DataStax and the Startup Mentality with Jonathan Ellis

The Business of Open Source

Jonathan Ellis, CTO and co-founder of DataStax, has always had a startup mindset. In this episode, Jonathan joins me to discuss his journey and entrepreneurial roadmap thus far.

In our conversation, Jonathan shares how he became involved with the Apache Cassandra project and his transition to founding DataStax. He also shares insight on the importance of hiring a go to market team, why hiring executives proves to be more challenging than engineers, building a company based around an open-source project, and more.

Highlights:

• Jonathan’s views on his identity as a founder and scratching his coding itch through art. (00:23)
• A look at Jonathan’s journey from Mozy to the Apache Cassandra project. (05:40)
• The history of DataStax - and Jonathan explores the benefits of building a company around open source. (11:33)
• Lessons learned: the importance of implementing a go-to-market team, DataStax Kubernetes adoption, and why hiring executives is a challenge. (15:58)
• Jonathan’s advice to technical founders - and his perspective and insight on remote work. (27:39)

Links:

Jonathan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbellis/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/spyced

DataSTax: https://www.datastax.com/