Sramana Mitra: When you raised the $35 million, how many customers did you have? Eric Frenkiel: I don’t recall the exact numbers, but it was around a dozen customers at that point. Sramana Mitra: Were these large companies? What kind of customers are we talking? Eric Frenkiel: They were all logos that anyone would recognize. One of the
Sramana Mitra: How did they find out about you? Eric Frenkiel: We were introduced to investor networks. There were investors who knew the startup needed a really strong database product. They put us in touch. We gave them a demo and they knew that was going to help them develop fast. That was our first
Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy? Eric Frenkiel: We started the company with zero code. Since we had that ability to focus on what we wanted to build into the product, we’ve been able to build enterprise-grade features into MemSQL in a very short period of time. Our hurried go-to market strategy is
Sramana Mitra: What is the rationale behind relational database at this point? Eric Frenkiel: That’s a great question. In fact, it’s one of the first questions our investors asked us, “Why are you building a relational database? The entire world is going to NoSQL.” We had a very contrarian view at that time, which was that
Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Facebook? Eric Frenkiel: Not very long, it was for 10 months in total. It was an amazing opportunity. We ultimately left Facebook because we had a bigger opportunity that we wanted to build. That was MemSQL. We joined in 2010 and left in early 2011. That was a
Eric and his co-founder Nikita left Facebook to join YCombinator to develop their idea for MemSQL. The company has blossomed into a robust enterprise software business with a solid customer base. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind