Cloud Cover: How Aiven Protects your Business with Open Source Transformation
7 Questions for Aiven’s CEO, Oskari Saarenmaa
Cloud is a cool topic. The team at Aiven knows why; they provide managed open source data technologies on all major clouds so developers can do what they do best: create applications. Aiven manages cloud data infrastructure, enabling global customers to drive business results from open source that trigger true transformation. With offices in Helsinki, Berlin, Boston, Toronto and Sydney, (& the VERY best in crab-themed merchandise) we spoke with Aiven’s CEO Oskari Saarenmaa after their Series C milestone.
We covered why open source matters, how to lay the groundwork for company culture, and an influential figure of 20th century literature, Franz Kafka.📖
Night of the Arts
To start, we chatted about the meaning of the name, ‘Kafka’, as in Apache Kafka, one of the open source languages that Aiven utilizes. Oskari says the name is something around which many narratives are formed. Apparently, creator Jay Kreps called it that because it was a ‘system optimized for writing and he liked Kafka’s work’. Oskari recounts how he and his earliest teammates hosted an event intended to attract engineers as potential employees. It was in a central Helsinki pub during a ‘Night of the Arts’ festival.
They posted a ‘Kafka Meetup’ sign, wondering how many literature fans might they accidentally attract? It turned out successful with a dozen people genuinely interested in the right topic. That continues to be a good parallel for Aiven’s growth: attracting people who want to build something unique with an open source foundation.
Welcome Oskari! Great to hear you on Clubhouse recently, talking with Aiven’s investors including IVP, Atomico, World Innovation Lab and Earlybird. Now we seek your personal perspective and insights. Having grown your team from 4 to 160, you’ve gained experience to offer fellow founders of early stage startups. You’ve said in the past: “Work hard to create simple solutions for complex problems. Automate everything. Hire the best people.” So let’s get into it!
1) You have a background as a Software Architect and Engineer. What experiences drove you to be a Co-founder of Aiven?
OS: I found over time, we’ve developed a good taste for what software should look like. Along with my co-founders, we were building software systems; the projects we worked on used many popular technologies, but we weren’t always convinced that they’d offer the best way to do something. Some of these technologies were open, but many were proprietary, making it difficult or impossible to understand how they would help us achieve the outcomes we sought. We often ended up engineering around these technologies to create novel solutions for problems we were working on. In discovering and understanding how many other engineers face similar issues, we decided to work on software that solves hard operational problems and helps developers make the most of open source technologies.
So, what do I mean by ‘hard operational problems’? Well, a database engineer might be the best person to explain indexing algorithms and to implement them in a database engine, but once I’m aware of the algorithm, I’m mostly interested in using it, not understanding its internals. In other words, how do I get this technology out into production and have the confidence it runs, and continues to run?
Not to compare software with cars, but let’s try: It could be the coolest looking vehicle but can I rely on it to get to my destination? If not, it’s meaningless…You would have to ask yourself, does it make sense to own this thing?
And furthermore, maybe it is better to focus on what actually matters: like keeping the lights on with what you are running and keeping things secure. Security matters a lot with data. Security is not binary. It’s making sure that the right people have access and knowing the protocol if there is a breach. Security can not be added on top. You have to ensure that the system you are relying on stays available and stays online.
Again, as a software engineer, I’m not interested in ‘features’ but rather asking: what problems did you solve and what processes led there? In our communications, we try to identify common pain points and communicate how we help you overcome them.
2) Successful teams are usually a result of blending different skills. How did you meet your teammates? What core skills do they have to complement yours?
OS: I talk a bit about how we got started in this article, but we met at F-Secure which, although known for antivirus activities, we four future-Aiven-team mates focused on back-end tech and the infrastructure needed for a high volume of data. It turns out, each of us are more similar than different in terms of skill area (i.e. not one in business development and another one in programming), but we do approach things differently.
On a microlevel, we complete the areas for each other in a ‘frictionless’ way. For example, one person might be faster to sketch, while another makes the solution work, and yet another looks at things from a high-level system architecture perspective. I realized I bring a certain practicality that helps our company grow and which is needed in my role as CEO.
3) Why is the future of data in the cloud open source? What’s obvious to you that might not be to others?
OS: The thing that gave us confidence in our founding idea early on was the cloud itself. That might sound odd. But we’d been working on multi-year software projects and seen their lifecycle from ideas to production deployments. We curiously watched as IT and finance contemplated the size and scope of future workloads and ordered tons of hardware before most of the code existed. That’s not an agile way and involved too much compromise in software later on.
The cloud changes this! The cloud lets you define a whole tech stack via software. You can keep iterating on software and keep optimizing. This means you can actually launch small and then scale up bigger. Like the saying goes, ‘software is eating the world’, but really it’s the cloud that’s enabling that.
4) Aiven prides itself on developing for the open-source community. Why is that relationship so sacred?
OS: People often want to define open source communities but I’d say successful ones are diverse and distributed. Their contributor developer base spans multiple geographies and companies and that keeps the community vibrant. Our own roots are in the open source communities. Open source code is the backbone of any modern society and organization, because people seek transparency and reliability. We believe open standards and an open world boosts digital freedom, innovation, well-being, and mitigates conflicts. Open source tech supports the growth of an open digital ecosystem.
Now from an end-user standpoint, we need a community of companies and organizations who work together on solving interesting challenges, promote open innovation, and develop software in the open. We aim to cultivate sustainable, open source communities and make sure that open source remains truly open.
We actually have a “Plankton Program” allowing employees to claim compensation for the time they spend on open source activities outside of work. We want to be the developers’ beloved choice for accessing open source. You can read about how communities play an active role in this post.
5) Congrats on recently partnering with ADEO! Can you expand on why big corporates like ADEO would want to work with Aiven?
OS: ADEO is one of the world’s largest home improvement companies, meaning that they are running hardware stores. So you might not be thinking software here, but they’re turning into a software company. Why? Because they are building something modern and empowering their developers with the latest tech tools to build interesting projects. They wanted to work with open source and we made it easy for them to get started.
Basically, you can start small, even if you are a huge corporate player. It’s about: how do I start agile and create a business and a business model that can iterate. This is why the cloud matters to companies across the globe. You can read more about how the teams accessed tech here.
6) Based on what Paul Klemm from our investment team wrote , your leadership team seems intent on supporting the growing team. What values do you share as a team?
OS: Early on among the founding team, we debated how to best grow our team. We decided it was right and fair to bring in senior level engineers who could grab a problem and tackle it without much guidance or direction. We wanted to give those people a real chance to be successful.
But we also understand that you can build a team in different ways. While we may have made some mistakes, we always course-corrected. Importantly, since the beginning, we intentionally wrote down our values about what we actually believe.
Values shouldn’t be just aspirational but rather reflect how you act. As the company grows, it also becomes apparent that values need to be refreshed from time to time and so we’re working on the next update now.
7) What upcoming milestones signal that you’re on the right track?
OS: With our recent Series C behind us, we basically see two tracks ahead. a) We want to step up investments in the open source community and b) We want to expand to underserved markets and different geographies.
What we have seen is that while cloud adoption in retail and software services has increased, other areas are still missing out. Certain countries, companies, or industries tend to hold back from cloud adoption because they have real concerns about data privacy. Doing so causes them to lag behind international competitors who modernize their business. This can especially happen in highly regulated areas like financial services. So we’re hoping to help them on their journey.
Thanks for talking with us, Oskari! We can’t wait to keep up with Aiven. 🦀
Looking for more? Follow Aiven on Medium. Aiven is building an Open Source Office and currently recruiting open source developers (for Kafka, PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch) as well as an open source program manager. To level-up in your next role, check out careers at Aiven.
You can find previous C-Level Insights on Earlybird’s Medium Publication. Check out a conversation on Fintech with Kristina Walcker-M. from Bitwala, now known as Nuri!
Or Privacy & Convenience topics with Xayn’s CEO Lief-Nissen Lundbaek here:
C-Level Insights interviews by Elisheva Marcus of Earlybird Venture Capital.
