmart, which I sold to Yahoo in 2000.

▪I stayed with Yahoo till mid-2008, also finished my PhD in mid-2007 with Mendel Rosenblum.

▪I started Cloudera in fall of 2008.


The VivaSmart Story

▪It started as Booksmart in Spring of 1999.▪Initial prototype was built by Thai Tran.▪We got funded by a great angel (Frank Marshall).

▪Couldn’t raise VC money, but we were able to raise more angel money, and got lighthouse customers.

▪Noticed that it is hard to drive traffic, decided to focus on catalog management technology (Aptivia).

▪Got initial acquisition termsheet from Excite@Home for $12M but they reneged at last minute (4/2000)

▪Yahoo Shopping acquired us for $9M in June 2000.


The EIR Experience

▪EIR = Entrepreneur in Residence.▪Joined Accel Partners in June 2008 as an EIR.▪Spent most of the summer researching possible ideas for my next venture, also helped with due diligence for a number of companies.

▪Experienced the fund raising process from the VC side, very useful to see how they think.

▪Met my Cloudera co-founders through Accel▪Andrew Braccia (agb) and Ping Li (pli) from Accel Partners joined the Cloudera Board of Directors.


The Cloudera Story … so far

▪Oct 2008: Got $5M round A funding from Accel Partners and a number of strategic angel investors.

▪Four founders (too many?): ▪ Mike Olson (Oracle)▪ Jeff Hammerbacher (Facebook)▪ Christophe Bisciglia (Google)▪ Amr Awadallah (Yahoo)

▪Announced the company in March of 2009.▪May 2009: Got $6M in funding from Greylock Ventures (opportunistic B round)

▪Aneel Bhusri joined our board from Greylock


Complex Data

DocumentsWeb feedsSystem logsOnline forumsStructured Data (“relational”)

CRMFinancialsLogistics

SharePointSensor dataEMB archivesPhoto/Video

InventorySales recordsHR records

A single, consolidated repository to enable insights across complex and structured data.

Cloudera’s Elevator Pitch


What is Hadoop?

▪The foundation of our system is built on top of Apache Hadoop, which is a scalable distributed data processing system.

▪The scalability of Hadoop comes from marriage of:▪ HDFS: Self-Healing High-Bandwidth Clustered Storage.

▪ MapReduce: Fault-Tolerant Distributed Processing.

▪The software manages and heals it self.▪Leverages the economies of scale of commodity hardware (multi-core chips, many disks per system)

▪Compute moves to data (not other way around).


Hadoop History▪ 2002-2004: Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella started working

on Nutch

▪ 2003-2004: Google publishes GFS and MapReduce papers

▪ 2004: Cutting adds DFS & MapReduce support to Nutch

▪ 2006: Yahoo! hires Cutting, Hadoop spins out of Nutch

▪ 2007: NY Times converts 4TB of archives over 100 EC2s

▪ 2008: Web-scale deployments at Y!, Facebook, Last.fm

▪ April 2008: Yahoo does fastest sort of a TB, 3.5mins over 910 nodes

▪ May 2009: ▪ Yahoo does fastest sort of a TB, 62secs over 1460 nodes▪ Yahoo sorts a PB in 16.25hours over 3658 nodes

▪ June 2009, Oct 2009: Hadoop Summit (750), Hadoop World (500)

▪ September 2009: Doug Cutting joins Cloudera


Open Source Software Business Models

▪Open Source is attractive since it gets you:▪ Free Distribution: People can download and try it out

▪ Darwinian Effect: Lots of developers try to solve the problem, best solution wins.

▪ Faster Innovation: Customers build the product with you!

▪OSS Business Models:▪ Support/Maintenance/Service agreements▪ Open Core: core is free, but there is value-add proprietary technology around it (“Community” vs “Enterprise” Edition)

▪ Monetization through enablement of other services (e.g. Firefox makes money from Google Search).


Lessons Learned & Advice

▪Make sure your idea can actually make money!

▪Hire great people (corollary: Fire swiftly).▪Make sure you are passionate about your idea.

▪Listen to customers, but look for the problems, it is your job to come up with solutions.

▪Be agile, iterate quickly, don’t spend a year planning, don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

▪Don’t be afraid to fail, but don’t persist in your failing ways, learn from failure quickly and evolve (Moore)

▪Have faith, but don’t let it blind you from reality


Books I Recommend

▪“Blue Ocean Strategy”, W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne.

▪“The Innovator’s Dilemma”, Clayton Christensen

▪“The Innovator’s Solution”, Clayton Christensen, and Michael Raynor

▪“Good to Great”, Jim Collins▪“The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey

▪“Crossing the Chasm”,“Tornado”, Geoffrey Moore

▪“The Black Swan”, Nassim Taleb.


We Are Hiring:

[email protected]

Amr Awadallah

CTO, Cloudera Inc.

http://twitter.com/awadallah

Online Training Videos and Info:

http://cloudera.com/hadoop-training

http://cloudera.com/blog

http://twitter.com/cloudera

Contact Information

mailto:[email protected]

http://twitter.com/awadallah



http://cloudera.com/blog

http://twitter.com/cloudera

cloudera/stanford ee203 (entrepreneurial engineer)

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