Why I joined Imply

I’ve been leading engineering and product at Imply for 5 months now, and every day is more exciting than the one before. Just before Imply, I was a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, directly involved in the investments in tens of companies and on the board of many. Many wonder: “having seen hundreds of companies at Andreessen Horowitz, why did I choose Imply?” The truth is it would have been a mistake not to.

First, as I have talked about elsewhere (podcast, presentation), there is a huge shift in the analytics space that is making what Imply provides not only important but critical to the success of businesses in many industries. As more business processes are digitized, streamlined and automated to improve the customer experience or operational efficiency, more workers have to make many more decisions faster and faster on a day-to-day basis.

Traditional data warehouses and analytics tools have not been able to meet the needs of this much larger population of operational citizens. Imply is building the first operational data warehouse, which delivers real-time data, serving a broad range of analytics types, with sub-second query performance at extreme scale. Tech companies like Facebook realized this need long ago, and built internal tools (theirs is called Scuba) to fill the gap and provide workers with real-time fast analytics. Imply’s mission is to deliver that value to the rest of the world.

Second, Imply was my first investment when I joined Andreessen Horowitz. I have been a board observer for more than two years and have worked closely with Fangjin, Gian, and Vadim. They are some of the most capable, nice, and fun people to work with. Joining Imply did not feel like taking on a job, but more like joining a group of friends embarking on an adventure together.

Finally, the metrics. Very few companies have been able to execute the way Imply has. By the time I joined Imply, it was one of the fastest growing companies in the a16z portfolio, all while spending very little. Fangjin is constantly measuring risk vs reward, and has built a very well-thought out and rock-solid business plan to take on the coming battle for dominance in the analytics and data warehousing space.

I’ve been at Imply for about five months now, and these have been some of the most exciting and fun times of my career. I love being back in an operational role where things move quickly and where I can make an immediate impact. As I build out a world-class product and engineering organization, I will be thinking about how lucky I am to have been at the right time and place to join Imply on this wild ride.

PS: We’re hiring 🙂