He Built Facebook‘s Groundbreaking Data Infrastructure And Now Raised $87 Million To Scale Your Business
Ashish Thusoo believed in the cloud long before most thought it would ever catch on. Now his company is empowering other startups to scale and grow fast.
Thusoo’s venture has raised almost $100 million from great investors and is enabling a whole new level of data processing and efficiency for their clients.
We caught up for an episode of the Dealmakers Podcast where he shared how he got started, why engineers make great startup founders, and what he’s learned from working with some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in history.
Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here. .
His family was a part of the middle class which is a big driver of the national economy. Growing up education was extremely important and highly valued. Especially since there weren’t many opportunities.
Both of Ashish’s parents were doctors. Yet, he chose a different path. He was much more excited about technology and what it could do for the future of mankind.
Ashish’s first computer was a BBC Micro. Back when we still used floppy disks. He says he completely connected with that machine from the first day. He started programming with BASIC, and was fascinated with what computers could do and the future potential.
By 12th grade, he was writing software for telephone call center applications as a part of school projects.
From interviewing the top-performing founders, CEOs and fundraisers over the past couple of years, I’ve found a high number of engineers turned entrepreneurs. Especially, many who have come from India. What makes them so well suited to launch hyper-growth ventures?
Ashish told the DealMakers’ audience that engineers are great at building things layer by layer. They are naturally talented and trained to take on big problems. They know how to break them down into small parts, solve one problem at a time, and put it all together to build a business.
Of course, engineering and technical skills aren’t sufficient to build a highly profitable business on their own. Just focusing on the technology part can be the demise of many hopeful entrepreneurs coming from an engineering background. In fact, Thursoo says one of the most important things is to be willing to learn, and to keep an open mind as you go.
As far as the reason so many successful entrepreneurs are coming out of India, Ahsish tells us about the environment that naturally cultivates entrepreneurship. India is booming today but has been traditionally restrained in resources.
That also creates a lot of competition. It’s a country of a billion-plus people. A lot of competition and limited resources forces you to become self-taught, to be self-driven and to innovate and become entrepreneurial.
Ashish says it also teaches you empathy for customers, partners, and employees. An extremely valuable asset when building a business.
However, all these learnings, skills and assets can be cramped by your environment. Thusoo and many others still see the US as this land of opportunity and having a culture that nurtures and empowers entrepreneurs to create.
Ashish did his computer science undergraduate at IT Dehli. One of the top schools. One well known for a competitive environment with lots of smart people. India had done a great job of building the infrastructure to advance technology and education to t his level.
However, at the time there weren’t many great options for advancing education beyond that. So, he got into the premier university in the US for learning databases and hardware. He seized on the opportunity to do his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.
After his Ph.D. Ashish landed a gig with Oracle and moved out to Silicon Valley. There he was able to apply and grow his knowledge of both database and scalable systems.
Specifically, when you are making those big leaps. Not just from 1,000 to 1 million users, but 1,000 to 10 million or 100 million or 1 billion.
Then he joined security and authentication company Identity Engines. There they tackled the move to mobile devices on commercial and education campuses.
He quickly learned the importance of choosing the right market to go after and differentiation, as well as that when it comes to business, it isn’t just all about the technology you are building. These are all very essential learnings if you hope to build a hyper-growth startup.
It was then on to working at Facebook. He joined when they had just 300 employees and were dealing with many scaling challenges themselves. They were growing fast with about 20 million users but were still building things the old way.
It was a great culture, a very open and innovative one. Yet, they were still being dragged down by infrastructure.
Ashish and his now co-founder of Qubole, Joydeep worked together at Facebook for four years. Together they created a lot of the architecture, machine learning and next generation of data platforms that are mainstream now.
They not only helped transform Facebook but the whole industry.
Ashish and Joydeep saw a big opportunity and shift to the cloud. In the early contrarian years, no one believed in it. They didn’t see it ever becoming secure or being used by more than startups. Qubole was born.
Qubole vision was from the start to help businesses scale while keeping cloud costs down, a problem affecting startups and giants alike. He is a firm believer in the power of flat and fast-moving organizations that place emphasis on teamwork and the need to challenge the status quo.
Today, Qubole has raised $87 million from top investors like Charles River Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, IVP, Singtel Inno8, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
They have and serve hundreds of clients who are processing massive amounts of data in the cloud and are using it to scale efficiently and quickly.
Listen in to the full podcast episode to find out more, including:
Learnings from hyper-growth companies · The importance of the market you choose · Cultures of high performing teams · Scaling quickly at a fraction of the cost
