scale.bythebay.io: Todd Mostak Interview
Recording: scale.bythebay.io: Todd Mostak Interview
[Music] hi I'm Todd Moss tech founder and CEO of nasty technologies it's a good question so I feel you know we have a pretty ambitious product it's a and gpu-accelerated analytics platform leveraging it both for the database side the sequel.fast sequel as well as visualization side and we're even pushing a little bit into doing kind of Indian machine learning so it quarters a lot of different skill sets in fact our company is interesting in that we have one contingent of engineers who are kind of die hard back in LLVM compiler guys because we have a compiler engine what we take sequel and generate GPU machine code from it on the other end we have a whole visual analytics platform so we have a bunch of guys who are deep in react and so how they still all love each other but they speak very different languages sometimes so I guess it's a you know stuff for us and that we have many different kind of functional specializations we have to find the right talent for each and we have make sure that they all live together and communicate harmoniously and yeah it's there engineering is one of the hardest parts of building not just a product or an organization sure absolutely okay so scale was an interesting question so part of me thinks scale from a kind of technology perspective and in that sense our platform was really designed to meet scaling issues and the fact that most people to handle big datasets interactively have to scale out to hundreds if not thousands of CPU nodes you know our solution by scaling up first across multiple GPUs per node we basically have these supercomputers in a box we can use some dramatically smaller Hardware footprint so that's kind of one of our core race on deck of our businesses that you know you can run on what took you a thousand nodes now it takes you five or six so on the flips on the flip side you know scaling a company is always an interesting endeavor so I think at Matthew we've reached our awkward adolescence where we're about 50 people we took our series be back in March probably had a hundred people but sometime next year and it definitely changes things you know I was we started the company was just a few of us and I was in the trenches just programming with the guys every day and you know moving forward I'm often on the road you know trying to close deals the whole the whole rigmarole and you know it's definitely changed a dynamic we have layers of a little bit not too much but a little bit of layers and management and so like making sure that everybody is still happy and motivated and feels valuable is always a challenge and I think it's a challenge at 50 and it's probably even more of a challenge at 500 or bigger so that's something we're you know we're really focusing on right now also making sure that you as you scale when you're not you know I feel like I myself a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to hiring like really making sure not just a technical bit but a cultural fit as well you have to be careful as you scale you know you're not always like in the room or a major part of some of the hiring decisions and you have to be careful that you don't dilute your company's culture or technical expertise making sure you're keeping the bar high that's always the challenge as well yeah so I think we're just starting I mean I think you know at 50 people that's still dramatically smaller than an organization of 500 much less 5,000 you know everybody's still basically knows each other often quite well and so I think that as you get bigger you by necessity have to put processes in place to allow you even Google had to do this right I think you know at the beginning they really tried to keep the organization flat and eventually they had to put management layers in I think you know same thing is with any organization the sad thing is that often with that an organization tends to move slower right there's more red tape there's more barriers to communication you know and I think the best orgs and I look at examples and you know Twitter Google you know there's plenty of others have been able to basically keep that agility of a small company even while they're while they're scaling [Music] so I'm probably you know I don't get to program as much as I used to or like - and you know our back end is mostly in C++ with a kind of LLVM compiler so it's very much still kind of object-oriented that's just the paradigm that people work in on the front end however we have a you know a great front-end team they're building everything in react I think that was a really good choice and we have definitely some folks who are huge adherence to functional programming and keep the bar high there and I definitely think it makes for a much nicer decoupled codebase but technically I'm not actually an expert in that type of that paradigm of programming so but I do know that the results are that it's just needs more easily maintainable appaling you know you don't have state mixed in with yeah what you're doing [Music] yeah I think it's a you know just my early experiences so far it's a great conference with great people everybody here is in some way an expert in what they do and brings a lot to the table technically it doesn't have the BS of a lot of other conferences with the other vendors here but it's it's mainly here for the participants so I really like that the the talks are fascinating right so I think you get a technical depth of talk here that's you know much deeper than you do at most conferences and the other audience to appreciate it yeah it just seems like an amazing conference