John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasted live from San Jose this week during Hadoop Summit 2013, inviting Stefan Groschupf, CEO and Founder of Datameer and an early contributor to Hadoop, to give his two cents about the current state of business, the adoption of Hadoop, as well as to share a couple points of advice for young entrepreneurs.

In his own words, Stefan Groschupf is ”a Big Data veteran and serial entrepreneur with strong roots in the open source community.” He was one of the very few early contributors to Nutch, the open source project that spun off Hadoop, which, 10 years later, is considered a $20 billion business.

Hadoop is changing lives

What he found fascinating at this event was Sky Christopherson’s account of Big Data and Hadoop changing lives and shaping the future olympians (see this talk here).

”Hadoop is just another tool in the toolbox,” says Groschupf. “As a company, if you want to be successful, you need to build your customer base, provide them value, and – obviously – make more money than you spend acquiring them.” Groschupf quoted Guy Kawasaki who warned about the danger of “death by customer acquisition costs”, which is where a lot of start-ups fail. “If you make more dollars than you spend on getting customers, you’re moving in the right direction,” says Groschupf.

Talking about the possibility of SQL coming to Hadoop, Groschupf said: “The Hadoop file system actually works like a tapedrive. Technically, Hadoop is a sequential optimized file system. To find something, you have to stream all the data, and that offers its performance for analytical workloads.” Adding varied languages on top of a sequential optimized file system does not make sense, Groschupf thinks. The only market advantage nowadays is moving faster than your competition, so it basically comes down to agility and flexibility.

Datameer’s pipeline

Furrier and Vellante encouraged Groschupf to talk more about the recent announcements made by Datammer. ”We introduced smart analytics, which is a machine learning tool that is so simple that anyone can use it,” admitted Groschupf.

He was referring to Datameer 3.0, the newest version of its big data analytics tool for business users. Using its self-service capabilities – states the press release – Datameer 3.0 adds new Smart Analytic functions. With a single click, it automatically identifies patterns, relationships, and recommendations based on data stored in Hadoop. For the first time, four advanced machine learning techniques become self-service and accessible for data-driven business users: Clustering, Decision Trees, Column Dependencies and Recommendations. Until now, these advanced analytics required highly specialized data scientists to build custom functionality, which was a costly and time-consuming process.

His advice to entrepreneurs is simple. As someone who is at his sixth company, Groschupf knows all there is to know about being successful in the business, and the other side of the coin. “I’m an engineer, always trying to solve technical problems, but it doesn’t matter. What you need to solve are the business problems, and the technology needs to have that edge, so that you can solve what no one else before you could. You need to find one specific area where someone has a problem and solve it.”