Just picked this joke up via a (warning: expletive) cartoon a friend mailed me. To spare those who want to avoid the expletive, here’s the text.
Bob: So, how do I query the database?
IT guy: It’s not a database. It’s a key-value store.
Bob: OK, it’s not a database. How do I query it?
IT guy: You write a distributed map-reduce function in Erlang.
Bob: Did you just tell me to go screw myself?
IT guy: I believe I did, Bob.
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, consultant, angel investor, and blogger focused on enterprise software startups. I am an executive-in-residence (EIR) at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to startup challenges having 10 years’ experience at each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director levels across 10+ companies ranging in size from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of cloud EPM vendor Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs in a competitive market, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of NoSQL database provider MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over 6 years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues. I started my career in technical and product marketing positions at Ingres and Versant.
I love disruption, startups, and Silicon Valley and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, GainSight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, and Tableau.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru (cybersecurity training) and Scoro (work management).
I previously served on boards including Alation (data intelligence), Aster Data (big data), Granular (agtech), Nuxeo (content services), Profisee (MDM), and SMA Technologies (workload automation).
Kellblog by Dave Kellogg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
I have to admit, this explains why I've always had a feeling that Erlang was a particularly bad practical joke.