In this high-tech, high-stakes world, you need to be ready for anything. Karthik Rau (LinkedIn | Twitter) has built a company that is based on that entire idea. SignalFX is a monitoring solution for cloud applications and infrastructure, built by the team that designed and scaled the internal monitoring service at Facebook. SignalFx addresses a large gap in today’s monitoring landscape that’s not addressed by APM or logging vendors – the ability to quickly alert service-wide issues and trends, versus host-specific errors, by aggregating metrics across distributed services quickly, efficiently, and with powerful analytics to identify outliers and trends. In layman’s terms, it means SignalFX is on stand-by for when things go wrong. “We’re a cloud monitoring solution, built for developers of modern distributed applications.”
Recently, Karthik – Co-Founder and CEO of SignalFX, and Tom, his Chief Marketing Officer, sat down with Mission’s Chad Grills and Ian Faison to talk about tech, business, and how their company is helping clients seamlessly blend the two.
Be ready to learn something at every step of the journey.
The road to SignalFX was long, though Karthik has always loved tech and knew he would probably wind up somewhere in that field. “I went to college here in the Bay Area at Stanford during the dot com craze, so it was hard not to be infected by the enthusiasm and the energy here. I ended up joining Silicon Valley full-time at a company called LoudCloud back in 2000. I knew some people who had joined the company – and it was co-founded by Mark Andreessen who is still is legendary in the valley for what he’s done. I got a front row seat on the dot com bus. I think I joined the company just at the very pinnacle of the dot com boom in March of 2000. That was quite an experience. I’ve been here, in Silicon Valley, for twenty years now.” Every experience took Karthik a step closer to his current position, and he learned a lot on every part of his journey. “I can speak to my experience at LoudCloud. I interviewed with them in January of 2000, and at that time the company was about fifty people. By the time I joined in March of 2000, there were about one-hundred and twenty-five people, and six months later it was almost six-hundred people. In a span of a year, they grew the team to about six-hundred people. Now, not every company was growing at that clip, but it was fairly representative of what was going on in the dot com days.”
Think of the “when” not the “if”. “For us the question was always when will this happen, not if. Would it happen in a couple of years after we start the company? In which case, we just wouldn’t have had enough time to build out the product in distribution to take advantage of it. Would it take ten years? Then we’d starve as a young company. The Goldilocks zone for us was – if the market really starts to take off and have real momentum in four to six years, that would be perfect. That’s how it unfolded.”
“We started the company officially in early 2013, and we started to see real momentum towards cloud in 2015, 2016. Now, it’s inevitable: everyone is moving to cloud and moving to these newer architectures. The timing has been really great.”
If you’re aiming to be the CEO, get ready to wear a lot of hats.
When asked about his leadership style, Karthik was very clear that his approach is one of many – and has many different moving parts. “There’s no one size fits all – every leader is unique. Every company is unique – and it just depends on the individuals and the circumstances. I think there’s a different kind of grit, background, and mentality needed when you’re getting something started from zero. You really have to formulate the market. It’s a different kind of mentality. It’s very helpful to have a technical background, especially in emerging technologies – to be able to navigate the landscape and set some clear strategy for the team, the product team, and the engineering team. Then, as you start to grow and when you feel like you’ve got the right product for the market, then a lot of the challenges start to become distribution. How do you go to market? Where are the right kinds of partnerships you want to create? Are you a bottoms up kinds of a sales motion? Are you more of an “enterprise-y” sales motion in B2B types of businesses like ours? Then a lot of those start to become more go to market related, but they’re both equal. At least in the early stages, you have to have a handle on both very, very, very closely.”
To get more from Karthik, check out the full interview here.
