Dean Guida, CEO and Founder at Infragistics, has a real passion for the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of software development. He has built a company celebrating these values and shared his story with me in 2021. Sramana Mitra: We will start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born
Sramana Mitra: What you described is reasonably accurate as far as my observation is concerned. The pure infrastructure layer is overcrowded and overfunded. The opportunity is in the domain knowledge and knowing what heuristics can move the needle on top of that horizontal infrastructure. Todd Goldman: What you want to do is combine knowledge of
Sramana Mitra: If you were to present the industry layers of infrastructure that are going into making that transition from analyzing samples to analyzing actual data, what does that landscape look like? Todd Goldman: There is the raw data warehouse, which today is evolving to be the Hadoop layer. I don’t think the legacy appliances
Sramana Mitra: Are there any other verticals? Todd Goldman: Telecommunications is another one. This is a never-ending topic. When I started my career in HP years ago in network management, I sold to the telecom market, and they were trying to solve the problem of churn.
Sramana Mitra: I would like to take three of your customers where this is happening. Let’s talk through three use cases and customer scenarios. Todd Goldman: There are two major scenarios that we are seeing of how people are using Hadoop. One is that over time, companies have bought traditional data warehouse appliances. They have
Todd Goldman is the vice president and general manager for enterprise data integration at Informatica, a company that provides data integration software and services based on big data analytics. Todd holds a BSEE in engineering from Northwestern University and an MBA in Business from Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management, having worked for IBM,
SM: I often tell entrepreneurs to bootstrap the early stage, and if they do raise money it should result in a better valuation. They have a validated business. Did you find that to be the case during your valuation negotiations? CC: We are a great example of bootstrapping paying off. In Q3 2004 we raised
SM: How did you find your initial customers? CC: We used things like cold calls, Silicon Valley networking, and friends of friends. When you’re starting from nothing, you do whatever it takes. I was talking to anyone who would listen. I networked heavily, got friends to send me ideas, and went to alumni databases.