Raj Verma
Chief Executive Officer, SingleStore
Leadership, in my opinion, is taking complete, utmost ownership of the outcome. The buck stops at you. It's no one else's fault; you take responsibility and accountability.
Summary
This week on “Leadership Matters,” Alan is joined by a businessman and thought leader who has played a critical role in defining “modern data” — the kind that’s available instantly, empowering people to make decisions in the moments that matter most.
Raj Verma is CEO of SingleStore, the fastest cloud-native real-time analytics database. SingleStore is focused on transforming businesses' ability to work with data in real-time — its database gives customers the ability to do transactions and analytics in the same place, all with speed, scale, and simplicity. Raj is an industry veteran with over 25 years of global experience in the space and has served in leadership roles at a variety of software-focused firms.
Both personally and professionally, Raj champions a philosophy of constant learning and improvement. Over the course of his conversation with Alan, he covers a wide variety of personal and professional topics, including his early life and career, how he explains Singlestore’s mission to a broader audience, and the transformative effects of data on our economy. Raj is clear-eyed about the potential hazards of rapid technological disruption, but makes a solid case for optimism — harnessed correctly, tech innovation has been and will continue to be a central driver of societal good. For similar reasons, Raj is a major proponent of Silicon Valley as both a place and idea: in the right place and time, it truly is possible for a few individuals to change the world. From his upbringing in India to his unique approach to interviews, Raj offers a variety of insights and observations relevant to both industry insiders and students of leadership more broadly.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Raj Verma is the Chief Executive Officer of SingleStore, the fastest real-time analytics database in distributed SQL. As CEO, he is responsible for leading the company, driving its growth and charting its forward direction on behalf of its customers, investors, and employees. With over 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Raj has worked with clients across multiple industries and organizations, from start-ups to enterprise level.
Formerly serving as the CMO, EVP Global Sales and COO at TIBCO Software, Raj was instrumental in that company’s growth to over $1 billion in revenue. Raj also served in leadership roles at Apttus Software, where he was CRO and COO, and Hortonworks, where he was President and COO.
Raj earned his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BMS College of Engineering in Bangalore, India. He currently lives in Los Altos Hills, California.
Clips from this Episode
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
My guest today is a businessman and thought leader who has played a critical role in defining the concept of modern data — the kind that’s available instantly, empowering people to make decisions in the moments that matter most.
Raj Verma is CEO of SingleStore, the fastest cloud-native real time analytics database. SingleStore is focused on transforming business’s ability to work with data in real time. Its database gives customers the ability to do transactions and analytics in the same place, all with speed, scale and simplicity. Their customers include 12 of the Fortune 50, five of the top ten banks, tech companies like Uber, and two of the top three telcos.
Raj has over 25 years of global experience in the tech industry and has worked with clients across multiple industries and organizations, from startups to enterprise-level companies. He was instrumental in growing TIBCO Software to over $1 billion in revenue, serving as CMO, EVP of global sales, and chief operating officer. He was formerly COO at Apttus Software and Hortonworks.
As a thought leader, Raj champions innovation, tenacity, and a philosophy to always learn and improve, both professionally and personally. He enjoys exploring the latest technologies and building long-lasting relationships based on trust and confidence.
I am so delighted to welcome Raj on the show, I know him well. We’re going to have a good time today talking about his early influences, his impressive journey to SingleStore, and his insights on the transformative power of data as a force for good.
Welcome to “Leadership Matters,” Raj. It is such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Raj Verma
It’s a pleasure to be here Alan, so good to see you. And yes, we’re gonna have a ton of fun.
Alan Fleischmann
It’ll be a lot of fun.
I’d like to hear a little bit about your early years growing up in India. Tell us about your family. What did your parents do? How was your life around the house growing up?
Raj Verma
So I was lucky enough, I won the lottery of birth. I was born to a wonderful set of parents. My dad was in the Indian Army, and when I was younger he would travel a lot. He had a field posting in Ladakh. So I very rarely saw him, but I remember how joyous I used to be when he’d come home on his break. He would indulge me. My mom was a school teacher and then became a principal of a couple of schools. I just experienced unconditional love since I can remember. It’s such a warm feeling, that you know you are loved unconditionally. I was one of those lucky ones that experienced that right from the start. We were talking about our kids, and that is something that we, as parents, want our kids to experience.
So yeah, very lucky. Their emphasis was always on being kind, being generous, and getting yourself educated, doing well in school.
Alan Fleischmann
Any brothers or sisters? Any siblings?
Raj Verma
No, only child — I think my parents gave up after one. So the only child thing was there. However, my dad was a strict disciplinarian, being in the army, et cetera. So even at this age, I’m never, ever late to anything, be it a meeting, a conference, someone’s invited dinner at home. This is something, I think, some of my Indian friends would probably understand — when an Indian friend invites you to dinner, it’s basically a range of timing. So if it says 7:30, it could be from 7:30 to 9:30 that you can arrive. But I’ve just been so conditioned that, if it says 7:30, I arrive there at 7:30. And I’m always the first one there, even the hosts are scrambling to get the party started.
But I was very lucky to have the set of parents that I did. We traveled around a lot in India. Unconditionally loved, always got the best education that I really could receive. And my mother always instilled in me this sort of principle that you’ve got to work hard. Sustained, hard work and tenacity over a long period of time is what’s going to determine our success. So those were early lessons that still sit with me, Alan.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. And I’m curious, also — the world of data and technology has been such a big part of your adult life. When you were a kid, did technology play a role then? What were your interests and activities growing up?
Raj Verma
Yeah, so in the ’80s, we used to have these computer kits. I remember one of our neighbors who visited Japan, and he and his son — we were same age — and we would write programs on that, which was so, so hard to do. We would probably have a stick go left, right, and hit a ball once, and that was supposed to be awesome.
I think what I enjoyed about computers and programming was the structured thought. Rightly or wrongly, I think like a programmer, even though I don’t program anymore. And I always did. So for me, the structured nature of programming was what interested me. And then of course, once you get interested in programming, data and computing comes alongside it. Fortunately, math was a subject that came naturally to me. So you combine those few aspects, and then also, when something comes naturally to me, it’s structured, and it’s fun, you don’t have to work that hard at it, which meant that I could play a lot more of cricket, tennis, squash, snookers, and billiards.
So that was the reason that I gravitated more and more towards subjects that had had the computer science, programming, structured, math elements to them. I then went on to do my computer science, engineering, and math major. It worked out well, I guess.
Alan Fleischmann
It worked out very well.
You’ve explored the world of data and technology throughout your life So I can imagine when you went to Bangalore University… That was a time when the city was in the midst of a great transformation itself, right? Now, you think of it as a great tech hub, the Silicon Valley of India. But when you went there, it wasn’t yet, right?
Raj Verma
Well, my dad got posted there, so I was in ninth grade, a freshman in high school. It was such a beautiful city. I use the term ‘was’ deliberately. It was called the air-conditioned city — I don’t know if too many people know, but it’s on a plateau which is almost 3000 feet altitude. So the weather was just beautiful, it was almost like Los Altos, Silicon Valley weather right through the year. It was the city of gardens, and really, most of the retired people lived there.
For me, moving from a small town like Anpur up in the north to Bangalore… It was just a beautiful, beautiful town. I have some of the best memories of high school — a place that I met my future wife — and did my college there as well. Now when I went back in 2010, it was just a very different city. It was crowded, places that were back or beyond are now sort of the middle of the city. I don’t recognize the city at all.
Sometimes they say you go to your city of youth to find your youth, and of course, you’re disappointed. Maybe that’s the reason, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s so different from anything and everything that I grew up in. The character, the soul of that city is still there, but you have to scratch a lot to get to it now, I suppose.
Alan Fleischmann
And is it considered, to you, a viable tech hub?
Raj Verma
Oh yeah, absolutely. We actually have a fairly large presence, from a percentage-of-employees metric, in India, and we’ve chosen Bangalore as our tech hub. So yeah, it still continues to be.
And you’re right, I think right now it’s probably the most evolved city when it comes to technological talent, the availability of it, and the maturity of that data, and also the maturity of the infrastructure to support it, apart from probably physical infrastructure. It’s a very viable town from an employability and expansion perspective, for sure.
Alan Fleischmann
I understand that, while you were at Bangalore University, you toyed with the idea of writing your university thesis about artificial intelligence and robotics. You didn’t ultimately decide to land on that — did you? — but that’s amazing when you think about where we are today. You were already thinking about that then.
Raj Verma
Yeah. It was just the fact that you could program something to model something repeatedly at that time, and be able to take smart decisions — which, 30 years ago, was magic. It’s like seeing planes land; I’ve been seeing that for 40-45 years, but it still amazes me.
When you get programs or stuff to do things in a very predictable, repeatable manner, that was something that was very, very exciting for me. I decided not to pursue it, because of circumstance, but the interest in that, and the joy that I get when I see something come to fruition around that, is still childlike.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. Anything from university life, before you went on to business life that you’d want to share?
Raj Verma
I’d probably not want to share that. I had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends.
Alan Fleischmann
What happens at university life stays at university, right?
Raj Verma
Exactly right.
Alan Fleischmann
So, before moving to the C-suite, you spent many years in marketing and sales roles at tech companies globally. Tell us a little bit about your early career — your journey to TIBCO, especially — and how these experiences influenced your leadership.
Raj Verma
Yeah, sure.
My first job, actually, was selling PCs and printers door to door for a company which is now a household name, called Wipro. At that time, it was more a hardware company than a software company. This is how much the world has changed: We would give software for free so people could buy our hardware. So I did that and just loved what technology did to change the lives of businesses and, in certain cases, people. So that was endearing to me.
From there, as life would have it, I moved to Sun Microsystems and then PTC, Parametric Technology Corporation, came calling in India. I’d never sold software before and I couldn’t fathom how people would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions of dollars, to get a CD in return. The concept of tactile selling doesn’t hold true for software, I suppose. I did pretty well there, then moved to Hong Kong with PTC, onwards to Singapore, and then Sydney, Australia, where we had a great old time.
I then joined this company called Staffware, which was an English company in the area of business process management — again, one subject that I’m still very, very interested in — which got acquired by TIBCO. So I ran the Asia-Pacific operations, or part of the APAC operations, for TIBCO out of Hong Kong for a couple of years.
Then serendipity happened, and I met with the founder and CEO, Vivek Ranadivé, in Paris at a client meeting, followed by a dinner. On the walk back to the hotel — I don’t know why — he just said, “Hey, I think you should move to the Valley.” I had no interest, really… Well, I had interest in moving to the Valley. However, I had not spoken to my wife. I had two kids, and life was very different in Hong Kong. But two weeks later, I was in the Valley, and I’ve spent probably the most fun 18 years of my life thus far in the Valley and hope to spend many more decades here.
Alan Fleischmann
I know we’re gonna get into that, because you are so devoted and loyal to not only the physical geography which is Silicon Valley, but the ethos and the aspiration of what it stands for. So we’re gonna get into that in a minute.
I’m curious: has your leadership style changed over time as you’ve had and played different roles? I know the answer has to be yes, but I’m curious in what way.
Raj Verma
I think, naturally, it evolves. Do the foundational tenets of those change or not? I don’t know. Leadership, in my opinion, is taking complete, utmost ownership of the outcome. The buck stops at you, it’s no one else’s fault. You take responsibility and accountability, and you take everyone along with you, leave no person behind.
I think that style sort of evolves as you grow and mature as a leader. I do think that the evolving style of leadership, as you get a lot more secure in life, emotionally, financially and socially… Some people evolved from leading from a place of internal fear to a place of internal love. That’s probably the greatest transition that I have had as a leader. So I do think that, if there is a change in leadership, it is a change from leading to avoid failure to leading to seek success. That’s probably the evolution in a nutshell for me.
I do also feel that giving people opportunities, for me, is the greatest joy of leadership. I got an opportunity that I never thought I would have. I see young professionals entering the leadership arena with that sort of wonderment — bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to conquer the world — and being able to support them in their journey is one of the greatest joys of leadership. I immensely enjoy fostering that.
Alan Fleischmann
People don’t always believe me until they become a CEO, but when you’re a COO, CRO, CFO, or other significant leader in the C-suite, there’s no questions that those are major leadership roles. But there’s something extraordinary about being a CEO. It’s a lonely job. It’s an extraordinary internal job and external job. But it’s also a lonely job that’s very clear, because you have to think about the horizontal, not just the vertical. The external, not just the internal. You got to think about more than one P&L.
So I’m curious… You always have to have the preparation that you had, being a COO and CRO, in order to get and fully appreciate how to manage as a CEO. But it’s a different challenge, for sure.
Raj Verma
It truly is. I like the way you put it, vertical versus horizontal. Of course, being CRO or COO teaches you about leadership. But being number two or number three, versus being number one in the organization, is an order of magnitude of difference. The scale of responsibility, the angst, the scope of thought, the requirement to connect dots to be able to keep an eye on trends, both internal and external, is… Yeah, it’s a full job.
I think, intellectually, a lot of people get what it takes to be a CEO. But when you experience it… I read somewhere, I think it was The Big Tuna, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, who probably defined it best being a head coach — which is akin to being the CEO. He says, just accept the fact that people who you think are the least likely to disappoint you, will disappointed you. Two or three things that you least want to happen, will happen. And you can have no one to go to but yourself. So if you’re comfortable with these three things, you’re a perfect candidate for being a CEO. That does ring true.
I do think that there are a lot of chores as well, being a CEO. You are in control of not only your own destiny, but the fact is that your decisions can also impact the lives of thousands of people, or sometimes tens of thousands of people, is a huge responsibility. It is an act of service, rather than a privilege. The fact that life has afforded me that opportunity is something that I am repeatedly grateful for.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. You also have this remarkable ability to translate complex technical concepts into something anybody can grasp. For our listeners who are less well-versed in data, give us an overview of what SingleStore is about — and particularly, what made you come to SingleStore, as I know you started as co-CEO and then CEO. Tell us a little bit about the value proposition of SingleStore and your vision for it, and then help them understand what it is that SingleStore does. I gave a good introduction, I hope, but I think you can probably go a little deeper than I did.
Raj Verma
Yeah, I think you did a great job.
Now SingleStore, as the name suggests, is a single place where you can put all different kinds of workloads of data on the same platform. Our value proposition — I’ll go technical first, and then simplify into a little more lucid language — is that we are a platform that can transact with high fidelity on data and reason with data, without moving that data, in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment with millisecond response times.
Just to translate that, the world right now is islands of computing. There is an island the computing where you transact. On transaction, I’ll give you an example. It happened to me a summer I was flying to get to Paris. I put my boarding card in the boarding machine, so the transaction knew Raj Verma is on a United flight from San Francisco to Paris. I sat down, I had a good flight, I had a bunch of meetings. The next day, I flew to Zurich to meet with my family who were already there. As I was driving to the hotel, I get an email with a notification from United about some of the fun stuff that I could do as a Mileage Plus member in Paris. I was not in Paris then.
So what happened behind the scenes: there was a transaction system which captured the transaction that I was on the plane. There was another transaction system that captured the fact that I was on WiFi on the plane, which I paid for. However, that transaction data had to be put over a wall into an analytical system, which then reasons with those transactions to get the insights that Raj is on his way to Paris and he likes to do the following things, so send him these offers. Except, it was 48 hours too late. Had they been using SingleStore, they could have been able to reason with the transactions of me being on a flight, me being on WiFi, and give me those promotions while I was still on the flight to Paris. Maybe I would have taken them up on it.
We do feel that the future will be real time. Come to think of it, we live in a service economy right now — take the way we use transportation as a service. You and I were in Davos together taking Ubers, right? So that was our transportation there. Our driver would arrive when you order the Uber, so it was transportation as a service. It’s entertainment as a service; Apple, or Netflix, or Hulu, or what have you. It’s grocery as a service. It’s holiday vacations as a service with Airbnb.
Now, if this entire life that we live is as a service economy, by its very nature it has to be real time. If the world is going in that direction, the world is moving more and more towards being real time, rather than near-real time. If that’s where they’re going, then these islands of computing between transactions and analytics will disappear, and the world would belong to this one platform where you can transact and resend the data without moving data. Whether it’s someone else who does that — and hopefully, it’s us — that’s where the puck is going.
Alan Fleischmann
You’ve argued that database technology and the world of data storage is not new — it’s the volume and velocity of data that have taken off dramatically and change the landscape. How and when did that shift to modern data occur? What does that actually mean?
Raj Verma
Databases, as I’ve said, a 60 year old concept, if not more — invented by IBM and, some would say, perfected by Oracle and the likes. So it’s been around and I think it’ll be around for the foreseeable future as well. What changed the role the database was the advent of the smartphone and the triage, the tri-factor that it had. As the internet capacity or bandwidth went up, that increased the volume, variety, and velocity of data by orders of magnitude.
I remember, Alan, when I was CMO at TIBCO, I stood at a conference in 2011. And I said, “The data in the world is doubling every two years.” At that time, you know, Barack Obama was the president and I said, “The data in the world before Barack Obama took the presidency to now has doubled,” and there was a sigh the room, saying, “Wow, that’s amazing.” Now the fact is, data in the world is doubling every week. And by the way, with all of that complexity of data and the volume of data, the one thing that is coming down is the perishable life of data. Which means that the window of opportunity that you have to act on it is going down.
So that’s, that’s really what the modern-day seminal challenge is. How do you make sense of the vast volume, variety, and velocity of data being sent to you? And how do you separate signal from noise? That’s going to be the seminal challenge for most business leaders.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that.
When you’re hiring people, what qualities and characteristics you look for when you do the interview?
Raj Verma
It’s interesting, I actually did a stint for about 12 months where I was a recruiting guy. We were doubling the sales capacity at TIBCO, so I would recruit, doing probably 30 interviews a week. I actually got tired of it, because it’s the same old questions — what are your mistakes, failures, achievements, yadda yadda.
So I actually had a really interesting question that I asked people. So if you and I were interviewing, of course, following the courtesy of introducing ourselves, I would just say, “Alan, what is that one thing that you’re super passionate about? Come on, roleplay with me: What are what is it?” Whether it’s golf or tennis, whatever.
Alan Fleischmann
You wanted people to tell you what they were passionate about.
Raj Verma
So say you were to say… In fact, it just so happened once that there was this lady who said, “Well, I’m passionate about cheerleading. I was a cheerleader in school and college.” I had very little idea about the sport of cheerleading, and I was like, “Alright, explain it to me. Here is a marker and a whiteboard. Explain the sport of cheerleading, and what makes one good and the other not so good.”
So, the person takes 10, 15, 20 minutes and explains something. You’ve figured out the clarity of thought, how they can verbalize what they’re thinking in language that everyone else can understand. How passionate they are about anything, because if you’re passionate about anything, then ultimately, you have passion that can be used in other areas, for sure. And also, you learn something new — so it’s not a complete waste of your time, even if the candidate isn’t good.
So, I look for, naturally, IQ in a person, because in the in the field that we are in, you have to have a certain level of IQ. You have to have a high degree of empathy, so the emotional quotient has to be extremely high: how you treat people, how you come across. And there is another aspect, which is probably more likely in the go-to-market side of the fence, which is the social portion. How good are you, or otherwise, in a social environment? Depending on the role, if you’re off the charts on two of those quotients, you have a place at Salesforce. So that’s how I go about recruiting people.
Alan Fleischmann
What I love about you is you’re very passionate about what you do. You’re very passionate about leadership. You also have an insatiable curiosity, you love people. That’s not always when you think of people who are deep in tech — they usually aren’t the people with the EQ or the love of people as much as maybe one would expect. But I’m curious: What advice would you offer to other CEOs who are looking to activate their passion the way you have activated your own?
Raj Verma
That’s very interesting question. I don’t think I’m in any position to give any sort of advice. I think my passion is fueled by this emotional side that you always get out of me. Everyone has a unique epicenter that triggers their passion. My passion comes from the fact that I grew up in a place where the vast majority of the people that I grew up with — the vast, vast majority of people that I grew up with — were probably as talented, if not more talented, than I was, but never got the opportunity that life afforded me. It is this opportunity that I have to then go and affect the lives of similar people in the world that I’m most passionate about.
Of course, people try and assign intent to you repeatedly and frequently when you’re CEO. But I’m very, very passionate about making a difference in the lives of other people. The vulnerable, the people who lost the lottery at birth. It comes from a place of gratitude for whatever you might call it, whichever God that you might believe in or pray in, or whatever superpower that we believe runs our lives. Or maybe, it’s just science.
But yeah. I’m in this position, and I’ll do everything that I can to maximize the impact that I have on the vulnerable and the underprivileged here in this world.
Alan Fleischmann
You’re a business leader who feels passionately — using your word —about not just doing what’s good for business, which is so important when you have stakeholders, but what’s good for society as well.
How have you thought through the decisions, you’ve made at SingleStore, and in tech more generally, to serve business interests and the public interest at the same time? What do we need to do better as leaders to ensure that we’re better off in the long run societally as well?
Raj Verma
Let me take you through some stats; let’s talk about capitalism. We are the epicenter of capitalism. Whether within Silicon Valley or in the US, this is where capitalism thrives. Capitalism is marvelous. I’m sure you know this, but for thousands of years, 95% of the population lived in sheer, utter poverty. Average time-adjusted per capita income for the last thousand years or so before the Industrial Revolution was $450. Then the Industrial Revolution happened, and it went from about $450 to $650. So, not that dramatic. Capitalism, which is probably 1881, so the last 140, 150 years… The per-capita income in the States is now $63,500. So in 150 years, capitalism has had an almost 100-fold impact over what every other thing had for thousands of years.
So in and by itself, capitalism is fantastic, statistically and invariably. However, the cases of anxiety, depression, and mental health issues are the highest in this society. There is an 88% increase in heart attacks on Monday mornings because people have to go to work. I think 90% of people would trust a stranger over their direct boss. I think 90% of the employees don’t trust the management of organizations or of the firms have been working.
So the fact really is, we as leaders have to be a little more conscious about how we use capitalism. The entire concept is of conscious capitalism, where you do something more than the fact that the business of every business is profit, because that’s the only socially sustainable model that you can actually build. One of the things that I’m super passionate about, Alan, as you know, is how you use conscious capitalism in the era of big data, or AI, or ML. I mean, we’ve read and seen documentaries where some of the leaders, very esteemed billionaires, made choices where their profits went up and the mental health of our kids deteriorated. The rate of suicides, as you and I have spoken about, among teenage girls and members of the LGBT community has gone up 33% in the last decade. Now, the average increase for the last 120 years, since we’ve been keeping stats, was single digits, between two to three percent. Now it has gone up 33%, a ten-times increase.
The real reason for that is the anxiety that has been peddled to our kids and minority groups through certain organizations, whose leaders have made a conscious choice to do that. I think that’s wrong. I am very passionate about the fact that it will take a lot of courage from a lot of us leaders to make decisions which are in the best interest of society for generations that will follow, and not merely for profit. That’s going to be my life’s work.
Alan Fleischmann
Can you give us a few examples of how data can be used to help vulnerable people?
I should remind our listeners that you’re listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM Radio and leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann, and I’m here today with a good friend and inspirational leader, Raj Verma — businessman, data guru, and thought leader — and we’re discussing his journey in his life, and right now we’re talking a lot about his leadership and what’s needed; the traits that one needs to have, or develop, or hone in order to be a successful leader or CEO.
It’d be good to hear a little bit about some examples where data does good. You mentioned a couple, actually, but I don’t know if people see it that way.
Raj Verma
Yeah, we work with… In fact, I’m doing a podcast in the next couple of weeks with Ashton Kutcher, who’s a partner to us. This organization called Thorn, and it’s a very interesting name, the thorn protecting the roses. It essentially helps prevent sexual trafficking of kids across the globe by monitoring chat rooms, et cetera. We have saved over 5 million kids from being sexually trafficked in the last three to five years. So talk about me, you know, making a meaningful difference in the world, and I applaud Ashton and his team for doing that.
Another example is GoGuardian, which provides a classroom-like environment for our kids at home. During COVID and everything that was happening, kids were not able to go to physical unit classrooms. How do you provide a classroom-like environment and support the teachers if a student is getting distracted and visiting other sites, whether it’s a sporting site or a more nefarious site? So those are some examples which are close to my heart, just because it involves kids; something that, I think, always touches a soft spot among us. You and me specifically, Alan, and I’m sure a majority of others.
The use of data for healthcare or care of the elderly is another example of a phenomenal use of data. One very interesting use case I’m sure you might not have considered: Do you know that the US is probably the only country where, when you visit a doctor and the doctor gives you a prescription, you never get to see the prescription? So, you never get to see the prescription when the prescription is made, and you never see it when you collect the drugs or the medication. So they could actually have given you the wrong medication and you would have no way to track them.
By the way — this is interesting — it costs the taxpayer $8 billion a year because of those mistakes from prescription incongruency. We work with medical companies to ensure that that is correct. And also the fact that a prescription might have a drug which is a lot more expensive when there are generic products available, which are a lot less expensive. So our data makes medicine more affordable, medical drugs more affordable.
You can go on and on about data for good. I think it does wonderful things. Just the fact that we have enabled 1.2 billion people with no access to a bank branch to be able to participate in the economy through mobile forms in the last five years is amazing. It’s just absolutely amazing. How workers can send money back to their villages, whether it’s in India or other impoverished countries, from the mobile phones without middlemen who are prone to cheating them. It’s amazing, right?
As you and I were in Davos and I was at the session with Satya, where he was talking about the ChatGPT use case, where Indian farmers can actually decipher legislation by the Indian government, and make the best decisions for their crops and how to sell it, when to sell it, all the rest of it… It’s amazing, just phenomenal.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that.
Mentors often play a significant role in shaping us, certainly in championing or influencing our leadership styles. Could you tell us a little bit about some of the mentors who had the greatest impact on you as a leader?
Raj Verma
Yeah. As I mentioned, Vivek Ranadivé, the founder and former CEO of TIBCO, was just a person that I gravitated to, and it was mutual. I had the good fortune of his tutelage for almost a decade. He’s a good friend of mine, someone I look up to. He instilled in me the leadership principles of compassion, of gratitude, of being fierce and kind at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive things, you know. The mentality of a warrior, but the heart of a servant. Those are things which have stayed with me for a long time.
So yeah, it’s something that I would love to pay forward at every instance and opportunity that I get.
Alan Fleischmann
A couple of years ago, the database market was growing at almost 20% annually. You argued it was probably the biggest enterprise space in software, technology, or any other business for that matter. With the changes in the economy since then, are there equally optimistic moments for you? Are you still optimistic? What does the current outlook look like?
Raj Verma
Yeah, I’m an eternal optimist. I was an optimist as Silicon Valley Bank was going down two weeks ago almost exactly two weeks ago.
I do believe that the database market is far and away the biggest target, addressable market that you have. That’s empirically the truth. As I often state, whenever you make presentations to the investors, if it’s an hour-long presentation, you spend probably 35 minutes arguing whether the plan is $2 billion, $10 billion, or somewhere in between. But in all my conversations with investors, the target addressable market slide conversation is 30 seconds long. Because yes, it’s been a market that has been in the making for six years. Now, whether it’s $120 or $110, it’s still ginormous, and it’s only going in one direction, which is up and to the right, so to speak.
Now, the interesting part about our market, Alan, is that if you took all the modern databases — Snowflake, us, Databricks, MongoDB, Datastax, whatever else — You will not surpass $5 to $6 billion, maybe $8 to $10. So over $100 billion are still stuck in incumbency. The seminal challenge that these evolving technologies have is this battle: does incumbency find innovation before innovation finds distribution? We do feel that in this case, incumbency will be modernized and it will give birth to probably 25 to 30 database companies which are over a billion dollars in ARR over the next three to five years, some even more. I do believe that we’ll be one of them.
Alan Fleischmann
It’s amazing.
In an industry where competition is fierce around talent — and we talked earlier about your interview style, what you ask people —how important do you think company culture is in recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest? How would you define the culture that you’ve worked on and created at SingleStore?
Raj Verma
I think culture is extremely important. It’s the glue that binds everything together, really. The warrior’s mentality, the servant’s heart, the eye for innovation, the eye for detail, the sense of urgency, all of that.
I heard the best definition of culture from my friend Brian Halligan, the former CEO of HubSpot. He said, “Culture is how people make decisions when you are not present.” The fact is, you’re not going to be present in the majority of the decision-making cycles in your organization. If you want them to have a north star as to how they should make their decisions, the cultural attribute of that is extremely, extremely important.
Now, the thing about culture which sometimes gets misunderstood is, every company’s culture is unique. You cannot steal a culture and make it successful. The culture is unique to an organization. One of my favorite books, Anna Karenina, says that every happy family is happy in the same way. However, every unhappy family is unhappy in its unique way. So in the cultural aspect, you have to have a unique culture that speaks to you.
Sometimes people take culture as a way to feel pampered, or think having peanut butter sandwiches, foot massages, or sleep pods is culture. No. Those are perks that a company offers. The culture is, as I said, what the company needs to succeed in a sustained manner. We spent a lot of time around, what culture it is that we firstly want to promote, practice, and most importantly, permit, because that is really how you build a culture.
Our culture is a culture of accountability and fun. Because we like to hold ourselves accountable, and we like to have a lot of fun, all the time. What we do is serious, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. I think we have the ability to laugh with each other, laugh at ourselves sometimes, and just know that it’s a privilege to be in our positions and to make the most of it. It’s something that you have to work on every single day.
Alan Fleischmann
Culture such a magnet. What do we do in vulnerable communities and marginalized communities, where we know we can incentivize them to be a wave of employees? Those who either came from the STEM field or are determined through work to learn them? How do you get people to say, “Okay, I want to be part of this and I can be part of this?”
The draw to your culture — and I know you’re building a great one at SingleStore — is so smart, but how do you actually have others see it? And then, how do you actually create opportunity for those who wouldn’t normally have access to this?
Raj Verma
Yeah. I don’t know, is the answer on this one. However, I’ll talk about how we attract what we think is the ideal talent for us and give opportunities to the capable, irrespective of where they come from or what they believe.
The fact is, when you are doing innovative work… One of our tenets for success is a very steep rate of innovation, which then means that we are always at the cutting edge of technology. That’s one of the reasons why we tend to attract our top talent from you know, MIT, CMU, Berkeley, Wisconsin, University of Washington, et cetera. Some of the top colleges. We spend a lot of time and effort to be able to make ourselves seen in those campuses, and be able to attract people who actually want to be at the cutting edge of innovation.
Now, there is another challenge there that you see. By virtue of the number of graduates that you have in a year, Alan — out of 100, 80 are men, and only 20 women. So that creates a huge challenge for us tech leaders as to how to ensure that there is enough diversity in our organization. Because we, as tech firms, try to maximize the quality of our product. By the laws of physics, if you’re trying to maximize one thing, you’re going to minimize the other. That’s why the conversation about lack of diversity in technical organizations is a fact. There is a law of physics elements to it; however, it’s a fact.
Now, one of the things that we do is, how do you promote STEM among girls at a younger age? The problem that you have is, most of the chairs of faculty at major universities around computer science and electronic engineering are males. So, the role models for young girls to follow, that they could one day be chair of that department, is going to be a long process. Some of the things that we do here is provide resources, like computers that our engineers think aren’t good enough for them — we ensure that they go to schools in Oakland for African-American, lower socio-economic schools, along with other areas in San Francisco. We also allow our engineers to take up to two weeks off in a year, paid, to be able to go teach at those schools.
The other thing, which is very near and dear to my heart, Alan —I have two daughters and two sons. My daughters, since we’re talking about diversity here, saw their dad wear a suit, or attend a board meeting, or be in meetings, or be in a TV interview, et cetera. So they have the desire and the ambition, or at least, the vision that they could do this. There are millions of kids who don’t have that role model. So one of the things that we tend to do here is invite kids from lower socioeconomic sections of society to come spend a day with us in the office. Sit in the conference room when a meeting is going on and have a lemonade or a chocolate bar. They don’t necessarily need to participate; they just need to know what an office environment feels like, what a boardroom feels like, what the office of a CEO feels like. Those are some of the best times that I have, when you’re sitting with a bunch of kids who have never been inside an office and they’re looking around. Some of them have had six Gatorades in the last 45 minutes, corn chips and all the rest. They are taking in an environment which is very, very foreign to them. And hopefully, that will instill an ambition in them that they can one day be sitting on the chair that I’m sitting in right now and be able to make a difference in the world.
Alan Fleischmann
That in itself is how you curate a culture of diversity — giving people role models and mentors, exposing people to you and others.
Your journey has been rather remarkable. What would you offer young people in general who might want to one day be you? Who actually love what you do and would love to be CEO? What would you recommend to them?
Raj Verma
I mean, I don’t know why anyone would want to be me. But the fact is, you are unique. You are who you are, and people love you for who you are. That’s the advice that I have for my kids and for young people who are aspiring to get there.
The one thing that I’ve always said is, I’ve met probably 50 or 100 billionaires in my life, Alan, much like yourself. Have you ever met a pessimistic billionaire in your life? No. Optimism is something which is a common thread that I’ve seen — whether you’re a billionaire or not — in very, very successful people. The fact that this too shall pass when you’re going through a hard time, and just not getting ahead of yourself when the times are good. Being optimistic that tomorrow’s gonna be a lot better than today is one recipe that’s held pretty true to me.
The other bit is being your authentic self when you get to positions of leverage, or popularity, or whatever you might call it. I don’t want to use the term power. The fact is, people do try to assign intent to you, to criticize you for things that they don’t quite understand. The ability to have a courage and conviction in what you believe — because you did the right thing and you’ve made a thoughtful choice and a decision — is very, very important. That is something that you need to practice from your younger days, that will hold you in good stead.
The one thing that I always tell my kids is that smart people, successful people change their minds often. When you are presented a set of facts, or information, or data, or perspective that you otherwise did not have when you made your previous choice or decision, it’s okay to change your mind. The other bit is, successful people are right a lot.
Alan Fleischmann
There’s a reason why they’re successful.
Raj Verma
That’s right. So try to be right often.
Alan Fleischmann
Let me ask you a question — I know that we only have another minute, but I don’t want to end this without mentioning something was quite stunning to me.
You put out an ad in the Wall Street Journal last week, and as I said earlier when we first started this conversation, you don’t just believe in the geography of Silicon Valley: You believe in the ingenuity, the inspiration, and the innovation that comes from Silicon Valley. And just tell us quickly: What is that message you want out there?
Raj Verma
Yeah. Because of the SVB collapse, Alan, there was a lot of negativity surrounding the Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is what has afforded me all the opportunities in life. The opportunity to wake up every morning and dream about changing the world, albeit in a small way, every day. I know there are millions of people who feel this way. When all this negativity was going on, we wanted to use our small amplification platform to just let the world know what we think about the Valley.
We think that Silicon Valley is not a location. It’s an idea. It’s a place where most conversation starts with “what if?” and leads to change. It’s also a place that’s been the greatest wealth creation that has happened, in that 50-mile drive from San Jose to San Francisco. A lot of credit goes to the dreamers who gave here to actually make their dreams come true. And of course, the riches happened as a consequence of that, but for them even until today, it was that dream that brought them here. The fact that that their dream came true is an inspiration to the following generation. So we say to everyone in the Valley, dream on.
Alan Fleischmann
I love it.
You’ve been listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. We’ve had a wonderful hour with Raj Verma, who is the CEO of SingleStore. An incredible story about his journey, his vision, his inspiration, and some of the great lessons that we can all live by.
It’s been a wonderful hour, Raj. I wish we had more time, and I look forward to having you back on. One hour for you is not enough.
Raj Verma
Thank you very much, Alan. Thanks for your time and for your friendship, it means a lot to me.
Alan Fleischmann
Me too. Look forward to more. Thank you so much.