Founder Real Talk GGV Capital

Idan Tendler is the Senior Vice President of Application Security at Palo Alto Networks, as well as the chairman and co-founder of Place-IL, a nonprofit tech initiative. Idan discusses his previous cybersecurity analytics startup, Fortscale (later acquired by RSA Security), and some key lessons he learned from his experience building the company. Before Fortscale, Idan founded Bridgecrew, a company that helps developers better secure their cloud environment. With the goal of to making developers love security—a seemingly impossible task—Bridgecrew built an open-source product called Checkov, which allowed the company to get millions of developers to use their product. Today, Idan is also busy building Place-IL, a non-profit initiative that helps connect immigrants to Israel with job opportunities in the country's tech industry.

Rich Waldron is the CEO and co-founder of Tray.io, a company he founded with his two best friends. This is the second time we're talking to Rich on Founder Real Talk, make sure to check out his episode from 2019! Software has been around for a long time, and in many different forms. On the waves of cloud adoption and digital transformation, it's more important than ever for companies to make technology accessible to their employees. Tray.io users in any department can use its automation platform to transform fragmented processes into powerful business outcomes. Rich talks about Tray's latest $40 million Series C extension, product and growth plans, and more.

Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree, created a solution to a database problem with his co-worker and eventual co-founder Xiang Fu while working at LinkedIn. At the time, LinkedIn was debuting its now-popular feature called Who's Viewed Your Profile, which required the ability to slice and dice massive amounts of data in real time. Kishore and Xiang developed what they called Apache Pinot, a real-time distributed analytical processing data store used to deliver scalable real-time analytics with very low latency.
The pair went on to found their open source company, StarTree, in 2019 to build a commercial version of Apache Pinot. The analytics provided by its technology are increasingly essential for all kinds of business decision makers, and the company's quickly emerged as a leader in serving up real-time user-facing analytics at very low latency—for millions. In this episode, Kishore talks about the solutions StarTree provides, its key relationship with the developer community and the roadmap for the company, which just announced a $47 million series B led by GGV, with participation from investor existing investors, Bain and CRV as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures.

Sid Sijbrandij is the CEO of GitLab Inc., the one DevOps platform that allows teams to collaborate, create, and deliver software in a single application. Before founding GitLab Inc. in 2012, he worked on recreational submarines and taught himself to code, going on to work at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, where he did version control software around lawmaking. GitLab Inc. was founded on Sid’s love of programming and a desire to create an open-core company. Fully remote from day one, GitLab Inc. is one of the largest companies to operate this way, with more than 1,700 employees across 65 countries. In this episode, Sid talks about open source, his community, and company transparency, along with the GitLab Inc.’s recent IPO—and what it means for the future.

Nikita Shamgunov is the CEO of Neon, a new company building the next generation serverless Postgres database. Nikita got his PhD in St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Facebook before going on to co-found SingleStore, an analytical database company. At SingleStore, Nikita realized the massive size of the transaction databases market and the ubiquity of Postgres, the popular open-source database, all of which led him to found Neon. Neon separates the storage and compute functions to create a truly affordable and compelling cloud native Postgres. In this episode, Nikita talks to us about working with his co-founders Stas and Heikki, incubating Neon at Khosla Ventures (where Nikita is a partner), and the implications of separating compute and storage.

Ryan Johson is the co-founder and CEO of Culdesac, which is working to build the first car-free city in the United States. After turning down M.I.T. and dropping out of Harvard, he chose to learn from the executives at Opendoor before co-founding Culdesac in 2018. Ryan has traveled to over 60 countries, but after visiting pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities like Budapest and Amsterdam, Ryan was inspired to create a new city from scratch. Culdesac's first neighborhood, Culdesac Tempe, is currently being built in Arizona. The neighborhood opens later this year and will have 1000 residents on 17 acres. Residents receive a suite of mobility benefits, including free access to light rail, street cars, and buses. In this episode, Ryan talks to us about building infrastructure from the ground up and how Culdesac provides people with life at their front door.