Founder Origin Stories: Amr Awadallah, Cloudera
Founders have uncommon drive and ambition. At Accel, we’re fortunate to back many impressive founders who are building marquee technology companies — so we understand that much of the entrepreneurial journey is about hanging onto inspiration to overcome adversity. We recently filmed some accomplished founders sharing their origin story and the purpose that fuels them on their journey. We hope this perspective is useful for people on a journey of their own.
This is the origin story for Amr Awadallah. Amr is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cloudera. Cloudera believes that data will make what is impossible today, possible tomorrow. They do that by providing the modern platform for machine learning and advanced analytics. The company works with over 2,500 partners and has 1,400 employees around the world in 28 countries. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
In many ways, Amr’s story is the quintessential Silicon Valley tale. The tale of a driven immigrant, a fateful pivot, and the importance of understanding how to innovate on solving a real customer problem.
Amr didn’t think about being an entrepreneur when he was young. Egypt’s economy was dominated by large incumbents which made it hard for new entrants to succeed. Amr expected to be a university professor like his father, and like his father, he emigrated abroad for his graduate studies.
But after arriving in Palo Alto to pursue his PhD at Stanford University, Amr was struck by his proximity to all the large technology companies he had grown up hearing about. It was at Stanford where things changed or “pivoted.” He learned it was possible to start a company and succeed, and that his background as an immigrant served him well as an entrepreneur.
As an immigrant, he was comfortable with risk. Like other immigrants, he was willing to leave his home country and everything he knew to start a new adventure. This is part of the reason why Amr believes so many technology companies are started by immigrants.
Another insight that he shares with other founders regularly — do you really know what problems to solve? That’s how Amr and his co-founders built Cloudera. They learned the problem to solve was helping companies to leverage all their data to automate decision making, thus impacting their businesses in significant ways.
Asking about the problem — not what the customer wants — is key, explains Amr. “Henry Ford said, when I asked people what they wanted they said ‘we want faster horses.’ That’s the mistake here, the entrepreneur doesn’t ask people what they want. The entrepreneur asks people, ‘What’s your problem?’ They will tell you, ‘My problem is I want to get from point A to point B very quickly.’ Then, the entrepreneur will say, ‘Aha, I have the perfect idea, called a car, that can solve that problem.’” So the key is to focus on innovating a solution for a real problem that exists with many customers, as opposed to innovating on a made up problem that nobody has.
