NYC Apartment to Series D Unicorn: Redpanda Infrastructure Powering AI & Real-Time Apps

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, and the products they build in an effort to transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today, Alex Gallego, founder and CEO of Redpanda. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Gallego: Thanks, Jake, for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: We're really excited to have Alex uh today. I'll give you a little background on him. Uh in 2019, he had the vision of making real-time data accessible to all developers. Alex engineered the first version of the Redpanda platform from the ground up for low latency, large scale, and a simpler, better user experience. Prior to Redpanda, Alex was the co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high performance stream processing engine acquired by Akamai in 2016. Alex began his career as a hacker and builder in his hometown of Manizales, Colombia. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and cryptography from NYU. Um, God, you got a great background there, Alex. Where, where are you joining us from today?  

Alex Gallego: I am uh joining us from uh, from San Francisco.

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Very cool. It's a place I've lived in before. I love that town. A lot of uh transformation happening there with all sorts of technology and engineering and it's a great place to be. Um I want to talk a little about your company Redpanda. Um but before we do that want to dive a little deeper into your background. Give us a little bit of your origin story and where did you start? How did you get the entrepreneur bug and how did you get into technology?

Alex Gallego: My friend KDP likes to say that I I was just always the kid that used to take apart television sets. When I was growing up, I grew up uh going to my grandma's house basically all the time cuz my mom was a single mom. And so my uncle had this uh motorcycle shop and we used to take this racing dirt bikes, like you know think KTMs, Kawasakis, etc. like dirt bikes where people would go and run and and jump and like make stunts. It was really cool. And so he specialized in this, like taking apart motorcycles. And so I think I was eight and I remember taking engines apart with him and smelling like gasoline and oil. I'm not sure it was like super healthy for a kid who was eight, but for me it was really fun. Uh and and I think I associate my identity with that of being a builder and and a doer. And it really comes from my um Uncle Tio. And we used to just uh yeah just take motorcycles apart. And honestly, that just sort of stuck with me. And so, even today as a CEO, even though I'm no longer writing code, I still feel very much like a builder myself. And I think I don't know, it's just part of my identity. So, so you could say I I don't remember not being the way I am. Um, but I remember like getting into putting things together and, or most most of the time taking them apart since I was eight years old.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah. Um, you know, we often hear that builders start in different sectors or industries and then you kind of fall into what you love and computer science is a great place to build and grow and create. Um, what was the inspiration um of you getting into computer science? I mean, it's it's, you know, something that if you're in Silicon Valley, it's pretty easy to do. If you're in a different part of the US, it might not be as prevalent to get into computer science, but what um what was it that connected you into thinking about doing that in school and then ultimately uh building a career out of it?

Alex Gallego: I think it's also more complicated when you're the first kid to go to school and um you do it in a different country with a different language. And so that's to say that it was largely luck I I I think and so when I came to the US I actually you know, got my first computer uh because before that we couldn't afford it. And so um when I was applying for schools I had no idea. And and uh I came to the US without learning a single word of the language really. And so um when when I was applying I was trying to figure out like "what, like you know what do do?" because you're in high school, you're trying to figure out and those are sort of your formative years. Like who are you? What's your sexual orientation? Like what are the things that you like? All that and you're like, "I have no idea what I'm going to do." And it's also not like I had anyone in the family that I was like, "Oh, what's it like to go to school? Like what do you recommend? Do you recommend a big school or small?" You know what I mean? There's like hyper um specific context, especially in the US. And so when I applied, I Googled, I still remember this like, "how to hack into systems." And I think at the time NYU uh Poly, which you know, the Brooklyn engineering school out of NYU, had this ad I guess or, and it's like uh "New York, come learn how to work on," they call it like a a hackathon, but it was really a cyber security program. I was like, "Well I don't know what that is, but it sounds really cool."

And so I applied, I got in, and you know, I had done well academically so they gave me a bunch of scholarship. Most of my school was really paid for uh with academic grants. And so that's how, you know, I landed there and I still had no idea. And so I ended up being on the Dean's List, which is like if your GPA whatever is above 3.7 um and I was the only kid that still had no idea and my advisor, Susana Garcia, uh was like, "Oh, hey, you did well in this class. Like have you considered it?" And I asked her, "What is it, like what what do you advise?" and she says, "I'm the advisor for the computer engineering and computer science program." I was like, "That sounds great." And here we are, you know, uh, decades later. That's, that's like... so it's partially luck, partially I was inclined, taking things apart. I did okay in a class and and here we are. So, it's just I, it wasn't a thing that I had a clue what it was before I got into it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean so many people that build um technology companies are not from the US but they, they end up coming here and building and um have a great life and go back to their country and and build, you know, a better life and share that experience. And it's really cool to kind of see the evolution of that continue to happen in a, in a positive way. Um, you know, when we look at business, we think of what problem can be solved and what technologies can help do that. Um, let's shift gears a little bit to your company today, Redpanda. Um, you'd already built a company that got acquired by um, Akamai, Kami, however you want to pronounce it.

Alex Gallego: Akamai.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Akamai. And, uh, it's a great company. I remember the company. That growth and how that scaled up and to be acquired first and foremost is amazing. It's like most entrepreneurs' dream is to build something that's valuable enough others will want to buy it and then go off and retire and you're living on a beach the rest of your life, but others want to get back in the game and do it again. So, what, um, talk about Redpanda and a little bit more of what inspired you to kind of open the computer and and start building again?

Alex Gallego: One of the most freeing things as an engineer is the ability to not have, not having to ask for permission. If you can think of something and you have the skills, then you just write it. And before, frankly, before Concord got acquired by Akamai, we were just three kids in three like broke kids in Brooklyn, New York with no money. No one knew who we were. And we were just like every New Yorker just trying to make something happen. And so like the acquisition I think was meaningful in many ways. One, it allows us to like learn as an engineer, what does it mean to do an enterprise sales cycle? So those are like important lessons learned and I'll share that because my role at Redpanda is different than my role um that when when I was at Concord.

Long story short, when I was at Akamai, I couldn't find a storage engine that could keep up with the volumes of data that I was trying to push cost effectively. And so when I left Akamai, I was really writing Redpanda for me. Like what are the characteristics of this system that I wish had existed? I had no intention really, like explicitly, that um like, "Hey this is going to be you know, a company powering like the largest city in or the largest electric car company or the largest bank in the US and some of the largest banks in Australia and like you know fundamental mission critical infrastructure." That honestly that wasn't the... I think it would have been too big at the time if I had thought about it. It was more like what is the thing that I wish existed. And I had been writing C++ code for a really long time. Um, and so I was in my Miami apartment, uh, and I just started writing the the the code and, um, I really got into like, "Hey, if you were to start from scratch today, what would you do differently?" And, and a friend of mine were chatting the other day and the summary of that is that uh, sometimes you're lucky enough to reinvent the wheel. And so there were just a bunch of lucky factors. The way hardware is today is different from the way hardware was done before. And I sort of had the skills and I was playing around. We ended up building something that was useful for a bunch of other people, and people jived with the way that we were trying to build the software. It was sort of this culture of like obsessive performance engineering. And the best way that I can share with the rest of the world is that it's not like your designer shoe is better than like the lowest cost shoe if uh you're trying to get from point A to point B, but you feel this like emotional association for people that care deeply about their craft. Um, you know, it's like actually outside of the price tag, you you kind of want to buy uh things from people that, you know, cared about the little stitches and the colors and the way the seams came together. And so that was sort of how I I thought about starting it. I was like, "I want to build something for me and I'm going to care about all of the details. I'm going to care about memory consumptions and cost and CPU utilization and disk saturation and all of these things." Um, and that's how we ended up building this company honestly.

Then I moved... I happened to have moved to my, a friend of mine uh was traveling and his apartment in Potrero Hill in in San Francisco was empty and I was like, "Okay, I'm like thinking about moving to the Bay Area." He's like, "Oh I'm, I'm like two months, I'm in I'm in India, like why don't you come and stay at my place?" I was like, "Great." And here we are almost five, you know, five and a half years later. Like it really was this very much this organic thing. I I I didn't build Redpanda as a way of building a hypergrowth company. I built the product for me and Um, it took off.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Sounds like you did it in the right way. You you were you were trying to to do it for for yourself and solving a problem that you saw, and and able to do the coding because you know you have that core skill set. Um, it's one thing to solve a problem, but then you have to go out and sell the product and make sure there's a product-market fit and make sure it actually works at a high level. Um, when you're a customer out there today or you're listening to this episode, what type of customers would be interested to hear this story? Like who are you selling to in a company that would take advantage of Redpanda?

Alex Gallego: If you are a company that is building data-intensive applications, and so um any data that is like moving tons of data either really fast or just really large amounts of data period, Redpanda would be a really great fit. Um I think it used to be classically, especially when we started, it was all about real time. And so transaction systems, credit card fraud, oil and gas monitoring pipelines, IP detection for security companies, threat detection. Like you know social media companies, we power companies like ShareChat for example, the largest social media from India, 390 million monthly active users. So that had been classically where Redpanda... I still think today it is sort of like the best uh operational streaming system in the world. And then over time we kept expanding the things that we could do. And I think today if you ask me um is if you are a business uh that is building a data-intensive application um then I'd love to have a chat.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Um you know in your first company you got acquired. In this company, as you grow it um talk a little bit about you know, you've been in business for 5 years if that's accurate with Redpanda. Talk a little bit about how much money you've raised and how big you are as an organization today.

Alex Gallego: Yeah, so we've raised uh I think uh roughly $170 million uh three priced rounds A, B, and C. Um and we're a few hundred people really in in in most uh time zones. And the reason for that is that we power mission-critical systems. And so if Redpanda crashes, people stop making money. We power a market maker. There's only seven of them. So think trillion dollar level liquidity for being able to trade liquid assets like gold or silver or or some sort of like rare uh earth mineral. And so somehow these things trade on on Wall Street and you're like, "Well how, how does this, you know, how does this happen?" Like Redpanda is the technology that allows for, you know, a core piece, it's obviously none of it, but the message passing technology that allows for for these kinds of systems. And so in order to do business uh with like the largest ISP of Europe, the largest market maker in the world, the largest uh CDN in the US, largest electric company, you really need to have presence in most major time zones because if something goes down, even if it's like a fractional outage, like you know one out of 20 systems, there's like a malfunction or somebody fat fingers a bad configuration, and uh or whatever. There's like many reasons why systems fail. Um then we need 24/7 support. And so we're a few hundred people really spread across most major time zones. We have people in Japan, we have people in India, and most of Europe, in the Americas, uh really all over. Um and so um that's that's how it is. I would say most of my sales team is in the Americas with a little bit of of Europe.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, you're doing it for yourself. Maybe there isn't a vision yet of what you want it to be because it's really about trying to solve something you wish you had. And then there's got to be at some point, I'm assuming, a moment where you're like, "I'm onto something here. This is like your big aha moment when you're coding." What do you remember what that was like? Do you remember when you said, "Oh my god, I just solved something that no one else has done yet, and I know I've got something pretty important here."

Alex Gallego: Um, in 2017, I was still working at Akamai. So, I was a year in, and I was trying to understand where the CPU clock cycles were were sort of uh being spent. And so I gave, so I I studied and I was like, "Hey, it looks like this, this really cool system uh spent a bunch of time trying to uh basically, with what is known as lock contention. Two things trying to access the same shared memory." And and it did it sort of like, that that kind of paradigm really didn't make any sense because there are alternatives today that work better with modern hardware. And so I gave a talk which was my understanding of the world at the time around like, if you were to be to build a new system from scratch today, what would you do differently?

And so from a technical level, I guess there's two aha moments to answer your question directly. In 2017, that was the technical aha moment. You're like, wow, if you like Redpanda or not truly like if if you're trying to build a new system you would build it differently today than you would have a decade ago. But like how, how differently? Like would you use that thread-per-core architecture, do you like use static memory allocation? Do you like, you know, there's like these tactical mechanical things that you really have to have an understanding for to to see like can you can you do better? And so that was in 2017 and I and I told the world about it by the way. I posted on on YouTube. I attended a technical conference and I had no idea of building the company. I just said like, "Hey, like I'm just uh as an engineer, these are the things that I've observed and these are the benchmarks and the mechanics of how this could potentially work out." And I figured uh my main competitor would simply take some of those ideas and will make a ton of uh revenue from those ideas. Um for some reason or another that didn't uh I guess luckily financially for me, but at the time no one really picked up those ideas in in the streaming space.

And so when I wrote, anyway, so then I went and I wrote Redpanda in 2019 and I posted it on on on a Docker registry where people get to download code and I wrote a blog post uh and I said, "The world doesn't have to be this difficult or this complicated. And here's a proof of concept of the software that I wrote." And honestly, it got downloaded by some of the world's largest companies, like largest CDN, largest I think ISP in Europe in Denmark, some other large car manufacturer. And I was like, "I can I just..." And one of the largest social media in the US, since then they closed the the uh the business unit, but it's like, you know, things in like I think tens of millions, excuse me, hundreds of millions of users per month. And I was like, "I mean, I think really highly about myself and the company and the software that we built, but um I'm not sure I would put that in production." But hey, whatever. These people were trying to, trying to, and I started getting Twitter DMs from like Chief Architects. I was like, "Hey, like this is a really great idea. What about this? What about that?" And then um that was just like it it sort of blew my mind that it was having this really positive impact.

And then at the time, a friend had introduced me to... I was working with one of the largest financial companies on the West Coast. A friend of mine was literally trying this in production. And he's like, "Hey, can I introduce you to my friend? Uh he he runs a venture capital firm." And I was like, "Sure." And I think something like two and a half weeks later I was a real company. Um I had you know, that's that's kind of how it worked out. But it was really I think the uh the architects which tend to be the champions, the technical champions at companies on how we go about selling the product. They really aligned emotionally and philosophically with the way we were about building the product. It was this idea that I think it was uh breaking away from this, I don't know, I call it the Hadoop era, right? This like super complicated way of running systems. And when I was at Akamai I was like, "Hey, the largest CDN in the world is is run by a single, you know, binary uh, it's so easy. They have this like great operational expertise." It's like, that's the future of running these things at large scale. It is not having, you know, tens of roles and specialized things like... so anyways, that was my vision and that's how we got started. And that was the second aha moment is if the world's largest companies were using this and are trying to use it in production, it feels like a real business.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. God, lots of opportunity, also lots of um risk, you know, you got to get it right and you got to make sure that it actually functions. Um, you've described Redpanda as power, you know, a power mission-critical infrastructure for some of the world's largest companies. What are some of the unique technical challenges you've had to solve to serve um these enterprise customers?

Alex Gallego: There is the the the basics in that it has to make financial sense. And I think cost is a, it's not the primary reason, but it is like an important reason for people buying uh software. And um the takeaway is that we can do more with less, right? So you can take a workload that used to take 100, and truly I'm sharing like true production-level workloads, that used to take 150 computers and and we can now do it in 17. And so cost was a big one. Two is that we allow people to do things that they couldn't, they couldn't do before. And so the example of the market maker is that uh they were trying to, you know, move data really fast, but they didn't want to run their own internal systems. They're like, "Can I just pay someone off the shelf?" And they tried all of the other projects and they just couldn't, they couldn't deliver the performance that they needed in production. And last, um um it's it's like as we evolved the company, people started paying us for more things like connectivity, collaborative projection, integration with others, AI, and so on. But I think at its core, they're really those two things. It was a system that was easy to understand. Um but they paid us dollars because we were able to do uh the same for less, a lot less, usually like 10x wasn't uncommon, 6x was common. Or two, we allowed them to do things that they couldn't have imagined before.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's amazing. You know, this transformation with AI is seems to be taking hold in every sector and impacting almost any business that's a real business and has data that they want to utilize at some capacity. How does data streaming impact AI applications?

Alex Gallego: Imagine if you were to enter ChatGPT a question at lunch and you would get an answer uh after you went to bed. It doesn't make sense. And that's how the business, that's how classically most businesses were built. Like you get your report at midnight and you're like, "Well, I'm sleeping at midnight cuz I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. and I wake up at 4:00 or whatever it happens to be, right?" And so uh like the idea that the future is going to be built the same way that it was built before doesn't make any sense. That that it's not, the future is going to be built differently. And I think if if you are building new applications today, you build them with this sense of interactivity. The best example I could give you is most people in the US, and I think worldwide, but I'll say in the US because I live in the US, um you just don't expect anymore uh Nigerian prince um credit card swipes, right? You just like, it's not a thing that even registers in your profile. It's not like, "Hey, if you live in San Francisco, you're getting a Nigerian prince transaction." And I say that for those of us that used to get thousands of emails about the Nigerian prince. Uh the right demographic will get the joke. But anyways, and so those things are so sophisticated right now. They happen in real time. In fact, the world doesn't happen in this like orderly batch system. It's not like all users come to uh Apple to buy a laptop exactly in the same seconds. That that is not how the world works. And so I think streaming is a more natural way to model how businesses truly interact. As in like, if you you get this general like slow and steady stream of transactions. If you're, you know, a store like McDonald's or something like that, and even then you have quiet periods like between midnight and 4 p.m. And so the tools that I'm describing is about how the world is built. AI puts an emphasis on the interactivity and responsiveness. From a technical perspective, this is called latency. And so the time that it takes to respond is one and the volumes of data are really large. And so this is where both uh two, the largest two trends in AI is accelerating the way that that that you know streaming has, plays a critical role. And so that when you do enter the question on ChatGPT you get the answer immediately, right? That interactivity is sort of crucial. And so anyways, to to sum it up I would say that streaming is a fundamental way of how to model the world and AI is simply an accelerator for people realizing that it is simpler, more cost effective, and more natural to model the world in a reactive fashion than it is to model the world in these nicely punctuated timelines, which is this artificial construct that we've created as software engineers.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well said. I'm going to ask you a question that ties into that a little bit. Why do you think data streaming is important in the larger tech conversation?

Alex Gallego: Yeah. Um, it, things don't tend to live in isolation. I I I think that um you know, I'm not sure if it's a a non-technical CEO problem or or perhaps as companies get larger um the marketing team thinks that like you know, you could do it all. That that's never the case. And there's no single technology, not even Google, right? Like if you go to Amazon, you still need other services. This is why we exist in the Amazon ecosystem or we exist in the Google ecosystem. There's no such a thing as a single platform that could do everything that, full stop, for lots of reasons like innovation, you just can't cover all the use cases and so on. And so um when it comes to streaming, it it exists as what I think of as layer zero. So the highest fidelity of your data is every event coming in um and you storing those events for future retrieval.

But at an architectural level, it gives you two properties that are fundamental. Um perhaps the most important so that we focus on that is this idea of immutability. And so when you have this immutable log of events, like you know, if I were to buy a yellow t-shirt at Target, like "Alex entered the store at 7 PM. He went to..." I'm assuming you can track all of this, you know. "Then he went to uh the the male t-shirt aisle and he then picked the yellow t-shirt and like," right? You start to contextualize these events with timestamps. And that immutability allows you to reconstruct digitally these ideas of sessions. And so long story short, immutability is an architectural freedom um that allows you to build simpler systems. And so why would people use streaming in a in like a larger ecosystem is like immutability, simplicity, uh high performance, and as a way of integrating anything to everything, right? So if you store all of the events in its truest form, right, in its highest fidelity form, you can reconstruct the state, any state that you want. And so if you're an engineer and you're trying to build an application that today uses a Snowflake for retrieval and tomorrow it's going to use Elasticsearch for uh search and indexing and whatever, the next day you're going to use OpenAI or whatever, you can rehydrate the context, the true context, as opposed to, you know, having to do backfills or making up synthetic data or whatever it happens to be to get to the same end state. And so in in summary, it is because of immutability and it is because it is simpler to model the world. Um those I would say would be the strongest pillars of use in streaming in a larger architecture.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know a lot of companies try and build their organization and bring products to market and you sell to you know various industries. Your product specifically, when your sales team is out there selling, who are they selling to within the company? Is it the IT leaders? Is it the founders? Like who, who's their target?

Alex Gallego: Yeah. The change that I ultimately want to effect in the world and therefore like what my sales team is trained on is how do we help engineers? And what I call you know, the hackers, doers, and builders, because some of them don't have an engineering degree um but tend to be in the like, the R&D department, right. How do we help these people uh build like the best future that that that they can? When like when you're tasked with solving a problem or building the next set of applications, like how can Redpanda going to be the the set of technologies that helps you build up the the best? And so being multi-cloud is one of them, being easy to use on your laptop all that. So that tends to be the persona where the conversations get started.

The persona that tends to sign the check tends to be the CIO or the CTO of the smaller companies. Um and then you know there's obviously the whole uh gamut like then you have like procurement and all that. But what you sell to the engineer is different than what you sell to the executive buyer. What you sell to the engineer is the ability for them to build a better version of whatever they're building, right? Or like help them accelerate. It's about it's it's about giving them the tools uh for them to build uh and solve the problems they're trying to solve. What you're selling often to the executive um it's it's a it's a different set, right? You're building them like future-proofing of architecture or lots of other things like cost reduction. And so long story, my sales team has to be able to converse with both the technical audience and the executive buyer. You need to provide the executive buyer with the business case: like why should we do anything at all? And if we're going to do something, why is Redpanda the best, you know, um, solution in the space of possible solutions? And so it's they're just different conversations. And if you're a seller, you have to be able to have a conversation with both audiences.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it sounds like a real enterprise sale. I mean, I was at Oracle selling ERP and applications and to billion-dollar companies, and it's sometimes like selling to Congress. You got to get people that are interested, they're using the product, and then people that are going to spend, to make sure that they're aligned with what the costs are going to be. And ultimately, you know, there's a big decision that has to be made. But, um, I'm sure you guys are very good at complex sales because it sounds like, um, it can go either way. Probably can be very simple in some cases and a little bit more complex in others. Um, I want to switch gears about you. Um, as you've built this company now, you got a couple hundred employees. You've had some breakthroughs with technology. You've uh grown. You've raised a lot of money. For you personally, what's the breakthrough that you've had to go through or the evolution to to lead a company that's as big as it is? When you start with a handful of people or 10 or 20 or 30, it's different than when it's 200. Walk us through some of that.

Alex Gallego: For me um I think there was a... there were perhaps like always will be uh, because this is the first time that I've been part of a company that is as big or has had the influence that it has had. This is not like, Concord was small all things considered and we didn't have the visibility, the reach. There's like there are so many opportunities for personal growth uh to be honest. And like you know, as a side note, I really recommend uh personal coaches. I I think like coaching and advice is something that I'm not sure if people look down on it, but I don't know many early-on CEOs that that that they don't have coaches and it doesn't make any sense. I have I've had a coach and like uh going past multiple coaches. I think I'm on like what, four or or five now. But I digress.

When for me, it was this struggle of my the value of my self-worth was attached to the identity of being a builder and being able to produce things that worked. And when I stopped writing code there was almost this like emotional point um where I was like "Who am I? What is my identity?" And I went from being relatively competent at something or at least people thought I was competent and they used to pay me a lot of money for being competent at that, and to into being, you know, what feels like utterly incompetent like whatever it is that you, you know, because it's like of course I haven't run a marketing department um and of course I haven't run a finance department and of course I haven't run like a people organization and like I don't know like what does it mean to develop like real strong cultural pillars?

And so um, over time uh like problems feel right-sized. Like at the time they always feel hard. The analogy I like to give some friends when they're starting now is that like when you're a kid, and I have, the reason I use analogies is because I have three kids. And they're three, my my three-year-old just fell from a table uh anyways recently, and it was, it was like bad. It was the the worst thing that had happened to him uh, but I fell from a table so many times I was just like, "Hey, it's going to be okay like um you're going to be fine, here's water, here's some water, and like and like let me give you a hug and and you're going to be fine." And so um there is no shortcut for living through those moments yourself. You have to fall from the table sometimes uh to realize. And so long story, that transition continues to be both like an emotional and personal journey of me trying to be a better human, a better person. Um feeling motivated by the work that I do and feeling aligned that I still feel like a builder. Uh, and so, um, yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure I'm done. I think I'm still like very much in the middle of the of the journey, and I'm not sure it'll ever stop. But, um, it's it's like every stage is is so different. I...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, they say when you stop learning, you stop leading. And as a leader, you're there to really grow and evolve. I'm a huge proponent of having a coach. I have a coach myself and um it's really about a year and a half into it, and I think there's a lot of value that you know, sometimes others can see your blind spots that you don't see or they can understand you know something you're about to do because they've seen that before and just it's good to get a sounding board, a second opinion on things. And they might not have the answer, but sometimes you don't need them to have the answer. It's about just exploring and brainstorming, and then, "Oh, you know..." Business is 80% psychological and 20% mechanics. So if it's 80% in your head then you should be thinking a lot about "What are my limitations? Why are we not doing things? It's myself telling me my own story. But if I look at it differently maybe things open up." So I I'm I'm with you 100% when it comes to having outside guidance. I'd say probably most of the companies we've worked with and have been on the podcast have all had coaches. They don't all talk about it, but that's just the... it's an edge. It's an advantage if you have the right one.

Alex Gallego: And it doesn't have to be one. I mean, I think that sometimes we um, or I guess more in American culture um than than others, I don't know. There's some stigma and some other things associated with like coaching as like perhaps not not you know, being on on paper uh strong enough. But actually being vulnerable and being honest, and and like vulnerability is not like this manic way of approaching a conversation like you're not bawling on the phone. You're just saying like, "I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to be what, what be a better CEO, a better person like obviously, you know, how do I handle this?" But what's important in this is that most people really don't know. Even like, even like these people that are successful and have like launched multi-billion dollar companies, they're like, "I I don't know, this is like the hyper specific context that I do know." And so you're like, "Okay, well, if you don't know, who do I know?" They're like, "Talk to this like very specific marketing person that knows how to do PLG," or "Talk to this um like very specific revenue leader that like figured out this one thing." And so, uh, in general, having a network of coaches, it's it's super complementary. And and if anyone is attempting to build a company, it's, I don't know, it's maybe the the the only thing that that is as close as it's ever going to get to a shortcut. Uh, because otherwise it's just grind to to...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I hear you. Um, I have a couple more questions for you, but one I want to touch on is culture. What type of culture are you building at Redpanda?

Alex Gallego: Yeah, culture is really important to me um on many levels. One, there aren't uh many people that are CEOs that look like me uh that are, you know, also first-time uh I guess generation immigrants in the US. And um and so I've been on a bunch of podcasts to talk about culture for that reason. Um, and the culture that I'm building is the culture that I wish had existed at at places that I I've worked. And so I define it really at a high level as being a good human, winning as a team, and customer obsession. We are a for-profit company. And so like if customers aren't successful in production, we don't have the right to be a company. And so I want to start with that relationship because that is the fuel that allows me to fund other things about the company. If we are not successful financially, it doesn't matter. We have to first and foremost be a financial success um in order to have a long-lasting impact.

And the impact that we're trying to effect in the world is that of being how the future of applications get built. And so in order to do that, like the first cultural pillar for me is customer obsession. Like is this idea of trying to get our customers to be successful in production. That's, that's it. It isn't this old antiquated idea of like the customer is always right or whatever. Like this shorthand that that only encompasses a fraction of what of what it means for me. It's well defined as like, if you are successful in getting these use cases in production, like we have made you successful and we're both winning.

The other two are internal for the company. The other one is being a good human. And why do I say that? It's complementary to the interview process. My expectation is that the interview process is designed to suss out your technical aptitude. In other words, we shouldn't hire you if we do not think that you can be set up for success or if you cannot do the job. Like there's a bar and obviously for different levels of seniority it's higher or lower, but like you must be able to, or at least we have to have confidence in ourselves for both of you know you and and and us that you can do the job. Like the technical aptitude bar must must be met, and therefore what I get to focus on is like, assuming that the technical aptitude is met, are you a person that I want to work with for for a long time? It also, by the way, doesn't mean best friends, just means that you're like fundamentally a good human. We can talk about that more.

And then the last one was really crowdsourced. And so I set those two pillars, customer obsession and being a good human, with the caveat obviously of the interview uh process that I just uh uh explained. And the last one was that uh it, it was a... we had five by the way for a long time and no one remembered four and five. And so at some point two years ago I was like, "Well we only have three because if no one remembers them they don't exist." And so the "winning as a team" was crowdsourced uh during multiple, you know, all hands and and asynchronous work. We're a remote company where we felt really that in order to stop playing kitty soccer and to play professional football, um the professional soccer as we call it in in the US, um you have to be able to trust your team. Uh, and so like you have to have confidence for you, not for me because I'm not going to ask you, but really for you, for the person who's doing the job, that you're going to be able to pump the ball from defense into the other side of the field and someone is going to be there to receive it and score. And it's just like that muscle memory and that, that trust. Um, it's really hard and I think you work on it every day. And um anyways, that's the culture that we try to, that's that's who we want to be as a company and you write it down because it isn't a thing that uh, you know, it's not the paper that matters, but you write it there to give people tools, mental tooling as like, "Hey, you're not acting in accordance with who we want to be." Two, we we write it so that we know who we want to be when we grow up. Um and and three, because it's just like, it's such hard work that like you know you don't achieve culture. It's like, it's like yoga or meditation or exercise. You like, you show up and you practice it every day and you try to be a better person every day.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. I I like uh the three points of kind of making it simple to remember what your culture, how you're building it and easy to remember for the people that are in the company. Um you know when we look at culture, um we know it's such an advantage if you do it right. But starting with building a product that your customer will love, really, if you get that right everything else can kind of go from there if you if you want to scale. And so to create a raving fan, someone who's going to talk about your product and talk to someone else about your product, I think you start to really build some a great foundation. Um but it is all about the people in the company. Technology is one aspect of the company, but the people behind it make it grow and run.

And you know, we did um, we did some research on culture as well. And there's um a book called The Culture Code uh which is actually phenomenal. It talks about the Navy Seals and about how they create a great culture and how they're, after every mission as an example that they're going across enemy lines or whatnot, um they come back and they do a huddle and they ask three questions and it's from the leader to all the people on the team. And the question is: "What did we do right on that mission?" and they go around the circle. The second question is, "What did we do wrong?" and they go around the circle. And the third question is, "What could we do better?" And they do that on every mission. And what it does is it actually makes everyone more open and vulnerable about what worked and what didn't work from the leader down and from the bottom up. It also creates a better sense of belonging and connection. And so that can be applied to any company, any group within a company, any team. But when you show that type of conversation, you get better as a company, but you also get tighter as a team. And so we thought that was really interesting and we've seen that apply to a lot of companies and it's, it's worked out pretty well. Sounds like you're right in line with having a really good culture and the foundation's there. Um, and and hopefully somebody um will hear your story and and pull something out of that too. I think it's, that's a really good place to...

Alex Gallego: What I find about your comment on like, you know, being vulnerable and talking about the things that that didn't work is that that's where trust is built. Right. It's hard to like, you know, like everyone knows if, if you if you like um ask a a a person at a team like, "Who would you enthusiastically hire to work?" And that's like a fun exercise that that you could do with with people. I mean in in different contexts, but in in the context of work like, "If you go to another company, who would you enthusiastically rehire?" People, that gives you a bar for like, those are the people that are the needle movers. And it's often, by the way, a small percentage of [the] team. And so it it could have, it could be because they happen to have the skills or whatever, but like in order for the team to function well, you need these high performers to be backed and supported by other team uh members. And the only way to do it is just like being honest about the things that you don't know. Like it's it's it's like everyone knows who knows. And like when people pretend that they know, it's just like it's you know, you sort of like putting like, "Okay, whatever. just you know you sort of tend to ignore ignore them and whatever and you start to break the trust." And so anyways, I I I share that because it's uh, it's so hard like it's so easy to understand and it's actually so difficult to implement in practice, um, but I'm a big fan of this like we, anyways, I could talk about culture for a long time but this idea of like explicit feedback and making feedback part of the cultural process so that um you're not giving people this sandwich style feedback where you talk about something like dumb and positive. You give them the feedback that you really want to tell them and then you close with like, "oh you you know, but on this one thing that is dumb and doesn't move the needle you did great." You're like "Well, let's just sit with the uncomfortable feedback and I'm going to do it in a way that's empathetic but I'm going to be firm about the way that I'm sharing this." Like, we we we we dropped the ball. Like you know, we said we're going to follow up with this uh customer and and like we didn't. And so let's talk about the ways that we can improve that, right? But you aren't trying to get the person. You're like objectively trying to focus on the only thing that matters, which is like the customer success. And so um anyways, we can... culture is is sort of like this, this rich uh uh context that we could spend hours chatting about.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, I'll just add one more um point to that. I think that's really one of the harder things to do as a leader is confront the issues sometimes and be combative in a scenario where you know that something didn't go right and you want to try and understand it and solve it but not offend anybody. Um, so sometimes you just hear the, "You know, I just had to tell them how it is because that's what it was. And, you know, whether they like it or not, I'm being straight up and honest." And that's a brutal response and you create a brutal culture in that communication. We think a better way is positive. You're kind of shooting for what happened and ho, how did it go down and how can we make it better in a way that's... you're... you're empathetic to the situation, but you know it was still wrong, but you're not making them feel like they are going to be afraid to talk or even do things again in the way that they could be if if it was communicated differently. So I think there's a fine line there of of the communication and the culture of when things are not right and how to confront it. But you know, if you want to build a brutal culture that's how you do it. If you want to be more I think healthy you just aim for you know, positive candor and I think you get the same result.

Alex Gallego: And I well, one one thing that I think um I didn't say that that I feel is important is the bi-directionality of feedback. Um and writing things down. So anyways, I'm a big fan of of like we're a remote culture. So we, everyone in my leadership has a 1:1 template and I say that bi-directional feedback is so critical because if it is one direction, if it's just from you to the people that happen to be reporting to you at this specific point in time, they're going to tune you out. They're like, "Uh, whatever. Like it's my 1:1 with my manager. He kind of doesn't really know what I do. Uh, I don't know if he really understands what we're building, what the company's about. Like why is he, why does he care about this dumb thing right?" And so that is really like obviously a breach of trust and like lack of trust. "I don't trust this person to be to be the right leader for me." And the only way to bridge the the trust I feel that is if you give people a space to give you feedback. Like you, it it is impossible for anyone, at least I've never worked with a person that happens to be like perfect. Um and the um, the the way to get better because you're not perfect is to hear feedback with hyp- hyper specific situations, like a customer call or a prospect call or a product launch or whatever, right? And so you you're talking about these meaningful things that move the needle for the business and you're like, "You know, Alex, you wrote that vision, but like you launched it with two typos and like that was off-putting to this particular customer." I'm sort of trying to make up examples on the fly. But when you make it the norm to give you feedback uh on both ways, then it sort of demystifies this whole idea of giving feedback every quarter, every month, every six months. It's just like, it should be a constant because we're only trying to get better. There's only one outcome that matters and that is the customer being successful in production for our, for our case. And so if you like, it is still you, the person that that like you know, didn't perform uh either like you know the manager or or or the person that that is reporting to the manager, like someone still did drop the ball. But you're talking through what was missed as a function of trying to make the customer better. So you're not saying like "hey like uh whatever" you're like "well we we can't effect this customer from going to production because we like you know we whatever, we didn't follow up the production checklist and so when they had an outage we didn't have metrics. Like what do you think would be a system that we can put in place so that we know a customer has production metrics or something like that, right? Like if you if you if you set the goal clearly as the customer outcome, then a lot of what would be this identity, PT level feedback with like, it's not about you the person being poor as a human. It's just like whatever, like you missed it because you were busy. There's like so many good reasons for missing uh uh not doing something rather. Um and you may have a, you're like "I know this and I took this risk because this other thing was a higher priority" or whatever. But you have to have this bi-directionality in the feedback, otherwise people tune you out.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I agree 100%. That's well said. You know, as we wrap up here, if you look into 2025, what are you excited about for Redpanda?

Alex Gallego: I think what we are seeing is our ability to partner with some of the largest uh AI companies. It feels exciting to me to be part of how the future is being developed right now. Um it feels cool to be part of the cutting edge. It feels like um and so it just like we we happen, I think this is a little bit of luck here where we happen to build a technology that is core to these mission-critical systems and the way that these engineers are solving the problems is with a technology like Redpanda. I think that happened to be like market timing technology. Maybe not a good point to be used for for these use cases, but it's still fun as a CEO to be part of the next wave of how the future is being built. And so I find it fun. Um, I am just trying to continue to focus on the things that uh you know, I actually think doing less is is is a hard thing. So I want to in many ways I want to do less uh so we could do more.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah I hear you. Well that's great. Well Alex, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story. Um as you look to grow, I don't know if there's any specific roles that you're trying to fill right now. Happy to give you some time to share. If there's anything in particular you're looking for, you can share it now or we can just add it in the in the in the details of the episode. But, um, I'll kind of just stop there and see if you want to share anything about roles you're looking to hire.

Alex Gallego: Uh, no, we're going through uh financial planning right now, so I don't know exactly the results. We'll actually we'll pause it here, try to figure out it's like what's the budget envelope for next year and who, you know, how do we get there? Um, so I don't know today, but I will. So, I'll send you, I'll just send it to you offline. Uh yeah, like once once like the roads open up uh later next month or so.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Perfect. Great. Well, if anyone wants to find Redpanda, Alex, where do they go?

Alex Gallego: Um super easy to be found on Twitter. My Twitter handle is emacog. If you want to learn more about... wow... Redpanda, go to redpanda.com. Last, if you want to learn specifically about like real-time AI and this, our idea of sovereign AI all that, go to ai.redpanda.com. Those are the three easiest ways to get in touch with us.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate your time and for all the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me that you spent your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

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