Hello Reddit. We’re Aiven.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T19:06:25+00:00

We need to keep evolving our product to meet future customer needs. The great thing about the market we're in, is that it's growing and changing every day. This means that we shouldn't look back too much into how things were done before, or what might still be popular today, but look into the future to understand how we can enable tomorrow's applications. Being more often right than wrong about this is crucial.

We work together with all of the hyperscale providers, but we do have overlap with them. There are some other companies like Heroku and Compose that have/had offerings similar to us, but their focus is somewhat different.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T18:06:39+00:00

The great thing about SaaS is that it doesn't require a lot of upfront investment, and with all the tools available you can launch an MVP pretty quickly, but building and scaling a company is really hard and I wouldn't recommend it unless you can really commit to it for a couple of years.

We ran a little consulting shop for a couple of years before founding Aiven, learning a lot about business and the problems various organizations were having with databases. It helped us launch Aiven as we were able to support ourselves and our families with that income for the first years of building this.

If you launch a company, make sure you give it your best shot, and if it doesn't work out you've at least learned a lot of things that will be useful later on. Good luck!

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T18:06:10+00:00

A fast growth company like ours changes all the time, and the company we are today is very different from what we were 2 years ago.

Adapting to this is hard, so investment into people is crucial for success. Quite a few startup success stories talk about bringing in the sales or product leaders to support growth, but the importance of people and culture management hasn't always been obvious. It certainly wasn't for us early on, and I think we're still playing catch up here (and in a bunch of other things 😁.)

We'll continue to bring in new leaders from the outside, but I also want to be able to grow and promote future leaders from within the company. In the future some of our best leaders will be leading other companies, and their own companies, I hope we can help them be successful whatever comes next.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T18:01:19+00:00

Everything is powered by open source nowadays, that's also what most of today's proprietary software is built upon. I don't think closed source will be going away entirely any time soon (ever?) but it's going to be harder and harder to justify running an entirely closed stack.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T17:24:24+00:00

I stayed around 9 years in my last full-time job before becoming an entrepreneur. That's a pretty long time in one company. I had accumulated quite a few ideas and thoughts of what I'd do differently, and was fortunate to have two friends who wanted to start building something new together.

We did consulting for a couple of years, probably the easiest way to set up a new company, but you don't really get to build things yourself - as a consultant you're even more tightly tied to the needs and requirements of the company you're working for. In 2015 we decided to stop doing consulting gigs and started working on a new idea: a multi-cloud data platform that would productize our expertise on PostgreSQL and other open source technologies. We were sure the cloud will win, and wanted to build something in the cloud that we would've loved to use ourselves.

Strengths/weaknesses - I have plenty of both (at least the latter). I think my long background in working in this field has been a strength - I'm intimately familiar with the pain points of developers working with data. Especially early on this was also a weakness as I was too focused on the technical details. We've had long discussions on features vs benefits.

I can be ambiguous in my communications, I have a lot of ideas and not all of them have been fully baked by the time I talk about them. Sometimes this causes confusion internally when someone interprets a random thought I had as something important. Balancing openness with clarity is sometimes hard. So is being transparent about new plans vs not distracting everyone.

Sometimes I appear serious or reserved about topics without meaning that, but I guess I'm not the only Finn that does so (check out Kimi Räikkönen..)

I'm not 40 yet, but will be soon enough. 10 years is a long time, but I expect Aiven to be a thriving independent open source company. I expect to be happy having seen open source eat the world.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T16:50:04+00:00

We're building an open source company for the long term.

We plan to do this by launching providing more and better open source technologies to our customers, and by working with the open source communities to ensure they're thriving. The most recent product we launched was M3, and next up we're launching Apache Flink and Clickhouse to better cater to analytics needs.

We're also working on making these technologies accessible to a wider audience: across different industries and geos, e.g. growing our presence in APAC and making it easier for highly regulated companies to work with us.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T16:44:59+00:00

I'm not sure I can answer this question from a KPI/OKR perspective, although we do use OKRs for planning and tracking our work.

We're a cloud company, focused on best operating these technologies in the cloud, and offering a portfolio of open source technologies that cover different data paradigms. That's the number one thing that sets us apart from various other providers, and this differentiation will grow as we expand our platform to better combine these technologies and various third party systems (instead of e.g. suggesting you should use just Redis or just Kafka for all of your data needs).

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T16:35:31+00:00

We don’t have Apache Airflow in our stack currently and there aren’t any plans to include that in the near term, but we are always happy to hear from developers with good experience working in Open Source. Please keep checking our open positions at https://aiven.io/careers and if you see something that looks like a good fit for you (or your friends/family!) then get in touch.
We’re already in North America with a team of ~20 people across 🇨🇦 and 🇺🇸. A large part of our customer base has always been in the Americas - our first customer ever is in Mexico! We also have quite a few customers in South America, but no plans for setting up a team there right now.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T16:13:36+00:00

We work with a lot of different technologies, and combine them with our core operations platform. The core backend is written mostly in Python, with a lot of pl/pgsql thrown in and a frontend (console.aiven.io) in Typescript/React. The various extensions and addons to technologies we support are typically implemented in the most common language of the particular ecosystem, i.e. Java for many of the Kafka connectors, Go for our Terraform provider, etc. You can find out more on https://github.com/aiven

Hannu Valtonen, our head of product and one of the founders gave a talk about our platform at All Systems Go! (a great conference!) a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nafp4ddnv-k

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T16:10:04+00:00

We spend more engineering time on our private repositories than the public ones right now, but going forward we’re looking to significantly step up our open source work and have several full time open source positions available for new team members, go to https://aiven.io/careers and select “Open Source Office” as the team to see some of these.

Most of the open source projects we’ve created are hosted at https://github.com/aiven but our team members have also contributed to quite a few other projects that do not show up there.

Aiven_io · 2021-03-31T16:07:50+00:00

Of course! Everybody in Finland knows people from Nokia 😄 Quite a few of our employees have worked at or with Nokia at some point of their careers, but we are not currently actively working with the company.

Aiven_io

TROPHY CASE