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Elementary Data (YC W22) Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 I'm Mayan, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Elementary Data.

00:04 We're building an open source data observability solution for data analytics engineers.

00:12 I started Elementary with Orr, my co-founder, about a year and a half ago.

00:19 And we've both been working with data for many years.

00:22 I experienced the problems of basically data breaks

00:27 all the time. And you always learn about it way too late after it becomes a real fiasco with your

00:35 users or consumers. So that was like the problem we wanted to solve in the world. We felt that

00:43 like there's a need for a solution

00:45 and we both built a pretty similar solution

00:48 in different companies.

00:50 So it felt like there's a place to build one solution

00:54 that many companies could use.

00:56 At first, we did the textbook

01:00 how to do ideation for a startup,

01:04 the discovery phase.

01:05 And we went and just talked to tons of teams.

01:09 I think we had conversations with data professionals from 70 different companies.

01:15 We learned way more from our first open source users than from all the conversations we had

01:21 before.

01:21 There is a really low barrier of entry, right?

01:24 You can just start,

01:26 you can just do something, build an MVP, post it, and then you will get immediate feedback on whether

01:34 it makes sense to users or not, right? Because you post something and then it's easy enough to

01:41 just put a post on Reddit or on LinkedIn or somewhere. And if you don't get any traction, it means something.

01:47 And if you get some initial traction and people, even, even if it sucks,

01:51 right. Even if it doesn't work,

01:52 if someone was interested enough to come and tell you it doesn't work,

01:56 then it means there's something there. And I think we realized that,

02:01 like we could have realized that six months earlier just start building instead

02:06 of talking and talking and talking and more conversations also i think something we did is

02:11 we were looking for uh what you would call design partners because that's like the um sort of the

02:19 playbook when you build um yeah a b2b SaaS product, look for design partners.

02:26 And again, we were going to companies and trying to make them use the open source instead of promoting it and waiting for people to come to us.

02:36 And then when people came to us, they were actively looking for a solution to this problem in this moment.

02:44 And they became 10 times more engaged.

02:47 Right now, the team, we have four engineers and we have a product manager.

02:54 And they're like building all day the product together.

02:58 And I'm like a bit jealous because I used to be in the code and in the details.

03:03 And I miss that.

03:06 But I'm also happy that it's like taking a life of its own. Our best hiring stories was a candidate that we wanted to

03:12 hire. And while he was interviewing for us, he just started to pick up issues and like contribute.

03:20 And then we're like, oh, we feel bad. We should start paying him for all the work he's doing for us.

03:26 So that's how we hired one of our first engineers.

03:30 So our big challenge for 2023 is to manage both the closed SaaS beta we started with

03:39 our first customers and not hurting our growth in the open source because we feel like we have

03:46 a long way to go still but as we are trying to build a sustainable business then we have to start

03:53 uh the second path as well so we hired uh we we grew the team so we think we can

04:00 now have the resources to do both and we're still hiring so uh if you're uh especially front-end

04:07 developers uh we're uh we're hiring but um i think that's our our biggest challenge for this year to

04:15 be able to do both um and right now in the open source we're mainly focusing on improving the

04:22 detection capabilities of the product and making the anomaly detection

04:26 much better like making the detection more sophisticated and handle use cases like

04:33 seasonality and stuff. How did you meet with your co-founder?

04:36 I'm sorry. So I was working on a startup called Signia. I was one of the first employees.

04:47 And then we grew.

04:48 And two years later, we hired an engineer,

04:52 Ronnie, a really talented developer.

04:55 And we became friends.

04:57 And then I met her husband, Ol.

05:00 And we became friends as well.

05:02 And eventually, we started ruining a lot of double dates, right?

05:07 Owen and I talking about tech and startups and our ambitions and data.

05:13 And eventually we decided to start a company together.

05:17 So, yeah, like what's the scene like in Israel?

05:21 Is there anything you might like to share about it?

05:24 And are you active there

05:25 in terms of conferences or you know going to offices about startups and and all this what's

05:29 um so uh yeah i don't know how if people are familiar with it but like israel has a huge

05:37 tech ecosystem and uh there are some companies here that build products that are really popular worldwide. And people probably don't even know they're Israelis.

05:48 Like Weeks and Monday.com and Waze and like a lot of tech here.

05:55 A lot of the industry here is cybersecurity related.

06:00 Like a lot of big cybersecurity companies and also small ones.

06:04 And not a lot of open source startups.

06:07 Like when Oren and I decided we were going to do it,

06:11 people thought we were crazy.

06:14 But now there are more open source companies here.

06:17 So it's kind of a growing industry.

06:19 And we try to like talk with each other and consult with each other.

06:23 And I felt a lot of support from other founders here

06:26 that were like in more advanced stages when I was just starting.

06:31 And I'm trying to help as well.

06:32 I think I already talked to like maybe 12 teams

06:37 that are thinking of doing this go-to-market

06:40 and are trying to understand why we did it and what are the challenges.

06:44 In my YC batch, there were 10% women, but hardly any CEOs.

06:51 And I think here in Israel, it's like the same.

06:54 Like you do see more and more women in tech, but not in like really leading positions yet.

07:02 I think like a while back, I saw an article there are like a hundred unicorns in

07:07 israel but only one women ceo of a of a unicorn so uh this is something that bothers me as a woman

07:16 ceo right but uh on the team we just uh made our first hire for a woman engineer. So that's cool. And I'm happy it was like our

07:27 fourth hire, which is pretty, pretty early. And on my previous startup, I was able to build a team of

07:34 50-50. So I hope I'll be able to do the same in elementary as well.

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