Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ashish Sharma, Principal at Axtria (Part 1)

Ashish focuses on Big Data in Life Sciences.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Axtria.

Ashish Sharma: Thanks for the opportunity. Axtria is a global Big Data analytics company. Our main focus is around the life sciences and financial services industries. In those two focus areas, we empower them to optimize their business strategies or their investments by optimizing their investment around both Big Data and advanced analytics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Rich Green, Chief Product Officer of SugarCRM (Part 1)

There is a lot of buzz in the CRM space on how AI will augment the effectiveness of sales people. This interview is a comprehensive deep dive into the issues driving the problem, both promises and challenges.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself and to SugarCRM, especially to what’s been happening in the past couple of years.

Rich Green: I’ve been at the company for about a year. I’m the Chief Product Officer. I came from an Internet of Things company where we had energy monitoring devices with cloud controlling systems. Before that, I was the Chief Technology Officer for Nokia in charge of all the >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Obviously, there is the keyword analysis capabilities that Google offers that is relatively public. Are you talking about data that is more granular than that? Are you talking about actually following your user through their Google search patterns that are related to Dove? If so, where do you get that data from? Who has that data and why is that okay to give that data to anybody?

Deren Baker: We are talking about the ability to trace that entire consumer segment behavior. >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: For your core business, you go seek out customers in a direct selling model. The open-source conversion is not your core business?

Hiro Yoshikawa: Correct. This is one of the interesting challenges that we are facing right now. Some investors called us open-source business 2.0. Historically, the open-source commercialization companies have a very typical freemium model. This is not our model. Our idea is to focus on developing the open source technologies, distribute to open-source communities, and then acquire users. >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise money in 2012 and how much?

Hiro Yoshikawa: We raised an additional $1.8 million of seed extension round in 2012 led by Jerry Yang and Dan Scheinman. We ended up raising the very first venture capital round in July of 2013 led by Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I know him.

Hiro Yoshikawa: Tim is an awesome venture capitalist.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you say you raised from Sierra? >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Give me an example of your first customer who understood your vision and signed up. What was the process of getting to your first customer?

Hiro Yoshikawa: We started the company operations in December 2011. We launched the initial product in September of 2012.

Sramana Mitra: You raised venture capital before all this?

Hiro Yoshikawa: Bill and Morio led the first million dollar round in late 2011. We started developing our initial beta product focusing on the open source data collection technologies and also the back-end database and the data warehouse to enable the collective data to get stored and analyzed. We started >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You already started thinking about doing something of your own?

Hiro Yoshikawa: He influenced me to start thinking about it. I have to say that until I met him, I didn’t really have any clear idea about starting my own company. He was the influencer. We had joint trips together. When I took him to Japan, I was introduced to the community leader of Hadoop. His name is Kazuki Ohta. Everyone calls him Kaz.

He ended up becoming my co-founder. Kaz and I have a very good chemistry even though both of us are in the very same space. He was more like a community leader. My background was more in business. In the last three years, I did a lot of venture investments. I started spending a lot of time with him and learned a lot about real-world Hadoop use cases. Kaz was involved in many early stage Hadoop implementation projects. He was clearly very sharp and entrepreneurial. He started coming to my house in Silicon Valley. >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: As an anecdote, I was at MIT in the mid 90’s. Richard Stallman was there. He was one of the first advocates of open source. This was 10 years before the timeframe that you’re talking about.

Hiro Yoshikawa: That’s true. I could likely become the firsthand witness that Linux took to mainstream. 15 years later, nobody questions Linux or open source.The situation was very different when I started at RedHat. After those exciting years at RedHat, I was hired by a corporate venture capital firm called Mitsui.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get into their venture capital group? How did this connection happen?

Hiro Yoshikawa: One of the former GM of Asia at RedHat joined a Silicon Valley company where Mitsui invested. I remained very friendly with him. I visited >>>