AD ASTRA 🚀🌌

I found my way home and am over the moon to have have accepted my new mission by joining Team Astra at DataStax 👨🏻‍🚀

Week 1 ✅

So, why did I join❓

Well, let’s rewind to just over a decade ago ⏪

That’s when I managed to get my break into tech 🐣

With a company called Apigee, that we pushed to IPO and a Google acquisition 🚀

I learned so much and we had lots of fun in that chapter 😊

Clearly remember meeting CEO, Chet Kapoor (now CEO of DataStax), in Palo Alto and was captivated by his leadership style, the team and how everyone rallied around the mission to shape the API economy 🌅

At DS there's also a phenomenal culture with strong and resonating values etched in the DNA & practiced daily:

✅ Obsess over developers and enterprises
✅ Be an owner
✅ Execute thoughtfully with speed
✅ Cultivate diversity and inclusion

Testament to it are the 6 recent Comparably awards inc. best company outlook, best engineering and best sales team as well as the recent selection in D.A. Davidson Companies The Herd (top 100 private companies) 🥰

Next up: #TeamStax

Besides the many awesome ex-Apigeeks I worked with who are now DataStaxers, I have met many new ones too 🙌🏼

Everyone is smart, driven, fun, caring and all have a strong sense of togetherness and relentless focus on the shared mission 💜

Essential for mastering the art of the “no-look pass” and how magic is made 🪄

Anything remarkable always takes a tribe and this tribe has IT going on 🤩

Let’s talk: #Product

DataStax is the company behind the open-source Apache Cassandra, used by familiar names like Uber, Apple, Meta, Netflix, Cisco, Orange, ING & many others 🤩

Any brand that needs performant, highly available and highly scalable real-time data processing to build and power their applications 🦾

As open-source, we channel the innovation of an impressive community, not just a company 🌍

Over the past several years, smart guys and gals have been moving all that traditionally on-premise, often complex, magic to the cloud and a few new stars have been born:

✅ Astra DB: the leading NoSQL Cassandra DBaaS that allows enterprise to get to market faster at less than 50% of the cost
✅ Astra Streaming: Built on Apache Pulsar, is a streaming and messaging platform which enables customer behaviours and actions to be visible to all applications
✅ Stargate: An API layer that lets developers build with the freedom of choice by focussing on building apps for the future with the APIs they love

Astra’s ARR has grown by 150% YOY and contributed to the 60%+ of company growth 📈

Finally: #Mission

Data is at the heart of any cloud, digital and AI strategy ☁️

Empowering organisations to use data to drive innovation and growth is paramount 🔥

Our mission is to serve real-time applications with an open data stack that just works ✨

And with the recent addition of Kaskada we now have a mandate to make real-time #AI possible for everyone 🤖

Excited to be onboard is an understatement 😁

Ad Astra 🚀