Yellowbrick is an SQL data platform built on Kubernetes for enterprise data warehousing, ad-hoc and streaming analytics, and AI and BI workloads. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Yellowbrick founder and CEO Neil Carson to learn more about the company.
Neil Carson’s Background
What is Neil Carson’s background? Carson said:
“I moved from England to California to work for Oracle back in 1998 along with my friend Mark Brinicombe, who is also the co-founder of Yellowbrick. We’ve now been building software together for around 30 years. We met during university times in the UK. My main talent was the languages of humankind, but I was one of the people who always had a knack for computers. I started programming when I was nine years old and was quite good at it. I was monetizing shareware by the time I was 13. For me, building complex software is explaining to a very simple entity (the computer) what to do by decomposing problems. I scraped through my software engineering degree at the bottom of the class, despite acing the programming classes, because I was spending my time on entrepreneurial pursuits instead of studying.”
“In the US, I worked at big companies like Oracle, BMC, and Dell to learn how smooth-running organizations worked, and at small companies like Liberate, Everdream, and Fusion-io to be part of early-stage scrappiness and understand how the sausage is made. I found I wasn’t just great at building software, but also had a passion for the whole product view, customers, and sales.”
Formation Of Yellowbrick Data
How did the idea for Yellowbrick Data come together? Carson shared:
“Mark and I spent three years working in the storage industry at Fusion-IO. A lot of potential partners had come to us wanting to benchmark their OLAP databases on our fast SSD storage, but the benefits were marginal. We realized it was possible to produce a much higher-performing OLAP database at a far lower cost by making proper use of SSD storage to reduce memory requirements and increase CPU throughput. We proved it by prototyping the core of Yellowbrick and showed it to investors. I learned how to fundraise, and we were off to the races!”
Favorite Memory
What has been Carson’s favorite memory in building the company so far? Carson reflected:
“The best sentimental memory would be early-stage fundraising and team building. We did actually start the company in a garage in San Mateo. So, when investors came to do their due diligence and understand the latest hardware capabilities, we were literally removing server parts from the garage and putting them next to the kitchen sink to talk about them! We were able to pull together a founding team consisting of individuals Mark and I had worked with over the prior 20 years, from software to hardware, and even our amazing COO, Jason. It felt incredible to watch them click and pull together.”
“The opening of our London office was also special for me. We needed to establish engineering in a different time zone for support reasons, and for me, it was meaningful to see our company growing close to where I grew up. Our fabulous engineering director, Matheus, joined us the day we opened and has been with us ever since.”
Core Products
What are Yellowbrick’s core products and features? Carson explained:
“We build a data platform. It does SQL data warehousing and application analytics and can even work with real-time data and store vectors for RAG AI applications. We’ve embraced private clouds, running on AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises data centers. Our customers love us because of performance and cost savings at scale (compared to legacy technology like Teradata, IBM, RedShift and Oracle), security (running in private clouds and on-premises), high concurrency (lots of users querying live data predictably) or the Kubernetes-centric, hybrid cloud nature of our product that’s great for businesses with data residency concerns.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Carson and the team faced in building the company? Carson acknowledged:
“The biggest challenge for us, like many later growth stage technology companies, has been in dealing with the realities of the new business environment: Lower valuations and harder fundraises while growing somewhat slower than before. We chose to be pragmatic: Cut burn, work on fewer things by killing projects and improve efficiency. When you have a rapidly growing business fueled by ‘cheap money,’ it’s hard to focus internally to clean up the house – especially as the instinctive reaction when growth is slowing is to pour even more fuel on the fire! But we’ve done that now. It leaves us very well capitalized, cash-flow positive, and operating far more efficiently than ever before.”
Evolution Of Yellowbrick’s Technology
Technology is always changing. How has Yellowbrick’s technology evolved since its inception? Carson noted:
“It’s evolved greatly. We started our business with two halves: A software half, building the Yellowbrick data platform, and a hardware half, building bespoke optimized infrastructure for our on-premises customers. Although the software half was always the more important bit, these days, we’ve completely jettisoned the hardware side, instead fully embracing Kubernetes and Cloud Native Architecture to take our software not just across public clouds but even private cloud infrastructure provided by our partners such as Dell and RedHat. We’ve also embraced semi-structured data and AI, by adding scalable, high throughput vector storage to our product, so our customers can store vector embeddings right next to the data they are for.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Carson cited:
“A first milestone is always the first time you get paid for your product: The first sale. It took a year, but our first customer, TEOCO, was closed just before midnight EST on New Year’s Eve. I was negotiating the final terms of the contract with Atul Jain, their CEO. Everyone except me had gone to parties. I spent my New Year watching fireworks and negotiating a contract from the hotel room until 2 am! After that milestone, we started growing really fast, winning more and more big-name enterprise customers.”
“Subsequent milestones include winning our first telco customer, our first large insurance customer, our first financial services customer, and our first bank. We recently crossed a $200 million total contracted sales milestone for the company which is a huge milestone.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Carson about company success stories, he highlighted:
“Here are links to customer success stories for reference:
- TEOCO as mentioned above: https://yellowbrick.com/resources/case-studies/teoco-insights-innovation-and-savings/
- Insight Software: https://yellowbrick.com/press-releases/insightsoftware-accelerates-data-analytics-services-with-yellowbrick/
- US Navy: https://yellowbrick.com/press-releases/u-s-navy-chooses-yellowbrick-sunsets-ibm-netezza/“
Funding/Revenue
When asking Carson about the company’s funding and revenue details, he revealed:
“Yellowbrick is currently over $40 million per year annual recurring revenue (ARR). We’ve raised about $250 million.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Yellowbrick pursuing? Carson assessed:
“Gartner predicted the data management solutions TAM was about $100 billion by the mid to late 2020’s. The data platform segment equates to 30-40% of the overall TAM or $30 billion to $40 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Yellowbrick Data from its competition? Carson affirmed:
”We’re an enterprise-grade SQL data platform that runs some of the most complex data warehousing and application analytics workloads at Fortune 100 companies. We have a level of quality, throughput, predictability and support that open source technology can’t compete with, even though we have the same open interfaces as open source technology. We’re designed for hybrid public-cloud and on-premises deployments using Kubernetes and are more cost-efficient for these types of workloads than any other data warehousing solution available. Our business terms are very flexible, with predictable pricing and even CapEx procurement options available. If you care about data residency, cost efficiency, high concurrency or hybrid cloud/on-premises deployments, you really should be adding Yellowbrick to your evaluation.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Carson concluded:
“Our next goal is to hit $100 million a year in revenue. To do that, we’ll be growing our sales and marketing presence and expanding our go-to-market alongside new software and hardware partners. This requires product work, too, to enable easier interoperability with other enterprise data stacks. We’ll also continue to add AI technology to our platform: Most recently we demonstrated a technology that lets users query their data warehouse in freeform English instead of SQL.”
