Venture Lessons: John Wang, Former Founder and CTO of Dashbase
John discusses leadership as a CTO, the acquisition of his startup, and interesting trends in deep tech.
About
Welcome to the 22nd installment of Foothill Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview. This week, we’re highlighting our venture partner John Wang. Our conversation covers his personal journey, the lessons that shaped him, and his vision for the future. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
John introduces himself
My name is John Wang. I was the co-founder and CTO of a company called Dashbase. Cisco recently acquired us, so I’m currently working on observability products at Cisco AppDynamics. I also work with Foothill Ventures part-time as a venture partner on the software team.
His background
I was one of a few kids who grew up with computer access and started programming recreationally when I was 12. It was great to learn that I could build a career from doing something so fun. Fast-forward, I developed an interest in computer graphics and then got into building search engines. Since then, I have mainly focused on search and information retrieval and worked for Yahoo on web search, LinkedIn on social search, and Twitter with enormous and fast datasets of tweets. Finally, my interest in solving problems with fast and big data propelled me to start Dashbase.
On the transition from big tech to startups
When you work at larger companies, you only see a small part of the elephant and don’t appreciate what the other functions do. For example, when I worked in big tech, I viewed engineering as the essential core while the rest seemed to play just a supporting role. However, after I started my own company, I began to appreciate all of the different functions and what a challenge it is to get people from different backgrounds with different mindsets to work together towards a common mission. That’s something that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn within larger organizations, as most of my experience was very technology-focused. I was accustomed to the role of an engineer, where my mentality was to build software that can have many use cases. It’s very different. when you’re running a company because you don’t have the resources to do everything, and you have to have sharp focus.
Young people have the luxury to take many risks, and I think they should capitalize on this more. When you’re starting, you don’t have many liabilities or risks, so jumping into a big company sometimes can hide the world from you until it’s too late. I would suggest for recent grads to try to work with startups (trying to be an early employee) because companies view early employees as partners at that stage, and you can learn so much more.
Young people have the luxury to take a lot of risks, and I think they should capitalize on this more.
What Dashbase does and why he built it
We built a distributed database so that you can support full-text search — similar to ElasticSearch, but with a focus on time series data and the necessity to handle data at a much larger scale. One application for it is log management. Big companies and their servers generate massive amounts of logs, so you want to make sense of what has been in these logs (ex: security, user behavior, troubleshooting, root cause analysis.
After having worked on searching and processing large volumes of data, I had some ideas that I prototyped early on. I started Dashbase to see how far I could go with it. From researching the space, I realized that log volumes would explode from the industry’s momentum. I saw the potential market and wanted to build a company that would solve the problem.
I saw the potential market there and wanted to build a company that would solve the problem.
On leadership and being a CTO
On an abstract level, many leaders at a startup act to translate business priorities and decisions into actionable tasks. For me, it was challenging to wear the hats of both the CTO and the head of engineering because they are very different roles. As an engineering leader, your goal is to ensure quality and that everything is delivered on schedule, so you de-risk by limiting the scope. As a CTO, on the other hand, you want to be forward-looking. Since you want to set the technical vision for the company, you are in a prototyping mentality and trying many different things. It was difficult for me to balance the two, so that was a challenge for me when I started Dashbase.
On an abstract level, many leaders at a startup act to translate business priorities and decisions into actionable tasks.
On the Cisco acquisition
Reid Hoffman once talked about an interesting way of looking at the progression of a company. When you first begin, you start as a family. Everybody is like a family member where everyone knows each other and what’s happening. Then, as the company grows, it becomes a village. Such parallels exist as companies become larger. We were lucky in the sense that even though a big company like Cisco acquired us, we were acquired through a company called AppDynamics which they bought a few years ago. That company transitioned from a startup to a late-stage startup, so we are essentially under their wing. I would describe this transition as growing from a family to a village.
On joining VC and the importance of relationships
Before starting Dashbase, I looked for my next play and helped a couple of VC friends doing some tech due diligence. I also started investing on the side and became a seed investor in Pingcap, a company building an open-sourced enterprise-grade NewSQL database. Since then, the company has grown immensely, and with its last round, it became a “unicorn”. After that, I analyzed why they succeeded and felt that other aspects of my career also equipped me with enough expertise to invest in a particular vertical, especially the big data/information retrieval space. The reason why I joined Foothill was to contribute my experience and also to expand my horizon. At Foothill, there are experts in biology, networking, security, etc and it has been great to listen and to learn from them.
If you look at very successful investors, you’ll see that they all prioritize their relationships. One of my heroes is Reid Hoffman — he built LinkedIn because he really understood relationships. That’s also the reason why I wanted to join Foothill. They work with their portfolio companies very well and even with companies outside of their portfolio.
The reason why I joined Foothill was to see if I can contribute my experience and also expand my horizon.
What he looks for in founders
Founders are everything at the seed stage. People can give founders advice but it’s only until they’ve actually done it themselves or made the mistake that they can properly understand how to run a company. If the founder hasn’t had entrepreneurial experience before, I try to dig deeper into what kind of person they are. I try to exclude more superficial qualities of candidates, such as grades, degrees, and even their school’s brand. Instead, I put more emphasis on other intangible attributes such as leadership skills, the ability to inspire others, perseverance, etc. During the due diligence stage, or even in the pitch stage, I talk to founders and ask particular questions during their pitch decks. I take note of their response — are they passionate about their venture, do they appreciate the feedback and plan on addressing their weaknesses, and do they have interesting explanations for what VCs have pointed out? There’s a lot that you can find out during conversations with founders.
People can give founders advice but it’s only until they’ve actually done it themselves or made the mistake that they can properly understand how to run a company.
Another component is that being a single founder can be challenging because of how stressful the burden is on one person. During my experience with Dashbase, both myself and my co-founder felt like the sky was sometimes falling, and we were two people. It is important for a startup to leverage the team’s superpowers.
It is important for a startup to leverage the team’s superpowers.
I started as a single co-founder until I met my eventual co-founder. He and I were compatible because he had great experience on the product side and wanted to work with a technical co-founder. Conversely, I appreciated a great product co-founder who helped me to understand the nuances of Go-to-Market strategies.
On upcoming technology trends
I specialize in big data, databases, and infrastructure software. I am most interested in finding the different applications that need this software. There are many sectors that haven’t moved on to the new trends in data infrastructure.
His book recommendations
I think that team-building leadership books are helpful. For example, there’s a book called Leadership and Self-deception and another one called Boys in a Boat. They teach about leadership and teamwork; both are vital ingredients in building a company. I would also highly recommend the book The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman.
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Foothill Ventures is a $150M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies.
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