We recently spoke with the CEOs of companies that participated in the recent AWS Startup Showcase: Innovations With CloudData and CloudOps to find out what drives them and learn about their visions for the future. This is the first of many in our CEO Startup Spotlight series.

The spark that birthed Stardog came about easy-rider style. One cold winter night in 2003, data scientist Kendall Clark (pictured) was “freezing on a motorcycle ride” when he came up with an idea to future-proof data management.

At the time Clark was working at an artificial intelligence research lab in Arlington, VA, exploring whether the World Wide Web could be the basis for a new kind of data integration system. Now the co-founder and CEO of Stardog, Clark has entrusted a philosophical approach to cloud-native computing.

With over $20 million in funding and an AWS Global Partner, Stardog is a fast-growing data integration company enabling pharmaceutical, finance and manufacturing industries to connect on-premises data with data in the cloud. There, Stardog crafts a unified data layer to more efficiently understand its context and relational patterns. As modern workloads demand more data to be processed at the edge, Stardog is among many companies rethinking relational databases. By allowing companies to keep data in existing silos, Stardog eliminates the costly, time-consuming task of moving data to a centralized location.

“I’ve always been gripped personally by data silos and wanted to eradicate the problems associated with them,” Clark said. “It’s exciting to see the industry and the world in general starting to take data movement issues seriously and look at new ways of doing data integration. That’s really what we’re about.”

Philosophy leads to technology

Philosophy and enterprise computing may not seem compatible bedfellows, but in Clark’s case, one naturally led to the other. With three university degrees in philosophy and religious studies, Clark entered into academia, teaching in the same field. While academia was engaging intellectually, he ultimately wanted more.

Growing up in Texas, Clark reflected on his father’s many deal-making phone conversations involving the dismantling and rebuilding of petrochemical refineries as operations moved from one country to another. That was the kind of engagement and excitement he was looking for.

Clark had heavily studied formal logic as a philosopher. The basis of computer science, and artificial intelligence in particular, formal logic made Clark’s parallel move relatively easy. He taught himself how to program and found a developer job in Dallas in 1999. That’s when he decided he could make a real impact in technology.

Not only did his background in philosophy help create a path to technology, it guides his decision-making daily as a leader. He’s an avid reader and articulates complex ideas clearly, having honed critical-thinking skills to discern falsehoods.

“As a philosopher, you’re acutely aware of what you know and what you don’t know,” Clark said. “It’s important to self-examine and, if necessary, change your beliefs based on data.”

Clark also deems himself very evidence-based in his beliefs and benefits from the Socratic pursuit of truth alongside colleagues.

“I try very much to bring that to my leadership. I’m also not afraid to say when I’m wrong or that I like another person’s idea better,” Clark stated. “Philosophers are good about changing their minds for reasons and ideas provided by others.”

Creating space for the data fabric

When Clark and his co-founders, Evren Sirin and Michael Grove, first founded Stardog in 2015, the challenges with data integration weren’t yet a hot topic of conversation. The industry was oriented around the status quo of relational-based data integration systems. What Clark and his partners uniquely recognized was that relational data integration leads to data replication, and replicated data leads to incorrect or outdated data.

It all adds up to pitfalls for human error. Each application’s distinct data model means that developers, data scientists and data engineers spend more time building, testing and managing custom code that supports this workflow instead of doing their actual jobs. This becomes unwieldy at scale and slows the pace of business. Stardog set out to create a new way to unify data without these challenges, which not only speeds time to insight, but also makes data reusable within an organization since each new use case leverages prior modeling work.

Before founding Stardog, Clark and his partners had seen the potential for data fabrics in person as part of a services engagement at NASA. They knew other large and complex organizations would be facing similar challenges, leading them to commercialize their work.

In 2015, Stardog helped a major bank launch the industry’s first data fabric, dubbed the Enterprise Knowledge Graph. Now with Graph as its flagship product, Stardog’s unique approach applies virtualized representations of an organization’s data. This is Stardog’s way of unifying data types across sources, abstracting away the pains of standardization. The resulting data layer can then be more effectively analyzed, teasing out the actionable relationships of structured and unstructured data.

Data fabrics rose to the top of Gartner’s Hype Cycles last summer as enterprises were forced to reevaluate their existing practices, especially in the face of a data landscape becoming increasingly distributed in hybrid computing architectures. Stardog was named a sample vendor in multiple Hype Cycles, and overall interest in data fabrics has since skyrocketed. Clark is pleased to see the technology go mainstream and excited to continue partnering with enterprises to better leverage their data.

“In order to maximize our impact in the market, we really have to create a user experience that makes our capabilities broadly accessible,” he stated. “We built something for power users, and they loved it, and now we’re working to convert those who are unhappy with relational data integration or nervous about the unknown. We’ve heavily invested and plan to continue investing in the visual front end-user experience to make Stardog accessible to a broader user base. Our new tool Stardog Explorer is a no-code user experience for understanding data, including context, relationships and hidden connections.”

Data management, ethics and the year ahead

Clark believes the pandemic has accelerated awareness of data and the importance of data management as a strategy.

“Organizations are becoming more data-driven, which is something I very much believe is an ethical obligation,” he explained. “It’s clear to me that my duty as a public citizen building a company is to help large organizations make better decisions backed by data and evidence, and I believe Stardog will lead that charge with a different approach to data management.”

Over the past 18 months, Stardog has signed a number of pharmaceutical companies that were associated in one way or another with the pandemic efforts. They’re using Stardog’s technology to find more connections in their data so they can decrease research and development time and get a drug to market faster. Clark takes pride in the fact that Stardog played a role in helping them use data strategically for societal good. Now more than ever, accelerating drug discovery and development is a critical endeavor.

Looking forward, Clark is excited for the post-isolation world of in-person interactions with customers and partners. In March of last year, he was on a major tour with dozens of meetings scheduled in London, Paris and Madrid with companies such as GSI, Accenture and Deloitte to launch Stardog’s European partner program. Then the world shut down and the tour came to a halt.

This year, the company will reintroduce itself to customers and partners.

“Face-to-face meetings are really important. Enthusiasm is much more infectious in person,” Clark stated. “Customers want to look you in the eye and feel your passion. Our team loves interaction with customers, telling stories and building relationships.”

Excited about Stardog’s future and the opportunities ahead, Clark said he has even missed his 30-minute commute to the company’s Arlington, Virginia, office headquarters overlooking the district of Columbia. With his second COVID vaccination behind him, he says, “I’m very, very close, and I can barely wait.”

Photo: Kendall Clark