Pete DeJoy on Astronomer: 292% revenue growth, a viral PR moment, and the hunt for a new CEO

what do you mean first person to go to the like post

since the tragedy tragedy?

Yeah. Anyway, uh let's move on to our first guest of the stream. We have Pete Dejoy from Astronomer. How you doing, Pete? Good to meet you.

It's great to see you on guys.

How you doing? Thanks for having me on.

We're doing great. How are How are you? Uh uh give us uh give us an introduction. Give us a rundown on the business.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. Uh I'm doing great. We're we're sitting here in our new office. We actually just moved into a new space yesterday here in here in New York City.

That's amazing.

Um it's been a heck of a heck of a month at Astronomer. The last four weeks have been pretty crazy. Y

and look guys, as you know, I've been working on this company for for eight years as a co-founder. Um, you know, you always kind of have this implicit belief that your your idea and your mission is going to actually kind of get worldwide reach and become a household name. This is not how we expected it to happen.

Yep.

But you guys you guys clearly made the most of it, you know.

Yeah.

I think you would kill to be in like a fly on the wall in a cocktail party two months ago where you once again have to explain what you do and people are like, "Oh, cool. Yeah. Is that going well?" Like, "Yeah, cool. like, "Yeah, we" And

you're like, "Actually, we're amazing and we have raised like a series D and we're a huge company."

I we we just thought it was amaz I I remember um

uh it was probably like a month ago at this point, but somebody was like, "Wow, Ramp's so good at marketing. They managed to like be, you know, right on the the last post on LinkedIn was like talking about your guys' partnership with RAM."

I I I actually with our moms have gotten much easier.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I wound up learning a ton about Apache Airflow through this. I learned a ton about the company. Um, but but I'm interested a little bit more of the history. Uh, how did you get into this? I want to talk about the the comp to how data bricks is working. There's an open source competi uh open source story here. There's a competition with hyperscalers. I I actually do want to talk about the business. Um, so so maybe go into uh the prehistory. What led you to found the company? What was your background before starting Astronomer? Yeah. So, we founded the company as a group of of five of us in Cincinnati, Ohio. Um, it was a great team. We were we were pretty scrappy. There's a long story there that I'm sure we don't have time to go into today.

Sure.

Uh, but the short of it is we were really inspired by the work that Data Bricks was doing with Spark at the time and the work that Confluent was doing with Kafka.

Yep.

And when Airflow came out of Airbnb, we worked with Maxim, the creator, to really form a commercial entity that could drive it forward. Mhm. And that was really the focus of our business for the first several years of our existence, just establishing the community and trying to get to the next level. And we're fortunate enough to get that level of kind of viral adoption in the open source specifically at the high end of the market that formed a basis for us to build a commercial business around. And that's we've been focus.

Yeah. What does that early early work look like? Like there's this open source project. Are you just contributing to the open source project? Are you going to companies that are already running an open source implementation and just saying let us act as almost like a consultant? Are you spinning up uh kind of a a selfserve portal? Uh like like what are the different steps that you're actually taking?

Yeah, early on it was it was three-fold. The first thing was we need to establish credibility and velocity in the open source because you can't build an open source business unless you have a viral and vibrant open source community. So that was that was focus number one. Then early on before you actually have a commercial product because you have to devote all of your R&D resources towards building this open source community and project you do do a bunch of services deals and kind of consulting around that open source to form the basis of a business and for in in our case we use that to finance the development of our of our cloud product and on product.

Got it. Um so you know we started there we started with open source we started with services and consulting and then were able to to bring a cloud product to market several years thereafter and that that really has formed the basis for our growth and business. And what was the early adopter? Like like you know graph databases are going to be used by social networks like what's kind of the most tangible business value uh example that you can give of like someone using astronomer or airflow broadly like just this technology specifically like like what is it used for?

Yeah sure.

Yeah. Airflow generally is like seen as mission control for your data. There are 80,000 companies in the world using it to schedule, monitor, and manage these data workflows that are powering these data and AI applications.

Um, it just had its biggest update ever. We released Airflow 3 in March. We're very proud of it. It's a very much built Thank you. Thank you.

Going to hit the G.

Airflow 3.

Airflow 3 fires me up. I I I

well so one one immediate question I have is is how how did uh during during those early days how did the venture community react to this kind of strategy? It feels like today every startup will talk about their open-source strategy but a lot of it ends up feeling just kind of like marketing because it's the it's the thing to do because there's been so many

examples and and winners like Astronomer that that invested in open source early and really built a business on it. But now it ends up just being like kind of a oh yeah we have an open source strategy but but but there's not a lot if you kind of uh dig in.

Yeah. No, no, definitely more obvious today than it was back then. Like keep in mind when we when we started Astronomer, Redshift was like the cloud data warehouse of choice. We would like see Snowflake very sparingly in the wild, but it definitely was not like one of our one of our common discussions in the field. And obviously that changed pretty dramatically through the years. And I think the industry started to wake up to the value of these businesses and how aggressive they how aggressively they can grow if you get them right. Um, so so to your question, you know, it definitely has changed. It's it's more obvious now and it's more of an execution challenge. You guys brought up kind of the hypervisor competition. That's that's one of the kind of core riddles that you need to solve as one as an open source business. Um, but it's been it's been great to see the trajectory of the company and the support from the venture community. We were fortunate enough to raise a $93 million series D round in March from the good folks at Gain Capital. Very very exciting. Uh very very great time for the company.

Um and we're just looking forward on driving it forward, guys. We've got a great list of customers. Um Ramp is one of them. They're an amazing business and also a great podcast sponsor from what I understand.

The best. They're using AI everywhere naturally and a lot of these AI workflows that are doing everything from fraud detection when you swipe a ramp card to kind of automation of internal outbound sales processes are actually powered by Astronomer under the hood.

Sure.

And we built a great partnership with them getting those to getting those to life. talk about how you guys turned this this kind of uh incident into a win because I think it was

many people in uh in our neck of the woods specifically on X were saying that this was like the the the PR master stroke. It was um one of the best executed kind of campaigns. It was genuinely funny and and perfectly timed. Um, but I'm curious what kind of that that process looked like and and the team and even the evenis logical like it's not like everyone I I believe uh wasn't Ryan Reynolds involved. Like that's not somebody who's like hanging out with every single Silicon Valley company. Like it's not like oh yeah, everyone that does a series D with Bane Capital is teamed up with Brian Reynolds now. Like that's not the narrative. Yeah. Um and so that that was fascinating. So very interested to see just the the thought process.

Yeah. Look, um, candidly, my team deserves so much of the credit for that. Um, you know, we were we were dealing with so much in that in that first week after everything went down and definitely did not have a celebrity cameo talking about Apache Airflow on my bingo card in the grand scheme of this company. But look, the reason we felt like it was important to do something Yeah.

was that we were kind of we found ourselves in this position effectively overnight where more people in the world knew about our business than we ever anticipated would even in kind of our even in kind of the the the most extreme circumstances. And we also have an incredible team of 300 plus people that have spent almost a decade pouring blood, sweat, and tears into building building what we believe to be a great company. So, we just wanted to be sure that when the public thought about astronomer, now that everyone knew who we were, they knew a little bit about what we did. And that was really the incentive to actually go do something. And we we were fortunate to have our 15 minutes of fame. It worked out in in such an asymmetric way for us as far as like kind of the PR and media angle is concerned. Um, but

and the challenge the challenge to go viral again with with a with a media, you know, with an ad that that actually explained the business was the be the magic of it, which was so great. It was like, hey, we're going to get people's attention again, but this time let's make sure that we talk about uh what we actually do.

Yep. Yep. Um, what was the uh uh I'm curious to get a sense of demand over the last, you know, have you guys benefited, you know, have you tried to capture uh you know, I'm sure you've captured value from from all this extra attention? Um, you know, maybe CTO's waking up of saying, I hadn't heard about Astronomer and suddenly I I want to sign up for a demo and and seriously explore this. But what what's that been like? Yeah, look, our our employees and customers have maintained an incredible amount of stability through this. Um, it's been really actually incredible to see and but but we're an enterprise software business, so it's not like consumer eyeballs deterministically translate to dollars. Yeah.

Like there's not some calculus that says because we have this many page views, like I think our site got more views than the New York Times for a day. That that that actually like outputs a dollar amount in terms of like these big enterprise deals that we're doing. But I will say we have seen a lot of early signs just in kind of entering our third our third fiscal quarter that many of our potential buyers, CTO's, CIOS, COS know about us now that didn't prior. We've gotten a lot of inbound calls. Our sales team is fielding them like crazy. Um, and that gets us very excited about the path forward. So, we just have a lot of execution to do ahead of us and yeah,

candidly, we're we're just happy and excited to be back to focusing on the business. It's such an interesting like like situation with this company because

it's not like a Netflix subscription where like if the Netflix CEO does something that everyone can be I'm canceling Netflix today and then they're you know you got to win them back but like ripping out a core piece of your data infrastructure even if you were in that camp of like I want to churn I don't like what's going on with this company like that's probably a couple weeks or a month decision and fortunately the astronomer like headed all of that off and and gave everyone a very clear way forward in just a few weeks within the within the news cycle. And so yeah, my how's the uh how's the CEO search going? You're CEO now uh but you're you're eight years in and and I understand you guys are are looking for uh somebody to uh carry the torch for the next uh next chapter.

Yeah, absolutely. So, look guys, as as a co-founder, this company really means everything to me. I know that sounds a little self-righteous, but it's honest. Been working on this for, you know, most of my adult life. And um I'm very proud of what we've built and being asked to serve in this job is actually a real real privilege. I care so much about the business and the people that we have here, but also like as as a co-founder and an entrepreneur, your job at every step of the journey is to reunder your worldview and do whatever it takes to get a win for the company.

Y

So, right off the bat, our board put out a search. I'm I'm working with them very closely on that and very supportive of of that process and what I'm focused on in the interim is just running the company and doing what I can for our employees and we'll see where it goes from there.

Awesome. Well, congratulations on on how you and the team have handled it. It's it's uh it's fantastic and I wish we could use the product. Maybe we can't. We'll we'll find the team find a use case cuz we just

we got some we got some great AI native kind of consumer oriented products coming out in the next 30 days that you can get your hands on. I'll say awesome.

All right. Give us the final thing. Give us the call to action for the event. Has that passed? Has that happened? Because I remember that from the video.

Yeah, we have a we have a virtual conference coming up in September. Fantastic. You'll actually hear more about these AI native kind of consumer oriented data engineering products that we're releasing then. Um, and we're really excited to bring it to the world. There will be a really really great set of releases in there. So, it's happening midepptember. Amazing. Looking forward to it. Well, thanks so much for rooting for you and the team and uh

what a what a fantastic piece of just Silicon Valley lore.

It's lore. It's lore. Incredibly well played and thanks for joining. It's great to talk to you soon.

Thanks, fellas. See you soon.

Cheers, Pete.

Uh in other news, the Palunteer CTO Sham Sankar, who's been on the show, confirms that he's working on a new pro-American film production company. He says the goal is to make content that makes you proud to be an American. I love this. Uh uh Sham Sankar is raising money for a new production company called Founders Films with Palunteerian Ryan Podos Podolski and Christian Garrett's involved.

Didn't Sham teased this when he came on.

Yeah. And Yeah. Yeah. We've t he's talked about it and I think he wrote a piece in Pirate Wires about it which you should go read and subscribe to. Um and uh Sham Sankar is uh on an absolute tear and I'm very excited for this and uh it's I it'll be very interesting to see specifically the uh the level of investment. We talked about this a little bit but um Hollywood is in this in this era of we need to even have a chance at an ROI. We need to invest $400 million. And so you see all these major blockbusters, but by virtue of when you when you invest $400 million in order to make a billion dollars, it has to sell everywhere. And that means it has to sell internationally. And that means that the planes have to be from like, you know, some anonymous country because we don't want to make anyone upset. So like, yeah, it's an American movie, but it's like we're fighting the the the like the and then they make up some name, right? um as opposed to a story like you just can't really make a story about like the Cold War because who knows that might upset a certain person in a different country. And so um it'll be interesting to see what uh what level of investment like what type of swings are they t are they taking? Are they swinging for grand slams and putting $200 million into a single film? Is it a bunch of $10 million projects? Is it a bunch of $1 million projects? The Blair Witch Project, which I know you haven't seen, uh has been was made for uh under a million dollars and I think it grossed over a hundred million dollars. It was one of the greatest ROI.

Have you seen Tyler? Have you seen the Blair Witch Project?

Of course. It was filmed like

Have you seen the Blair Witch Project? Wow. You

filmed in in Blair, Maryland. Well,

no way.

Yeah. Right near my house.

That's amazing. So the the bullc case for AI in film production is that even if budgets stay the same, we could get five times as many films, 10 times as many films, if the models can get

significantly better. Yeah. I think that the just the cost to produce a what what we think of today as like a blockbuster Yeah.

or a Marvel level film could fall dramatically.

Yeah. I I like the production side is interesting. There's certainly a way to drop costs and produce something that feels like a like a hund00 million film for $10 million. That that feels like it's coming. But I think that honestly it might be more of a distribution problem in question. Like if you have a if you have a banger video, a banger movie, and you know that there that people are are excited about it, but it's a little bit more of a niche audience, there's really no way to get people to pay for it other than the the traditional playbook of like a wide theatrical release all over the place. Um, and so you wind up in the UFC camp where you have a movie and your only option is to go to the streamers or and hope that you're converting subs or a really wide release. I wonder if there's some middle ground that will pop up. I wonder if we'll learn something from UFC, but um, it's very hard to it's very hard to take a movie that doesn't merit a huge release and actually make an ROI in the theaters today. Anyway, what what do you want to talk about next?

Run said yesterday, Elon falling so in love with the Grock image model. Imagine