Organizational Trends in Sales and Hiring

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Spencer Huang, who is the VP of sales at Qubole. Welcome to the show, Spencer.

Spencer Huang: Thank you, Jessica.

Jessica Ly: We're going to talk about cloud data, business analytics, data platforms all kinds of technological innovations that are taking place around data because we know that it's so important now. So please explain a little bit more about your technology and where it fits into the big picture because we hear a lot about BI technologies.

Spencer Huang: Yes, thank you, Jessica, again, for having me on the show. So Qubole, we are a cloud native data platform. And essentially, what that means, I'll just break it down. We are 100% Cloud. We don't run on premise. And when we mean by data platform, we enable organizations to process their data within the cloud and offer a single experience for their data analysts, their data engineers, their data scientists, and their data administrators to govern the entire platform for their organization.

Jessica Ly: So you allow people to take the raw data and analyze that and you have a user interface that's very easy to then actually create all these algorithms to do to get insights.

Spencer Huang: Yes, so I think what I've just mentioned, kind of the different personas. So if you're a data analyst, or you're a data scientist, I mean, at the end of the day, all you really care about is I need to get insights from the data. And so what we do at Qubole, if you're coming in signing into Qubole, with that persona, we offer like a I'll call it a sequel workbench, we also offer Jupiter Notebooks or Zeppelin Notebooks. And these are the primary environments where a data analyst or data scientist can write, you know, Python code, PySpark code, to be able to extract, write, you know, build models. And to get to those insights. Going back to your earlier point about some of the raw data, because we're 100% in the cloud, we leverage a lot of the advantages of the cloud. I’m sure your audience or haven't heard even called separation of storage and compute. So one of the issues with on-premise, you would have bare-metal hardware, and these boxes would have to be on 24/7. So with the cloud and the advantages of a cloud, what Qubole does is we can spin up clusters, or we can spin up VMs or EC two, so that's for the compute side, and then the raw data is landing, you know, it's in the cloud, it's landing in an object store, like an s3, or if it's Google clouds, you know, Google Storage. And so those two are separate. And so leveraging the advantages of the cloud, if you have huge data sets, you know, from the raw data, and a data scientist or a data analyst needs to process that data, it needs a lot of computing power. That's where Qubole comes in, you know, so the data analyst is like, hey, I need to get this insight. I'm writing out this, you know, this query, and I don't care about what's happening in the backend cube. Will you take care of the back end? And for Qubole, you know, if it's a query that they have to scan, you know, a petabyte of data, you know, hopefully, they have a filter on there. So there's a where clause, but we'll meet, you know, Qubole on the back ends, well, that's a big job. Let me go ahead and spin up, you know, 100 VMs. And when the job is done, we'll shut it down. So that's the advantage of the cloud. And that's kind of the magic behind what Qubole does.

Jessica Ly: Let's talk about some of the relevant usages now because I know a lot of companies are doing clinical trials to find a solution to the Coronavirus situation. Could you share what's some of the ways that the technology is being used?

Spencer Huang: Yes. So for a data scientist or for someone in R&D, you know, there's a problem that they need to understand or find molecules that can best? You know, in case of like, say, COVID, right, what, what are the right proteins? And, you know, looking at DNA, and how do I ensure I can develop a certain molecule or drug to basically, you know, get to the outcome of a vaccine. So, a lot of that takes a lot of, you know, there's a lot of machine learning, a lot of algorithms that they'll need to write, and, again, the raw data, so you know, with the environments that we deliver with Qubole. Their data scientists or biostatisticians can use Qubole to be able to write code to be able to run jobs. And some of these jobs are big jobs. They take a lot of computing, you know, they'll. Some of the algorithms are like neural networks, you know, deep learning. They can write some of this code to be able to solve that. And so in the case of life, sciences and healthcare, using the data to be able to predict or be able to get to that better outcome that's you know that's very typical or that's a very strong use case in the healthcare Life Sciences vertical.

Jessica Ly: So besides the healthcare challenges, which is a very serious thing. What about one thing, the non serious stuff like online gaming.

Spencer Huang: Oh yeah without from the very you know very life threatening stuff to well I guess in some people's world gaming is life threatening right you know I have kids and they're always playing games and when they're when their character dies or gets hurt you know you hear ahh so I won't downplay not being serious but to answer your question yes data is being used you know Qubole is being used heavily by some of the largest gaming companies in the world and at the end of the day I'm there's there's a couple things that the gaming company if you think, you know, you were your gaming company hat you know, you're the publisher of the game, what do you want people you know, to do, obviously, you know, you want them to spend more money, right, you know, you deliver a free game, you make money by these microtransactions you know, they buy skins, they buy weapons, they buy add ons, sort of, you know, DLCs, downloadable content, and so for order for it to get a gamer or player to do that, they have to have a good experience. So a lot of our customers that are in the gaming, you know, the gaming publishers or the developers, they're using our software to analyze what players are doing, how they're moving, let's just say if it's a map, how they're moving through the map, you know, are they dying, you know are they buying certain items and then they're using that data and insight to try to create a more fair world a balanced world because our balanced game I mean, I guess let me just flip it around the frustration could be if you're in a game, your level one and also in a level 30 player comes in and just kills you out and takes all your stuff you're never gonna play that game again right? And so so what these publishers are gaming people are trying to do is they're trying to create that a little bit of a fair a better-balanced world for you and by using the data by looking at you know, different items you have you know, if one player has my kids they Opie overpower, they have an Opie weapon you know that just like destroying the entire world that's not fair. So they look at, you know, these kinds of things. And then the other big one too is cheating and fraud. So gamers love to always get the end. They always like to get the upper hand, so they'll create hacks and they'll create ways that they'll get the upper hand and so anti cheat and anti-fraud which covers goes across many different verticals, not just gaming and so they're looking at you know, querying the data seeing this player This doesn't look right you know, is this is an outlier you know that these players shouldn't be doing this and so that's another really big you know, use case that we're seeing.

Jessica Ly: Very interesting. Let's talk about sales. I know that it's very different now for enterprise sales, you know, we're not meeting for happy hours anymore. It’s a challenge. How is it going for you?

Spencer Huang: Um, I would say this quarter is much better than last quarter, so when COVID hit, I'm sure everyone was what we are all frightened,anti-cheat you know, we had this lockdown. So what we saw in sales at that point in especially, it's at the end of the day, we're human right and so if I'm trying to do a sale and it's like, put yourself back in March and you know, there's so much like unknown or so unknown today but think of how much unknown it is and I'm calling you up as a buyer. Hey, would you like to buy Quoble? I mean, that's pretty insensitive. I mean, that's the dumbest thing so to do as a salesperson, so what we saw are what I instructed my team to do, you know, put sales a secondary at the end of the day people buy from people they like or trust and are you building trust with your customer or your prospect and I think that is actually to always be 100% even Corona or no Coronavirus but back last quarter I said let's amplify that even more. And so last quarter it wasn't so much about sales yes sales important but let's really take care of our customer let's see how they're doing. You know kids are staying at home, you know, meaning like you can't. How do you handle a zoom meeting like my kid busts the into this zoom meeting? It’s like, does this? I think your audience would be okay. It’s accepted now, right and but back then, we didn't know. And so I think it was just for us to be a little bit more resort empathetic and caring and that's what we did a lot and so I would say business, for the most part, took a little bit of a backseat. When you know when people first and that's what I really, you know, was telling my team to do.

Jessica Ly: I suspect that a lot of this experience in working from home is going to stay even after the COVID situations are over because personally I love it and working from home, being able to interview people outside of the physical Bay Area and opening up this platform for people all over the world. And so there's a lot of advantages. And I'm wondering because, on the sales side, you're able to interview candidates anywhere in the world and bring in talent from anywhere in the world, not just the expensive city areas, you know, then that there would be a lot of advantages to that to your thoughts on the remote workers. And Allen's available.

Spencer Huang: Yeah, so it's just, I did do a hire. And to this day, I have still not have met that person. In-person, it's what I bought. I only know him through the zoom window and maybe a phone call. So was my very first I mean, typically, when you hire people, you want to meet them in person go through rounds, but we did that 100%. Now I'm sure your audience doesn't find that too strange. But we did that hire. I think in April, which was strange back then, I was like, can we feel confident hiring people 100% over zoom. And we did it. So I do believe that yes, for some of the sales activity, and you can do this, over 100% work from home. But at the end of the day, I do believe you know, once things start opening up, you know, the vaccines out, you know, we're human beings, we’re social creatures. There's a sense of, you know, we buy like adventures, like we buy from people we like, and we trust, and I don't know how much trust we can build, you know, Jessica, I'm learning to trust your resume, but I still haven't met you yet. You know, and I think, for me to feel 100% comfortable. I Just we need to meet. And I think you know, once that happens, I do believe, you know, we as you know, as salespeople will be what people will be back, we'll be meeting with people. And I think for some of the maybe complex sales, deals that especially for some of the stuff that we sell, you know, there's so many different layers, and so many people you need to meet with, I think it's almost it's necessary for us to have folks that are better closer to the customer, or maybe traveling to the customer. And that's not to say, you know, some of the lots of maybe a majority of that can be done through zoom or work from home. But I really believe that in the future, we will be going back and I hope so too. I know you love working from home. I kind of 50-50 if I'm on the computer so much. I'm trying to get back pain now. And I was just slouching before. So Jessica said, sit up. So I hope we get back out because I can't just sit here in front of a computer all day. It's just It's killing me.

Jessica Ly: Yeah, I think that this situation has forced us into experiencing something that we otherwise would not have the opportunity to write. It has forced us to actually work from home and find creative ways to be productive. And I think that it did, then allow us to prove whether it is possible and how much of it is possible. So it gave us the opportunity to experience something. And then yes, after we have the vaccine, and everybody's back to things opening up again, I think what it has done is giving us the opportunity to say hey, we've gone through it, and let's continue it or it has not worked out well. Let's come by and see what’s best to keep on what not to keep right.

Spencer Huang: Yeah, I think it's going to most likely be what's the combined. Let’s keep certain things. Let’s not keep sharing things. It'll be interesting. I think people can talk about what's the new normal, and what that's going to look like. I really don't know. But I mean, we do know, there's a lot of things like we talked about some of those industries. You know, gaming is doing fantastic right now, you know, online, we have some entertainment customers to online streaming is doing fantastic. It'll be really interesting to see, you know, once things start opening up are the kids. I don't wanna say kids because I do play games. Are we going to go out and start playing outside and the game is going to drop ours online streaming gonna drop? I don't know, you know, one of the major studios released a feature film, I guess you could say, you know, Everyone, and I think, you know, buyers were paying 2999. And that is an entirely new business model. If it wasn't for COVID, I would have said, yeah, that's completely insane. But these are new business models that are better than we're seeing. And let's lab really curious to see what's going to stay afterward.

Jessica Ly: Right, I know that the theaters will open up again. And so, with more streaming, will the revenue for those theaters go back to the way it was? Or will you see that as actually a declining business with more streaming available in the comfort of your home to watch?

Spencer Huang: Yeah, I don't know what your vote is, but I don't. I would vote, you know, those big chairs where you lay back and you have a beer. Yeah, I can't replicate that at my house. So I look forward to being going back to that environment because you can't recreate that experience. But I don't know. Maybe people will be like. I’ll save the money and stay at home. I don't know. What's your take?

Jessica Ly: Well, I mean, I think we do want different environments after a while even though I have a fabulous home that I love, you know, it's like a vacation for me. But I do want a different environment. I do want to go out to the restaurant and eat, go to eat or for date night. So you're right. We do need changes. Whatever we have cannot be the only place to enjoy no matter how good it is, you know?

Spencer Huang: Yeah, Exactly.

Jessica Ly: Very interesting conversation. Thank you so much, Spencer, for being on the show to talk with us about the data platform trends and your thoughts on sales. How the situation is now, so I appreciate you being a thought leader on the program.

Spencer Huang: All right. Thank you, Jessica, for having me.