Ich war das letzte Jahr viel beschäftigt. In positiver Hinsicht. Die Entscheidung – mich ausschließlich um Zukunftsthemen zu widmen fühlt sich immer noch richtig an.
Ich lerne jeden Tag und beschäftige mich mit super spannenden Dilemmas, nicht entscheidbaren Fragen – und das gemeinsam mit einer wachsenden Community von Menschen, welche die Welt von Morgen gestalten.
Technologie war und ist mein Steckenpferd. Und auch die Verbindung zum Digital Campus Vorarlberg – insbesondere zum Coding Campus und Green Campus geht recht weit zurück.
Nachdem es in meinem Blog etwas ruhiger war die letzte Zeit – an der Stelle ein ausführliches Interview, das ich sehr gerne mag – und mich auch so zeigt, wie ich mich gerne sehe. Danke an Daniela, Berloff, Marco Esposito und Mika Halbeisen.
Ich freu mich über Feedback.
00:00 Intro und Vorstellung von Jodok 02:39 Was versteht man unter den Begriffen Klima Tech oder Green Tech? 05:12 Erklärung von Credits, Zertifikaten und warum man tree.ly hier vertrauen kann. 08:06 Wie funktioniert der CO² Speicher Wald? 11:25 Wie kann die Technik in Sachen Nachhaltigkeit am Beispiel der Waldwirtschaft helfen? 13:48 Digitalisierung benötigt Energie. Wie ist das Aufwand/Nutzenverhältnis hier? 15:10 Beispiele für energieeffiziente Technik 16:20 Welche Technologien und Berufsfelder erwarten uns hier in Zukunft? 19:03 Was können kleine Unternehmer in Vorarlberg tun um nachhaltiger zu handeln? 22:25 Gibt es spannende Start-ups im Bereich Nachhaltigkeit in Vorarlberg? 24:46 Was muss passierten um das ganze Potenzial zu nutzen? 26:01 Welche Berufsfelder gibt es im Bereich Programmieren? 30:15 Wo fange ich an? Welche Skills benötige ich? 35:28 Eine Frage die sich jede:r stellen sollte: Wie schaut eine Welt aus, die für jede:n funktioniert aus?
I’m a natural scientist by education. I do my best to operate on objective reasoning, rely on data, trust the interpretation of experts. A lot of that thinking goes back to my time at University/studying (NTB Buchs in Switzerland, University of Karlruhe in Germany, but also studies abroad, e.g. Harvard Business School).
When founding Tree.ly, it was clear to us that datascience is going to play an important role. We started with some local Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code (works actually pretty well), but quickly realized we need something where we can collaborate within the team and with others.
Analyzing Forests Image Credits: Tree.ly, Ocell.io, illwerkevkw, TU Vienna
We continued with tools like Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Notebooks, but also Google Colaboratory. Not to forget to run JupyterHub within our Kubernetes infrastructure. It’s amazing to see how easy everybody can do Data Science nowadays! I strongly encourage to check out these tools.
It’s primarly targeted to educational customers (that’s also where it is coming from), but I also see a great potential for “commercial” datascience. What do I find especially cool?
Snapshot and shared workspaces.
Inside the platform one can easily snapshot and share datasets with others. E.g. a teacher can create an environment for an exercise and share that very environment with the entire class – and each student can continue in her/his personal environment. Only to hand in the solved problem to the teacher afterwards.
Or assume that you wrote a scientific paper, who’s findings are based on a larger dataset and a couple of computations. You cannot only share the PDF, but also provide the possibility to access the full environment and validate the findings – or even build upon them. Magic!
In our case we’re using larger datasets (e.g. a few TB of airborne laserscanning pixel clouds, parcel data and all kind of other readings) that we collaboratively work on. We can use a shared Kernel image with all dependencies installed and work on the same shared data folders – while still preserving our personal preferences and spaces.
Resource efficiency / Shared resources
Data science has the characteristic that you need quite some resources for a rather short amount of time – and then for a larger amount of time you don’t need the instances running. Nuvolos and it’s billing/usage model makes that cloud-elasticity super simple for the user. One can book a base level of resources (that are only spun up when needed, and automatically terminated afterwards), but also book spike resources.
That’s not only convenient for companies, but even more for universities or school classes that need these resources for every student.
Everything in the Cloud
We spoke mainly about Jupyter Notebooks, but the Nuvolos environment also provides access to Snowflake (One of the coolest databases on earth) and many other Tools. In the Cloud. In the browser. In a shared space. The team is working on expanding that toolsuite permanently. Right now it’s RStudio, VS Code, Spyder, JupyterLab, Julia, Stata, Matlab, GNU Octave, SAS, IBM SPSS, REDCap, Airflow and others.
A winning team
During due diligence I took a look at the tech stack and got personally known to some of the core team members. They are not only using state-of-the-art technology and methodology, but also managed to attract top talent to build and operate the product.
I couldn’t be more excited to play a small road on Alexandru’s and his team journey. Thanks for letting me ride with you.
I had the opportunity to speak at TEDxDornbirn about my journey as (serial) entrepreneur and my latest venture Tree.ly, ensuring optimal carbon storage in our forests.
I’m also giving more intimate insights why I’m doing what I’m doing and how I put my values into action. I would love your feedback via Twitter, LinkedIn or E-Mail!
TEDx talk “Saving the Climate with Entrepreneurship”
For the more text-oriented visitors, I’ve paraphrased (and detailed) my talk. Note the different intro 🙂
TEDxDornbirn, Eva Sutter | Matthias Rhomberg. fotograf
2 years ago, to be exact on February 27th, 2o20, 20:45 Toronto time, I boarded Air Canada’s flight to Munich. I was exhausted, sleep deprived, as this marked the end of a crazy 4-day trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, including 2 red-eye flights east-coast/west-coast because of heavy snow and weather.
Flying twice SFO-YYZ, red-eye.
Little did I know about the changes the next two years would bring.
But it was a super successful trip and marked the end of a month-long marathon to raise capital for my deep-tech startup baby. The final boardmeetings with our future investors were positive, and we were about to secure a termsheet in the range of ~$20M. Holy! That was an incredible feeling! I’ve worked so hard for that. I’ve travelled >60x to San Francisco over the past 15 years, and yet this was one of the few business class flights. In the light of the exhaustion and great success we decided we deserved to spend the extra 1.066 CAD.
This is one of the many high peaks an entrepreneur, running to build a unicorn company, has to climb. The feeling reaching new heights is overwhelming!
How little did I know in this moment about what the future would bring.
/me dreaming at this time
I’ve built several successful companies and was running some of the largest web properties on this planet. I’ve built a 65 people database company from scratch. Out of the small town of Dornbirn, Austria – with hubs in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich and ultimately headquartered in San Francisco. We’ve made it to Techcrunch Disrupt, been part of the Gartner reports, named by Forbes as one of the most promising companies and won lots of happy customers.
I had all of this.
/me, sitting on top of that hill, crying.
Yet i found myself sitting there, crying on the top of that hill. Asking myself: “What am i doing here?“. Something is missing. Perhaps some of you have experience with the same feeling. Live is too short.
Don’t me wrong. It was not completely off – but something was missing. That was my life – and that’s fine. If that was you this would also be fine to continue! But not for me.
I decided to move on to something new after 7+ years. I’ve read so much about that purpose sh.., and heard people saying it, over and over. E.g. from team members, 20y younger than me. But yes – it’s really true!
It was a hard step, as giving up something is always difficult. Over that time I’ve spent many, many hours in nature. Skitouring, hiking, biking, a total of whopping 135.000 vertical meters in that year.
Well deserved coffee break after a hard day working as forester
During that time I’ve also spent a lot of time with my friends dad in their forests and became a semi-professional forester. This helped me a lot to also pause, and to reflect. It might be clear for you. For me it took a lot of time. It took a year, with unknown results beforehand. And i also worked with my coaches and friends Dieter and Matthias like i’m doing since many years, did peer-interviews with friends and thanks COVID-19 some excellent online-exercises.
I’d like to share how I’m doing what I’m doing. Or to put it into Simon Sinek’s terminology. My values in action:
Lead the way Sense the unseeable and pick up initiatives, fuel excitement and make them lively; nudge people and ideas, even if outside of comfort zone. All while remaining transparent and clear. No hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy.
Engender trust Assume everyone is the best at their jobs, even when they fail; Without basic trust, without fundamental respect, an organization cannot thrive.
Live our authentic self and develop it in an agile manner, all while staying grounded. Diversity and tolerance attract creativity and yield in innovation.
Be smart Look at things in new ways, from new angles, questioning assumptions. See the inconceivable big picture, but also take care of the small details.
Strive for genuine success It’s not about making others lose; it’s about genuine improvement, crafting better solutions, making a dent in the universe.
Live basic, unruly optimism and unconditional love Impossible is a good word to start; assume we can figure it out and solve what needs solving full of joy and with a good portion of humor; laughing about ourselves. It’s good to be nuts now and again.
Trampolines are great fun
What can i pass on to my kids? How am i leaving this planet?
I’m going to fight climate change!
I started to eat less meat and switch to a mainly plant-based diet. I do my best to fly less and we got rid of one car and switched to an EV. We’re using only green energy at home (and to charge the car). We reduce consumption and I preferably only buy used things. According to the Klima App this reduces my personal yearly footprint from ~11kg to 7kg.
This are great thing to start! And it’s great if you do that too.
But i’m an entrepreneur and i see a lot of opportunity in that change ahead of us. And i want to have impact and build something scalable. I want to move capital and help large businesses to change. Using entrepreneurship/capitalism to save our climate.
At some point climate change is irreversible
We only have around 10 years left. The main tipping points (irreversible damage) are:
The melting ice sheets in Greenland (G), Arctic (B), Antarctic (I and J)
The slowdown (since the 1950s) of the atlantic circulation (C)
permafrost thawing (H)
large-scale die-offs in the coral reefs (F)
the shrinking amazon rainforests (A)
but also
Fires and pests changing the boreal forests (D)
Treeloss in Germany: 5% over the past 3years. Source: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR)
If you look into science, europe’s forest have a great potential to help reaching the climate targets as they account for 7% of emissions in europe. This could grow by additional 5%. Partially through improved forest management, through additional forests, but also by substituting fossil fuels or CO2 intensive building elements. However the forest are endangered by climate change and potentially even could emit CO2.
Europe has around 16M forest owners. This means 16M opinions. Many don’t mind der footprint, many don’t even know where their forest is and they never visited it. They just inherited it. The forester is an unsung hero and he’s fighting a hard game where timber prices are still not matching the risen costs of labor.
However there’s a light at the end of the tunnel: The mechanism of trading carbon credits. To put it simple – companies (and individuals) emitting more than their budgeted carbon have the possibility (or duty) to offset hard-to-avoid emissions. Of course they have to 1) avoid emissions 2) reduce emissions and as last resort 3) offset them. This approach is called “Science Based Targets“.
Right now about 10.000 companies in Europe are part of the non-voluntary ETS (EU Emissions Trading System). They account for ~40% of Europe’s emissions. While this is a big and growing market, I find the voluntary carbon market way more interesting. Companies decide – e.g. because of their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to offset their hard-to-avoid emissions, but often also contribute to secondary ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) goals.
I had a dream that these 16m forest owners could be united, and pull in one direction; step by step, not just in one year. The forest has a lot of functions (protection, commercial use, recreation, wellfare) and we need a healthy mix of various forest types (jungles, primeval forests, biodiversity, commercial forests,…). In the first step Tree.ly is focussing on the forests with the largest share – managed forests.
Measuring forests Image credits: Tree.ly, illwerkevkw, ocell.io, Land Vorarlberg
We’re developing state of the art software that calculates the amount of carbon stored on parcel level, using terrestrial forest inventory and airborne laser scanning to train machine learning models that run on multispectral and multitemporal satellite images.
Ideal stockstand Image credits: ETH Zurich, Silvaconsult, Tree.ly
For each parcel the optimum stockstand (the amount of timber per hectare), based on scientific methods, e.g. studies from ETH Zurich, is being calculated. This depends on a series of factors, e.g. the altitude of the different areas of the forest. Within that calculated boundary, the annual growth of timber is optimized. If a forest is operated in this area, the largest amount of CO2 is being sequestered every year.
An important side-note (and already mentioned earlier): For other reasons, e.g. biodiversity we also need native ecosystems and forests with more natural conditions. E.g. the FSC (Forest stewardship council) recommends 10% of the area to be optimised for biodiversity.
Image credit: Unsplash
The forest owner makes a commitment for 30 years, based on his/her future plans and the previously calculated data. It might be necessary to build up biomass, or simply to preserve it. As seen above, if we do nothing, our forests won’t exist the way they do now in the coming years. Adapting our slow moving forests to the challenges of climate change requires a great amount of resources and time.
Carbon Credits and secondary benefits Image credit: myclimate
Based on the forest owners commitment and management of the forest Tree.ly takes care of the cumbersome job of auditing it with a third party and also does the annual reports/monitoring. We manage the issued VERs (verified emission reductions), often called carbon credits or CO2 certificates and sell them on behalf of the forest owners on the voluntary carbon market.
There’s much to talk/write about the things that need to happen behind the scenes. Tree.ly takes care of certification standards (especially the aspects around additionality, permanence, leakage), creates a risk pools for calamities, works with public bodies in the areas of double counting, encourages companies to work along science based targets – just to name a few.
Lush mountain meadow in front of my parents house Image credit: Andreas Schlachter Photography
It’s still a long way to go, but that’s where i’m coming from. A boy from the beautiful Bregenzerwald mountains. I could have known that this is part of my journey. I found my purpose right now, fulfilment and I’m certain success will continue.
I have to practice what i preach, and therefor I have shouted into the forest. I hope I come back in 10y and show that Tree.ly and my other activities made a dent in the universe.
Wir leben an einem der privilegiertesten Orte dieser Welt. Wir haben eine große Verantwortung für zukünftige Generationen. Deshalb nimm‘s in die Hand: Trau dich! Es wird niemand anderer für dich machen.
Dabei durfte ich Statements zu #selbstorganisation #leadership #comfortzone #stadtderzukunft #green #climate #smart und vielen weiteren wichtigen Themen geben.
Ach ja, ein Spoiler auf ein neues Unternehmen ist auch dabei. Dazu in einem der nächsten Posts mehr.
Youtube Video: Selbstorganisierte Systeme sind resilienter.
I received some feedback and questions about my post on leadership decisions at a workplace, and why I believe that many societal and political topics don’t belong to my workplace. (A clarifying side note: I wasn’t saying Basecamp is right or wrong. And banning and forbidding speech is a bad idea in general).
I’ve been chewing parts of this post for a while. But as about one third of the Basecamp workforce left after their leaders Jason/David announced some cultural changes and today Melinda and Bill Gates announced their separation, it was time to push it out.
All of these separations really moved me and over the weekend I spent several hours in reading and researching. It moved me because I can personally relate to that very well. In November I left my previous company (~60 employees like Basecamp) and over the last few month ~25 people – of which most of them I hired personally – left the company too.
(Just to be clear and explicit: I’m not making hints, propose conclusions or draw any parallels to my former company or people involved there. This is rather based being a curious, learning entrepreneur for 30years).
It was the right decision
Companies and their leaders have the right and duty to make decisions. To set their leadership style and their culture. To change it gradually, radically or not at all. And to take the consequences. This isn’t good or bad per se. This is just how it is and how it has to be.
At the point a decision is taken (“Culture Changes”/”Quitting the Job”) – it was the right decision for the corresponding party. At the very moment to decide, everybody will take the best decision this person can take, based on the (limited) facts available.
Software engineers in the tech space are well paid (in Basecamp’s case ~220k/year, paying at the top 10% of San Francisco market rate and will receive up to 6 month of salary if they decide to leave). So they can also decide freely if they want to stay and adopt to the new situation/culture or if they want to move on. It’s also very unlikely they have to pee in bottles while driving delivery trucks or being in physical danger. So it’s pretty safe to assume:
Strong companies are built around strong cultures. And they will be highly individual, but they will share a couple of patterns. Often they are built around the leaders that craft them. I bet you’ve seen this comic:
This comic has been floating around the internet for a couple of years
Organisations need structure and leadership. This is a good thing and isn’t contradictory to self-organisation, empowerment of the individuals,… Modern leadership styles/principles fully embrace that. I’m stressing that because I strongly believe that so much of a happy/fulfilled workplace is dependent on that connection.
Changing culture
It’s as simple as that. Different cultures attract different people. Sometimes leadership changes, and therefore a change of talent follows. Or culture starts drifting away and gets recalibrated, which results in churn.
Nothing to worry about. just to be aware of.
Missing Joy
As leader you need to know what employees enjoy. Where a person can work at their best. People aren’t resources that are slotted into a position. Remember, we spend a good portion of our time awake at work. We need to support everybody to craft their optimal experience at work.
You need to design around them. If people are engaged and come to that energized state that is named flow, magic happens. And magic results are just magic! This is only possible if people are in a safe space, where they don’t have to worry about many things. Without trust a safe space can’t exist. But how to create trust (Yes, mistrust leads to people quitting their jobs)?
Shrinking Trust
Strong cultures are memorable and based on a set of rules. The simpler and more explicit they are, the better. Because if you’re operating on these set of principles reliably it creates trust. An additional benefit of trust is that it makes communication way more effective. Because, if you don’t trust me, all my talking would be useless.
A few of my personal rules that randomly come to my mind: “I do what I say, I say what I do”, “I communicate decisions, as soon as they are taken and don’t hide them.”, “In case of mistakes I’m focussing on avoiding it in future, not on finding who’s guilt it was.”, or to close that heading “Assume every decision is right, as you assume best intentions.”…
Never forget: It’s hard to earn trust and takes time. It’s easy to destroy trust and takes no time.
Lack of Appreciation
A healthy company has a good, diverse mix of individuals. The doers, introverts, fighters, dreamers, caretakers, listeners, thinkers, tinkerers, silent ones, critics,… As leader I often felt like a Zoo director.
Assume everybody is doing her/his best. All the time. Therefore everybody deserves their share of appreciation and attention. A “small beaver” can be equally important to a “big roaring tiger” but will leave if he’s not seen and appreciated. No matter how long an employee is with the company, or how important their role is.
Lack of growth perspective
Bill and Melinda Gates separated after 27 years of marriage because they “no longer believe they can grow together as a couple”. So, if an employee is asking: “What is my perspective at the company?”, you already missed the point of proactively managing that. If these answers are missing, one will sooner or later quit. On the other hand – providing a clear growth path can do wonders!
As Leader, don’t delegate diversity and inclusion. It’s your job. As soon you reach a point, where DEI is done for it’s own purpose you lost the connection to the company culture and this leads to dissatisfaction.
There are assholes out there. They might be inside your company. Manage them well. Recognise that you won’t be able to change them. Make sure they do as little damage as possible. As long you have the power. Don’t look away, act.
People don’t leave companies, they leave people.
Paraphrased from Ben Horowitz’ Book
Oh, btw. I’m about to put together a new team as we speak.
People don’t join companies, they choose the people to work with.
Mail me or call me if you’re ready to make a choice.
Über die letzten 7 Jahre – während ich Crate gegründet und mit aufgebaut habe – hatte ich über zahlreiche Finanzierungsrunden Gelegenheit Pitches zu üben und zu “delivern”. Ich habe mich sehr gefreut, darüber mit Boris Gloger darüber eine Podcastfolge aufzunehmen.
This has originally been posted on the Crate.io blog end of September 2020.
Today I’m announcing my departure from Crate.io, the company I cofounded 7+ years ago and have been building together with a great team.
I’ve had many roles at Crate.io over the years, and today I have a new, final one – a still convinced user and ambassador of CrateDB. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over distributed databases and building a strong engineering culture built on trust, it’s time to move on and focus on solving other problems on this planet. Going forward I’ll use my experience and endurance to tackle them in any way I can.
Seven years ago, Bernd Dorn, Manfred Schwendinger and me built the first version of CrateDB and then we configured our startup: Manfred had to take care of our pre-existing business, I took the CEO role, Bernd, the best coder and architect was the natural choice as CTO and Christian Lutz, with his experience and success in funding, building and selling tech companies initially as our COO. Our goal was to make scaling super simple. CrateDB and “Big Data SQL in Real-Time” did a picture-perfect launch: HackerNews, trending Github repository, TechCrunch, Gigaom, TheNextWeb, Pioneers,…
It was crystal clear that building an open source database is a long-term, difficult undertaking requiring lots of VC funding, which would allow us to build together a successful business and raise capital in multiple rounds.
Crate: simple – horizontal – scaling
Machine generated data – including Time Series Data – is the fastest growing database segment and the fully distributed SQL query engine of CrateDB is the perfect foundation for the enterprise IOT market.
End of 2015 it was again a natural move that I took the CTO seat and Christian took over the CEO seat to build out with the team the commercial part of the company and execute professional VC fundraises in UK and Silicon Valley.
End of 2016 we tipped the cow, released CrateDB 1.0 and also started monetizing our product. This led to a global, strong growth of users and we transitioned from an engineering-only r&d company to a financially successful B2B enterprise business and also raise our Series A.
Today, 7 years and 360 CrateDB releases later, Crate.io is grown-up and is a revenue driven enterprise business with large customers and partners, and even more ambitious growth targets than ever. That’s why the board of directors brought in Eva Schönleitner as CEO, Christian got appointed as President to the board and I am happy to see Bernd coming back and taking again the engineering lead as CTO. To be able to pursue that huge opportunity that lies ahead of Crate the leadership team needs to evolve and guide the company to further growth. As a leaving executive I couldn’t be happier to see that the company is set up for success and find a new role.
As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet.
It’s never easy for a founder to part ways with their work. I know that most ideas never materialize. Most software goes unused. Most businesses fail in their first years but we didn’t and here we are. Now, with Petabytes of data being processed by CrateDB, some of the largest and most successful businesses using CrateDB in their core processes, being recognized by Forbes Magazine and named a Cool Vendor by Gartner you know that your work was meaningful, and that a vibrant group of customers and partner will continue building upon it…. can any founder ask for anything more?
Photo: Ian Ehm/friendship.is
I want to thank from the bottom of my heart every Cratie – our team members, past and present, for making Crate.io what it is today. Thanks to you, this founder’s bittersweet moment is mostly sweet. I look forward to seeing where you will take it next.
Thank you
Jodok
What started with an Cathode powered screencast ends with the same:
Mein Freund Boris Gloger ist ein besonderer Mensch. Mich verbinden viele Sachen mit ihm. Wir wollten und wollen immer noch mehr gemeinsam unternehmen. Ein erster kleiner Schritt ist, dass wir es endlich geschafft haben, einen ersten Podcast aufzunehmen.
Im Frühling hat mich Boris “auf dem Fahrrad” besucht – und wir habeen beschlossen: Jawohl! Eine Podcast Episode zum Start.
Hört euch an, was wir zum Thema “unternehmen” plaudern:
“Die Ideen gehen mir nicht aus”, Jodok Batlogg ist Gründer und Geschäftsführer von Crate.io in Dornbirn. Außerdem ist er Informatiker und mehrfacher Entrepreneur, der bereits sieben Unternehmen aufgebaut hat und nun das achte Jahr im aktuellen Unternehmen Crate.io angeht. Ausgehend von einer – für ihn – glasklaren Idee einer hochskalierbaren Datenbank für maschinengenerierte Daten (z.B. Sensordaten, Daten in der industriellen Produktion) gründete er das Start-up Crate.io und fing dafür wieder einmal bei Null an.
Ich unterhalte mich mit Jodok darüber, wieso er es nicht lassen kann, was ihn antreibt und welche Hürden er überwinden musste. Er erzählt uns ein wenig über seine Produktidee, was seinen Lebensstil als Unternehmer ausmacht und wie er das gesamte Unternehmen denkt. Silicon Valley spielt natürlich auch ein Rolle.
I had the opportunity to record an episode of the “Digitale Leute Podcast” with my friend Oliver Thielmann from Giant Swarm and would like to reshare it here as well:
featuring electric skateboards and bitcoins
Why industrial IoT startup Crate.io can easily do distributed databases but still had trouble finding product-market fit
Being at number one at Hacker News or winning the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battle might help create a hype around your startup. But it doesn’t help finding the product-market fit. Jodok Batlogg, CTO at industrial IoT startup Crate.io explains in this episode why they needed six years to finally hit product-market fit.
Digitale Leute Insights is the podcast for passionate product people. We interview product developers from around the world and take a closer look at their tools and tactics.
When Jodok Batlogg was the CTO at StudiVZ, the largest social network in Germany before Facebook got traction in Europe, the biggest problem they had was data storage. The data of 60 million users were running on about a thousand servers and Docker had not been invented yet. It was clear to Jodok that the amount of data would be growing and the problems with it.
Four years later, he founded Crate.io with a prototype of CrateDB. The open-source distributed SQL database management system used Elastic Search when that was still “a crazy guy sitting in Israel coding at a new kind of approach on how to deal with distributed computing,” as Jodok puts it in this episode.
His startup enjoyed two hypes early. The first one was a Hacker News article that resulted in the company going into the “Big Data SQL in real-time” direction. The second boost came after winning the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battle, which Jodok completed with a broken fibula. Although it helped to keep the company alive with bringing in investors, they were still to find product-market fit, Jodok admits. “On the product side, it was fine, but from the going-to-market side and on the monetization side, it was totally wrong.”
How to gain product-market fit
The turnaround came as late as five years after the foundation when the company did a customer survey. The result was a transformation to a more enterprise-focused company concentrating on industrial IoT. They switched the open-source model, which allowed the customers to perceive Crate.io as a product worth buying. It also helped the sales department actually to sell the product. Before that, even hiring extra sales employees had resulted in zero sales.
Today Crate.io is a remote-first company, led by Jodok Batlogg as CTO from Dornbirn, a small town in Vorarlberg, Austria. The mountainous country and Jodoks attempt to not use his Audi anymore leads him to try out all the new electric boards, bikes, and gadgets on the market. He shares this passion with our host Oliver Thylmann. This is why they close this episode by discussing electromobility and paying it with bitcoin.
About the Host Oliver Thylmann is a serial entrepreneur based in Cologne, Germany. He is the co-founder of Giant Swarm, a 35-person SaaS company providing managed microservice infrastructure to big enterprises.
Hi, welcome to the team. I’m so glad you are here at Crate. You’re now a Cratie!
Crate.io‘s mascots: goats
You’ll need at least one cycle to figure this place out. Maybe even two cycles. That’s totally o.k. – take your time. Uh? a cycle? What’s that? Let’s call it 1-2 quarters (of a year) for now. When entering a new environment, the first impression is really important. And we’re working hard to make the first experience a good one. But as we’re a bunch of curious, different and complex people solving complex problems this will take some time. Btw. complex is still better than complicated1. Be curious, meet everyone, look around, ask all the questions, write and talk to whomever you want. I bet there are many new acronyms, habits and rituals to learn. This will time until you’re fully productive. We expect that. In case you feel unsafe or don’t dare to ask someone, you have multiple fallbacks: your onboarding buddy, your lead person or just me.
Company culture is reflecting the people working there. What you do is who you are2. It started based on the belief of the two founders – Christian and me. Over the last 6 years we kept a lot of principles, but also carefully changed others. The following paragraphs are a user guide to navigate Crate and navigate it. It captures what you can expect out of working as part of the team, our aspirations and the leadership values that influence our culture.
My intent is to accelerate the working relationship between all of us with this document.
Our Average Week
People work from where they want and when they want. It might seem this is less efficient than having all people at one place for fixed hours. But we’ve deliberatly decided to craft a remote-friendly culture that even allows people in different timezones to be included. It makes us resilient and adaptable. It is sustainable. We’ll do as many things asynchronously and in written format as possible. People working in one of the offices have the advantage of meet at the espresso machine – and have random chats. But even if you are remote or in a different office you will be able to see and talk with your team mates at least once per day: During the daily coffee – a video call that the team does once a day. This call is about social interaction, staying connected and getting better known to each other. The teams decide themselves how to organize the rest of the work and agile methodology. One nice weekly ritual worth mentioning for the people sharing a location is the weekly team lunch – we cook something together in Dornbirn and invite you to go for lunch in other locations.
It’s up to you and your lead to agree on a schedule to set expectations, about cadence and structure/tools of 1:1s and related topics.
We have a bi-weekly all-hands meeting (attendance optional) where the leadership will present a summary about what’s going on in the different areas of the business and is also open to questions. The meeting is also recorded in case you can’t attend.
You can contact the founders 24hours a day. Don’t worry. We’re used to that and have tuned the notifications of our phones and other tools in a way that is in harmony with our private life. If we don’t want to be disturbed we’ll manage to not be disturbed.
If one of us is traveling, out of office, ill or on vacation, we update our status beforehand in Pingboard3. All our meetings still occur albeit with time zone considerations.
Some of us work now and then on weekends, evenings or early mornings. Some start later, some leave earlier. This is their choice. We do not expect that you are going to work on the weekend, evenings or early mornings. We might be sending mails and Slack messages, but unless the thing says URGENT, it can always wait until work begins for you on Monday. It’s up to you to find your work/life balance, be an integrated part of a team that delivers results. We’ll help you to do so.
We all take vacations. You should, too. Disconnected from work is when we do some of the best work.
North Star Principles
Simply Sustainable takes a major concern and common claim – simplicity – and qualifies with the ultimate payoff: sustainability, an application and a business that can scale and maintain itself ad infinitum. It’s forward looking – in a world of data overload, this is how we do more than survive: it’s how we thrive. Sustainability demands balance, playing well with others, moving forward with peace of mind. And who doesn’t want it to be simple??
Crate is a team of passionate, experienced people who’ve crafted a bold and clever database for the fast, data-intensive world, making speed, scalability super simple, open, and accessible – a solution that’s built to be sustainable for all.
Crate.io Brand Story
Clever. We’re passionate people with a love of technology and a lot of experience. But technologic breakthroughs don’t just come from knowing your stuff. They come from looking at things from different angles and flipping the situation around: they come from being clever.
Bold. We believe in being bold, in the power of having a vision and the gumption to realize it, however radical. Being bold means seeing the big picture and believing you can impact it, shape it, make it better.
Open. The best solutions come from people listening to each other as they share information, insight, and experience. Which is why we are fanatically open and honest — listening to our customers, being good citizens of the open source community, building with others to make solutions better.
Simple. It takes a deep understanding of the craft, coupled with human empathy, to render the complex simple. To make it accessible for all. In everything we do, from how we configure data and integration with existing systems to user dashboards, documentation, and support, we aim to keep it all super simple. Because data should work for everyone.
Sustainable. We believe the best solutions are sustainable, supporting communities and businesses as they grow. Which is why we believe in working together, building on each other’s advances, all in order to create open and accessible solutions that are sustainable for all.
Crate.io Brand Pillars
Our System Of Values
Our Values are the guiding principles that lead to what we do on a daily basis. They are the parameters that tune our decision process that results in how we behave if no one watches. This is what we call culture. You can rely on those values, and you can demand them at any time.
Meaningfulness. At any time we offer to explain the meaningfulness and relationale of tasks, goals and measures.
Success. We strive towards and celebrate joint success.
Colleguality. We offer a work environment based on collaboration and cooperation. At the same time we respect everyone’s individuality.
Esteem. We appreciate and respect each and everyone and their opinions and provide open and honest feedback.
Challenge. It is our aspiration to provide everyone with the opportunity to grow by taking on new and challenging tasks.
Self-determination. There is as much room for self-determination as possible.
Joy. By Living Our Values above we gain happiness and satisfaction.
Expectations and Feedback Protocol
We firmly believe that the process of setting, expressing and matching expectations is at the core of building trust and respect in a team. This requires the continuous process of giving and receiving feedback.
At Crate.io, there is a formal feedback cycle which occurs twice a year. We have outlined the structure of an appraisal interview in a separate document.
Meetings take time, we take care about our mutual time. Therfor we have a couple of principles for our meetings. First of all we deliberately run our calendars publicly visible. If you have a question about any meeting on any calendar, just ask. If a meeting is private or confidential, you’ll most likely just see a placeholder. The vast majority of meetings are neither private nor confidential.
Each meeting has to include an agenda and/or intended purpose, the appropriate amount of productive attendees, and the expected contribution of the parties invited. If Craties are attending a meeting, they prefer starting on time. If Craties are running a meeting, they will start that meeting on time. If it’s not clear to a Cratie why they are in a meeting, they will ask for clarification on their attendance.
If you send a presentation deck a reasonable amount of time before a meeting, we will read it before the meeting and will have our questions ready. If we haven’t read the deck, we will tell you.
If a meeting completes its intended purpose before it’s scheduled to end, let’s give the time back to everyone. If it’s clear the intended goal won’t be achieved in the allotted time, let’s stop the meeting before time is up and determine how to finish the meeting later.
Nuances (and Errata)
Being a diverse team is a priceless advantage. Because tolerance creates creativity. And creativity is the most precious ingredient of the future. It’s essential to have different personalities in a team. We embrace this fact – but also move out of comfort zone when needed.
One possible model: The Myers-Briggs Personality Types, by Jake Beach, via Wikpedia
We don’t put people into boxes. But to concern oneself with different scientific models helps us to work better together.
We always assume positive intent for all involved. Whenever a person takes a decision, it’s the best decision that he/she can take in that moment.
If someone of us is on the phone during a meeting for more than 30 seconds, say something. It’s easy to get distracted nowadays.
This document is a first braindump of myself – speaking as one of the founders and CTO. This is not my creation, but I was privileged to work as part of a system of people that shaped our culture and my thinking. When I came across Rands in repose article „How To Rands“, I decided to take this as template, rework it and use as basis for a wider discussion within the Crate.io Team, but also the public.
I would like to update it with you, make it a shared thing all of us can underwrite, and therefor would appreciate your feedback. I‘ll turn this into a Github document in case we need to improve tooling to collaboratively work on that document.
