What happened in 2019?
2019 was a big year for Starburst. Today we shared some of our major accomplishments:
- 6X customer & revenue growth. This puts Starburst on par with the growth trajectory of some of the most successful software businesses in history.
- We raised one of the largest Series A investment rounds in the northeast, at one of the highest valuations. In November we closed a $22M Series A led by Index Ventures. We’re lucky to add Mike Volpi to our board; Arguably no one has had more success scaling open source businesses as he’s been a critical part of the Elastic, Hortonworks, and Confluent journeys. Read more to hear Mike’s perspective on the opportunity for Starburst.
- We were profitable. This is another rarity for a company at such an early stage but I’m very proud to say Starburst was again profitable in its second year of operation.
- Our founding team grew by three. While the original Starburst founding team had already made a name for itself as the leading developers behind the Presto project, we felt like we were missing something. Or, more precisely, we were missing three of our best friends – Martin, Dain, and David, the original creators of the project at Facebook. “MD2″, as I like to call them, joined our founding team in 2019 and remain committed to open source Presto and building the community we are so proud of.
- We completed three major software releases including Starburst Mission Control which simplifies the management of Presto clusters, Kubernetes support for Presto, high availability for Presto clusters, and high performance Teradata, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and IBM DB2 connectors. An additional product highlight was enabling statistics for the Starburst cost-based optimizer for Oracle, DB2, Teradata, PostgreSQL, and other data sources, delivering even faster performance.
- We developed exciting partnerships with the largest cloud platforms including making Starburst Enterprise available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, and for direct purchase via the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Starbursts’ support of Kubernetes is enabling usage of Presto on Google Kubernetes Engine, Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.
- We grew the Starburst team by 230%. Key leadership hires include Jordan Ostroff as the Vice President of Sales, who formerly led sales at Rubrik, Jess Iandiorio as the Chief Marketing Officer, who formerly led marketing at Mirakl and product marketing at Acquia; and Jason van Zyl, the creator of the Apache Maven Project. Every member of the team poured their heart and soul into this and I’m deeply grateful to be part of this crew.
What I’m excited for in 2020
While we’ve already accomplished a lot, it’s still just the beginning.
I’m excited to continue building a team of all-stars: Engineers, customer success, sales, and marketing pros who are playing at the top of their game. We’re pursuing success in a unique way – with the audacious goal of becoming the first company to a $1B valuation while taking on the least amount of venture capital – preserving the opportunity for our team to share in the rewards of our success.
If you’re an all-star and align with our values (Authenticity, Grit, Humility, Ownership, and are willing to earn rewards through Meritocracy), check out our open roles here.
Onward and upward!
– Justin
