In this episode, we sat down with Aaron Katz, the CEO of ClickHouse, a company that went from an open-source analytical database into a highly successful cloud service, utilized by Spotify, Netflix, Disney, and many more. Aaron Katz provides intriguing insights into the challenges of transitioning an open-source project into a thriving business, ClickHouse's go-to-market strategy, the role of technical support in pre-sales, and the strategic decision to avoid traditional SDR and CSM roles. CLICKHOUSE Website - https://clickhouse.com/ Twitter - https://x.com/clickhousedb Aaron Katz LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094 Twitter - https://x.com/ceo_clickhouse FIRSTMARK Website - https://firstmark.com Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap Matt Turck (Managing Director) LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck (00:00) Intro(00:56) What is ClickHouse?(04:28) What are the use cases for ClickHouse?(06:17) Reducing the latency: why the world shifts to real-time(09:05) How did ClickHouse evolve from an open-source to a cloud product?(15:01) "Open source is the future of software"(17:27) Self-hosted deployments(18:45) ClickHouse's roadmap(20:51) Is there a real-time data stack?(22:25) ClickHouse partners in data ingestion(24:32) Who are ClickHouse's main competitors?(27:35) ClickHouse's sales process(36:44) Is partnerships a good go-to-market strategy?(37:44) When is the right time for startups to start partnering?(38:22) Aaron's story of becoming the CEO(43:50) Team and culture when working on two continents(46:15) What's next?