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Matt Pfeil
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What would you say are the key milestones that you have accomplished, based on almost four years of being in business? Matt Pfeil: From my perspective, I think that open source as a business is really hard because you create something as an open source project that you don’t own. You throw up
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what happened with that money? What were the Series B milestones? What were you able to accomplish? How did the product come together? Jonathan Ellis: When we were pitching Series B, we had the blueprint of what we wanted to build for DataStax Enterprise. We knew that we wanted
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the business model from that time? What were you charging? What were the deal sizes and so forth? Jonathan Ellis: When we were first starting the company, we had a potential $80,000 deal. I told Matt, “You know if we can get a few deals like this, we might
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to the pitch to Lightspeed based on which you raised your Series A. How did you evolve from there? How did you build the business? Matt Pfeil: We built out an engineering team for both the core open source project as well as continued to evolve OpsCenter. For practical purposes,
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Had you already moved to Silicon Valley before raising the money? This is another key question that a lot of entrepreneurs are wrestling with and making decisions on. Jonathan Ellis: Yes. It actually wasn’t an explicit condition of the funding and we actually took another 3 months or so before moving the headquarters.
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: I am going to probe you on a couple of different points. Did you start DataStax while you were still inside of Rackspace? Jonathan Ellis: No. We were working on Cassandra at Rackspace but we started DataStax, originally called Riptano, after leaving Rackspace. Sramana Mitra: So, by the time you left Rackspace and
Building an Open Source Software Company Around Cassandra, Seed-Funded by RackSpace: Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, Founders of DataStax (Part 1)
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. This is an interesting story of how an open source software company built around Cassandra was incubated by RackSpace and has grown to $5 million in revenue. Founded by engineers Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, the interview traces not only the successes of their journey but
