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 fifth feature in our CEO Startup Spotlight series.

Football has been a lifelong passion for Billy Bosworth, chief executive officer of the SQL lakehouse company Dremio. Bosworth was a scholarship football player while studying at the University of Louisville, and early in his career he coached high school football for more than a decade. His leadership role at Dremio intertwines a fascination with the ever-changing landscape of technology and data with a coach’s mindset to drive a successful team.

“I come from a place that values relationships and people on the team, something that was forged through my sports and family background, not through a classic business school education,” he explained. “I love the notion that people can achieve great things together that they didn’t think were possible, and I enjoy challenging those who want to be challenged; as much as I love technology and am a nerd at heart, I care equally about people and genuinely want them to do well.”

That doesn’t mean it’s all rainbows and lollipops, he added, explaining that sometimes there are hard conversations to be had. 

“If you’ve ever been a part of sports, you know that the relationship between coach and player can be a little dicey at times, but that doesn’t mean the coach doesn’t care,” he said.

An avid reader of nonfiction, Bosworth was inspired by the book “The Score Takes Care of Itself” by the legendary NFL coach Bill Walsh. Walsh’s book outlines his philosophy for building a great team and organization. 

“I’ve always respected Walsh because he was a very rare combination of innovator, which requires a certain mindset, as well as a phenomenal communicator, and he executed really well,” Bosworth said. “He was very open and honest with his players, and he would have forthright, difficult conversations when needed. As a leader, I’ve tried to emulate Walsh’s approach.”

Three decades in the database business

Bosworth’s career spans 30 years with an ongoing focus on data and databases. After graduating with a bachelor of science degree in information science and data processing, he entered the job market as a software developer and database administrator. Later he moved into product management for companies doing systems management for databases and eventually became vice president and general manager for the enterprise database unit at Quest Software Inc.

In 2011, he became chief executive officer of DataStax Inc., which was the primary company behind Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL distributed database. Under his leadership, DataStax grew from less than $1 million in revenue to more than $100 million in under a decade. 

Bosworth also held a board membership at data analytics company Tableau Software LLC for several years leading up to its acquisition by Salesforce.com Inc. in 2019. It was at that time that he joined Dremio as a board member. And in February 2020, he stepped in as CEO after being aggressively recruited by the company’s founder and chief product officer, Tomer Shiran. 

“I got to know Tomer who was CEO when I became a board member. He is really a visionary and wanted to focus more on the platform,” Bosworth said. “We joined forces, and I came on board as CEO to help operate and scale the business, allowing him to turn his attention to the product. It’s been a great relationship ever since.”

Data democratization and eliminating inefficiencies

Bosworth underscored the sentiment that the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation taking place with so many companies. 

“Cloud migrations, being nimble with data centers and everything else as a service, were already trending, but COVID hit the gas pedal,” he said. “The timetables have compressed, and businesses have to move very, very fast. And companies like Dremio are helping them. Part of our job is to provide them with insights and solutions to speed up that journey.” 

He likened the process to turning a very big ship, referring to the ship stuck in the canal allegory. 

“If you’re a really big business and you make a wrong turn, it’s difficult to recover. And that’s what happens sometimes when you move really, really fast. Large enterprises are trying to balance speed with agility, and that’s hard. Vendors like Dremio are helping to provide the support they need to be successful.”

Dremio offers a data lake service that delivers faster time to analytics and eliminates the need to copy and move data to proprietary data warehouses or create cubes, aggregation tables and BI extracts. As a result, data architects have greater flexibility and control, and data consumers have self-service capabilities. In this way, the company says it is democratizing data. 

Due to its infinite scalability, low cost and simplicity of management, cloud data lake storage, such as S3, ADLS and others, has become the destination of choice for storing high volumes of data. However, to analyze that data, it first needs to be moved and copied into proprietary data warehouses — a process that can become costly, complex, risky and inflexible. 

Dremio is an engine that sits between data lake storage and end users who want to directly query that data for high-performing dashboards and interactive analytics, without the need for copying data into data warehouses. Dremio’s technology fundamentally simplifies workflows, allowing analytics directly on the full data set, stored in industry-standard open formats, residing in native cloud storage.

In May 2020, Dremio introduced its AWS edition, which the company says makes it easier and more cost-efficient to run business intelligence tools, such as Tableau, on AWS S3 data lake storage while accelerating queries for predictive analytics models. 

Marching forward and mastering upstream/downstream efficacy

In January, Dremio raised $135 million in Series D funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $1 billion. The new round was led by Sapphire Venture with participation from existing Dremio investors Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Cisco Investments. 

The funding announcement revealed that the company’s investment will help Dremio expand its engineering centers around the globe, grow its customer-facing organization, contribute to open-source initiatives, and invest heavily in educating and enabling a growing community of data lake practitioners. The announcement also stated that Dremio has doubled its revenue, customers and employees in the past year and is working closely with strategic partners, including Amazon, Microsoft and Tableau.

Bosworth acknowledged the challenges of growing a company on a fast track, saying that there really are no “one-size-fits-all problems” when it comes to this new post-pandemic environment. 

“We’re hiring a lot of people. We’ve grown from about 85 to 250 people now in 14 months,” he said. “We’re just trying to be overly communicative and find new ways to connect with people and being mindful that everybody’s experiences are a little bit different.”

One area of focus for Bosworth is the concept of upstream and downstream accountability within the company. This involves more than just “checking the boxes,” which represents activity, but not efficacy, he explained. 

“I’m asking people to take more responsibility to understand whether their work is having the intended effects it should have,” he said. “It’s very easy to miss when everybody is so busy and feel they just need to get their to-do list accomplished. But if you don’t really understand the efficacy of your work downstream from you, and if you’re not getting good, clear instructions from those upstream from you, then the company is not going to run smoothly.” 

When asked what he thinks employees expect of him, Bosworth responded that they expect strategy and that he understands where the company is going and how it is going to win in the market. Increasingly, people expect their leaders to be of very high character and integrity and know that the journey is just as important as the destination, he added.

“We don’t want to be  proud of just our financial success, but the journey and how we arrive — handling ourselves in a way that makes us proud on multiple levels. That’s the kind of team culture we want to build,” he stated.

Spoken like a true coach.

Photo: Dremio