Transcript: From Mars Rover to Starups: Ex-aws exec khawaja shams on the art of product-market fit in b2b cloud
In this episode of The Startup Project, Nataraj Sindam interviews Khawaja Shams, Co-founder and CEO of Momento. Khawaja shares his journey from working on the Mars Rover at NASA to leading major teams at AWS. He discusses the insights that led to founding Momento and offers a playbook on finding product-market fit, building a B2B go-to-market strategy for cloud infrastructure, and the importance of customer obsession for startups.
2024-10-15
Host: Once you land a potential customer you immediately got to start looking for local likes.
Host: Because when you go to those local likes, they know that they're not the first ones.
Host: They're not the sacrificial lamb that you're you're trying with.
Host: And so that's that's important.
Host: The focus matters.
Host: The look alikes you know, find the look alikes matters.
Host: The other part is you just you just never want to let a customer down.
Host: We sell boring infrastructure.
Host: But we take pride in the fact that as more AI applications are formed, the undeniable truth, the axioms that are always going to be true.
Host: People are going to want more interactivity and that interactivity has to be fueled by the latest data, so real-time data and they want it fast.
Host: It's never going to change.
Host: And the theme of products that we help build allow folks to get more interactive applications based on real-time data and make them faster.
Host: That's why we do caching and messaging.
Host: It's the bread and butter of interactive low-latency applications.
Host: One thing I learned about myself is that I'm pretty impatient.
Host: You know, what was it like to work at NASA?
Host: You know, I worked on the NASA supercomputer as well and you know, we had a demo that showed Amazon had released spot instances.
Host: You could run for about a hundred bucks an hour.
Host: You could run a top 500 supercomputer.
Host: A lot of fun just working on, you know, AWS in the early days and taking the state-of-the-art technology and bringing it to space exploration.
Host: You did image processing for Mars Rover, the drone communications for interplanetary missions.
Host: Then you worked at Amazon.
Host: I had it in my heart to just be a part of like startups one day.
Host: And Amazon purchased um a video encoding company called Elemental Technologies.
Host: And um I didn't know anything about video, but I really wanted to be there.
Host: Sorry.
Host: Crazy because um 2013 is where I think I started observing That was my first job in the US and observing AWS and Amazon close to me and then we used to think that it's already a hundred billion dollar company and I think yesterday it's like a $2 trillion company.
Host: All you had to do in the last 10 years was just buy Amazon, Microsoft, basically all the three clouds and you would exceed every.
Host: About 15 years ago.
Host: Werner Vogels said something really controversial where people were saying is AWS just a hobby project for Amazon and he said one day AWS will be bigger than the retail business.
Host: And people were just like, okay, this is just posturing, that's never going to happen.
Host: But the one thing about Amazon leaders is you know, they really believe in the Think Big Leadership Principle.
Host: And then the leadership principle just says, you know, thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Host: Nataraj is the host of Startup Project podcast.
Host: He is an investor at Incisive VC, an Angel investor, and a product manager.
Host: All opinions expressed by Nataraj and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of the firms they work with.
Host: This podcast is informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.
Host: Natraj and guests may maintain positions in the companies or securities discussed on this podcast.
Host: To learn more, visit the startupproject.io. Nataraj: Hey Khwaja, welcome to the Startup project podcast. Khwaja: Hey Nataraj. Khwaja: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. Khwaja: Excited to be here.
Nataraj: Yeah, so for audience, I'll I'll set a little bit of context, you know, about you. Nataraj: Um, and I was going through your profile and you have a pretty, you know, interesting career till now. Nataraj: Uh, you worked at NASA.
Nataraj: Uh, you did image processing for Mars Rover. Nataraj: You draw communications for interplanetary missions. Nataraj: Then you worked at Amazon, uh, in AWS, worked on Dynamo DB, Simple DB, uh, which powered Amazon retail, Amazon video.
Nataraj: And then you were head of AWS and Elemental. Nataraj: Um, and now you're building Momento which is a, you know, serverless cache. Nataraj: Uh, low latency messaging service and soon to be launched or already launched durable storage service.
Nataraj: Um, and you've also closed uh series A led by Bane Capital 15 million dollars. Nataraj: Um, so yeah, you've done a a lot of stuff and congratulations on series A. Nataraj: Uh, I guess to start with, you know, what was it like to work at NASA?
Khwaja: Oh, it was great.
Khwaja: I started NASA as, you know, while I was still in college and it was great to be surrounded by incredibly smart people who were, you know, more more so than smart, they were very passionate about what it was that they were working on this endeavor to further human reach and explore places that we have never seen before.
Khwaja: It's a pretty inspirational mission. Khwaja: And I saw firsthand what you can accomplish if all you really care about is, you know, that passion, that that mission that uh that you're on.
Khwaja: Um, a lot of the distractions, you know, team dynamics, politics, all of that kind of disappear when everybody is unified in chasing that one mission and I um, I really enjoyed that working at um at JPL. Khwaja: At NASA JPL.
Nataraj: Can you talk about the projects that you were involved in? Nataraj: Uh while there? Khwaja: Yeah, I so I started working on the cameras on board the Mars Rovers.
Khwaja: I started as a uh you know, I was more on the hardware side and one thing I learned about myself is that I'm pretty impatient and impatience is a is a virtue I guess as as far as I'm concerned.
Khwaja: But um um you know, I found that software engineering had a much better velocity with which you see the results of what you're working on.
Khwaja: You can iterate faster and you're not, you know, you can see the results of your of your labor uh come to life quicker. Khwaja: So I shifted over to the image processing side.
Khwaja: And image processing for Mars has a lot of interesting challenges, you know, data is coming down from Mars and what you want to do is to paint all of the relevant images next to each other.
Khwaja: So that scientists can see a 360 degree panorama around, you know, what's going on around the rover. Khwaja: You want to overlay satellite imagery that's been captured alongside the terrestrial imagery that's been taken by by the rover.
Nataraj: Where you also impatient because it takes a lot of time to get images from Mars, right? Khwaja: Exactly. Khwaja: It it does take a lot of time to to get images from Mars, but you know, it was taking longer to process the images.
Khwaja: And uh you know, because we were generating multi-gigapixel panoramas in, you know, as quickly as we could, as soon as the data comes in, people want to look at it.
Khwaja: And that's when I decided to punch in my personal credit card and I went in and became a customer of AWS Amazon Web Services to see if I can get these panoramas to be generating a lot faster. Khwaja: And so I got to work on that.
Khwaja: I moved our entire image processing pipeline onto AWS, took advantage of the elasticity. Khwaja: There weren't a lot of services in AWS back then. Khwaja: This is back in like 2008, 2009 time frame. Khwaja: This is pre EBS.
Uh you know, we had EC2, S3, and SQS is is all we had access to. Khwaja: And got to deploy that and was a lot of fun just working on, you know, AWS in the early days and taking the state-of-the-art technology and bringing it to space exploration.
Nataraj: Does it involve a lot of process at NASA to get yourself reimbursed with your personal credit card? Khwaja: Oh, yeah, so I started uh prototyping on public data sets.
Khwaja: And I I don't think I ever got reimbursed for uh for the initial credit cards that I that I spent. Khwaja: I got reimbursed in you know, I I think I I I feel like I became a better engineer and I I learned a lot and that was totally worth it.
Khwaja: But onboarding Amazon as a vendor back in 2008, uh 2009 time frame, like late 2008 time frame was hard because, you know, there was commentary like, what does the bookstore need like know about running infrastructure?
Khwaja: Like they they don't know what what it's like to run data centers. Khwaja: And you know, or or maybe, you know, like can they actually do stuff securely? Khwaja: Like can they live up to our standards?
Khwaja: And so it took a lot of, you know, uh effort to qualify them and to make sure that they were compliant to all the regulations that we had to comply to.
Khwaja: But after that point, you know, GPL was supposed was able to just um uh the NASA center I worked at, we were able to just uh pay for the AWS uh usage via the PO.
Khwaja: And then I could take my credit card off and you know, I I I couldn't afford to pay for all of the image processing needs that we had, but it was good enough to do uh prototype work.
Nataraj: And that made you join Amazon because of did you see like the potential or it was just another job opportunity?
Khwaja: Yeah, I I joined NASA because I like to have a positive impact of what I'm doing and I thought that the extending the human reach was a pretty novel endeavor to take humanity to where humans can't go because NASA JPL the center I worked at, they are the premier NASA center for, you know, robotics exploration of the solar system and and going to places where humans just can't go.
Khwaja: Um, the furthest uh spacecraft they operate is beyond it's Voyager. Khwaja: It's beyond the edge of the solar system now. Khwaja: And I thought this was a very profound mission.
Khwaja: And the more I worked with the leaders at Amazon and the engineers at Amazon, the more I realized that this is the beginning of something really magical.
Khwaja: Cloud computing at the time was commoditizing infrastructure to make it available for experimentation. Khwaja: And it's the same thing.
Khwaja: Like the way I was going and putting my credit cards in, I I felt that startups are going to be able to run a lot faster because they could just punch in their credit cards and experiment without the physical barriers of buying infrastructure.
Khwaja: I had a demo where I I was showing that, you know, I worked on the NASA supercomputer as well and you know, we had a demo that showed Amazon had released spot instances. Khwaja: You could run for about a hundred bucks an hour.
Khwaja: You could run a top 500 supercomputer. Khwaja: And and I did the benchmarks to to validate that. Khwaja: So I was inspired by the profound impact AWS was going to have on the the GDP of the world's innovation by enabling more experimentation.
Khwaja: I wanted to be a part of that mission and I wanted to, you know, bring those benefits and and be a part of the the journey that that brings it and do my little part that I could. Khwaja: And that's why I got inspired and enjoyed Amazon.
Nataraj: Amazon is a particularly unique place from, you know, what I lot of friends who work at Amazon because I'm Seattle place. Nataraj: Um, what was your experience of working at Amazon?
Nataraj: Like those early days to, you know, when you came out of Amazon? Khwaja: Yeah, I mean when I joined Amazon, it was 2013 and it was still early days of Amazon compared to where Amazon is today. Khwaja: Amazon was a much smaller company.
Khwaja: Uh, the market cap was, you know, a tenth or so of where it is today and um the employee count was smaller and what I really liked about Amazon at the time was it had the same kind of missionary mentality of people really passionate about achieving a particular goal and working hard to to kind of deliver on it.
Khwaja: It was still a smaller company, there wasn't any bureaucracy or anything like that. Khwaja: You you have an idea, you just just go get it done and the level of ownership was through the roof. Khwaja: And I really enjoyed that.
Khwaja: It felt very much like the same passion that people had at at NASA and there was this very unique feeling of customer obsession. Khwaja: And 2013 was a really nice time to be at Amazon in particular in the AWS division of Amazon, right?
Khwaja: The AWS was tiny back then.
Khwaja: And the customer obsession was really nice because people would put themselves in the shoes of the customers and you would get to go work with all kinds of customers around the globe and understand problems in a completely foreign domain that you have no idea about and help them solve deeply technical problems via using the AWS infrastructure.
Khwaja: So I had a lot of fun and I felt, you know, incredibly productive in terms of the contributions I was able to make um to the world in my small ways um by being a part of uh AWS in those days.
Nataraj: Uh, which teams did you join and which products did you work on while being at Amazon? Khwaja: Yeah, so I joined as the um uh technical assistant to Charlie Bell.
Khwaja: Charlie ran, you know, basically product and engineering for AWS at the time. Khwaja: Um, and technical assistant is basically a chief of staff role. Khwaja: It has the title is technical assistant. Khwaja: You're the chief of staff.
Khwaja: It's the same role that Andy Jesse had to to Jeff Bezos um at one point. Khwaja: And it's a role typically reserved for somebody who's been tenured at Amazon for a while. Khwaja: Uh, but I got lucky.
Khwaja: I I was able to get that role uh as my first job at at Amazon.
Khwaja: And it was nice because I got to learn how AWS was scaling and I got to be in the, you know, the same meeting rooms as all the core AWS leaders for six to eight hours a day for the first 15 months I was at Amazon.
Khwaja: And it was like the best MBA program that you can get access to because, you know, I I just got to absorb. Khwaja: I didn't know anything about running a business or running making money off of infrastructure.
Khwaja: I'm still learning, but I was able to absorb a lot while being there and and just watching the way Andy and Charlie were were were operating. Khwaja: Uh subsequent to that, I ran um you know, it's a rotational role.
Khwaja: You're you're supposed to go in, learn and go, you know, um repay Amazon the benefits of all of which you've learned by taking an operational role. Khwaja: So I was um appointed to run Dynamo DB, um which is a large no SQL database.
Khwaja: And um you know, I did that for for a bit and then um Amazon purchased. Khwaja: I I had it in my heart to just be a part of like startups one day. Khwaja: And Amazon purchased uh um a video encoding company called Elemental Technologies.
Khwaja: And um I didn't know anything about video, but I really wanted to be there. Khwaja: So I I went in as the the person who was supposed to do the integration work.
Khwaja: Like everything from getting their wifi set up to, you know, uh getting everybody an Amazon username and password and all of that. Khwaja: Um, so that's the kind of hands-on, you know, roles that are available at Amazon.
Khwaja: And uh, in the process, I I fell in love with the people that were there, the energy in the startup uh of Elemental, the passion that people had.
Khwaja: And this was a company that got acquired and we were supposed to just go and build a bunch of AWS services on the technology that Elemental had.
Khwaja: So I stayed back after the integration was done and took on the role to run product and engineering for Elemental and ship um six different AWS media services.
Khwaja: And so a long and short of it, I ran Dynamo and then I ran product and engineering for all of the media services for for AWS.
Nataraj: It's crazy because um 2013 is where I think I started observing that was my first job in the US and observing AWS and Amazon close to me.
Nataraj: And then we used to think that it's already $100 billion dollar company and I think yesterday it's like a $2 trillion dollar company.
Nataraj: All you had to do in the last 10 years was just buy Amazon, Microsoft, basically all the three clouds and you would exceed every expectation. Nataraj: Um, have you been surprised by the scale of the cloud in general?
Nataraj: Uh, like did it even surprise your expectations or when you were in those early rooms with Andy Jessy, uh, were you sort of expecting this kind of growth?
Khwaja: I you know, about 15 years ago, Werner Vogels said something really controversial. Khwaja: People were saying, is AWS just a hobby project for Amazon? Khwaja: And he said one day AWS will be bigger than the retail business.
Khwaja: And people were just like, okay, this is just posturing, that's never going to happen. Khwaja: But the one thing about Amazon leaders is, you know, they really believe in the Think Big Leadership Principle.
Khwaja: And and the leadership principle just says, you know, thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Khwaja: So I, you know, I was along for the ride, but the leaders at AWS always had the the North star in mind to be to be as big as they are today and they're relentless.
Khwaja: They they're not they're never going to be happy with the level of impact they've made on the world by where they are today. Khwaja: They're already thinking how do we grow this an order of magnitude again?
Khwaja: And that's the the really exciting part of of being a part of a company like that. Khwaja: Um, I honestly, I didn't have expectations of how small or large the Amazon growth would be.
Khwaja: I I was just enjoying the ride of working alongside some of the largest consumers of infrastructure convincing them to move to AWS and seeing the business benefits that they were getting by running on the cloud and how productive their teams were as a result of it.
Khwaja: So I, you know, every step of the way the product market fit got validated and the AWS teams just kept adding capabilities.
Khwaja: So, yeah, I don't know if I could if I could genuinely say that I I thought Amazon was going to get as big as it is today. Khwaja: Uh, but I I had a lot of fun watching it happen.
Nataraj: Um, so at some point you decided uh, you know, you have you had enough experience with Amazon and started Momento.
Nataraj: So what was the triggering point and did you see an opportunity for like, you know, building a cache or uh because I mean AWS, you know, when I compare AWS and I'm mostly in the Azure world as a user and a builder, um AWS has more products than I think any other cloud, right?
Nataraj: They they turn out products left and right and I think they have scaled back a bit. Nataraj: Um, and I've seen caches also of a lot of different kind, right?
Nataraj: Front and cache, back and cache, key value pair cache, so many products out there. Nataraj: So what was the trilling point to say that, you know, there's a gap in the market that you are trying to address with Momento?
Nataraj: So what was the journey like?
Khwaja: Yeah, so you know, my co-founder Daniela and I, we both come from the Dynamo team and one of the things that we really about Dynamo was if you need to do 10 million transactions per second, you don't have to learn what instance type, the number of shards, the number of replicas, a lot of the knobs that you have to deal with with a traditional database, they just kind of go away with Dynamo.
Khwaja: And that experience did not exist with any of the caching solutions. Khwaja: All of the caching solutions that we have or had in AWS, they exposed, they were leaky abstractions and they exposed a lot of the knobs to the end user.
Khwaja: So we started by saying, hey, you can Momento will help collapse a bunch of the diagrams, a bunch of the boxes in your architectural diagram of your caching deployment into a single, you know, SAS endpoint and, you know, it doesn't really matter if you're doing 10 TPS or 10 million TPS.
Khwaja: We we take care of, you know, making the best underlying decision on the infra side to get you what you need and to keep you productive.
Khwaja: What we realized along the way and we actually literally did this accidentally is, you know, we built a two-tier caching system and the second tier ended up being a really great web server.
Khwaja: And this means that now we're not only collapsing a bunch of the boxes in the caching side into one, we have the fine grain access control plus the HTTP server and a cache so that, you know, like mobile devices can talk directly to Momento.
Khwaja: And again, that just comes down to developer productivity, right?
Khwaja: If you want to build like a chat system with 4 million subscribers without having to deal with web sockets or having to deal with, you know, membership management and you know, writing a bunch of code, you just write a bunch of client code and a token vending machine and boom, you're off to the races, everything scales behind.
Khwaja: And nothing like that exists today and it certainly didn't exist back then.
Khwaja: Um, AWS is great for providing incredible building blocks and all we had to do was to compose the best set of building blocks available to solve this particular use case around enabling developers to build highly interactive applications.
Nataraj: So this idea that, you know, different abstraction level is necessary.
Nataraj: Was that an insight you know, talking to a lot of Dynamo DB customers or um like how did you get to that sort of maybe hypothesis uh that, you know, customers need this? Khwaja: Yeah, there were two things.
Khwaja: One was, you know, we at the Elemental side, we were some of the largest caching consumers because we built you know, one of the services uh my team built was uh media tailor. Khwaja: Media Taylor is a personalized ad insertion service.
Khwaja: It inserts personalized ads when millions of people are watching Thursday night football on Prime TV. Khwaja: Like there's a service that's injecting personalized ads. Khwaja: And you can imagine this is a very high system.
Khwaja: And as a result, we became one of the largest customers for, you know, the caching services at at AWS and that's when a lot of us, you know, looked at it and said, you know, I really wish this was less painful.
Khwaja: I really wish I didn't have to deal with the instance types, the number of shards, the replicas, the maintenance windows. Khwaja: I wish all of that just didn't exist. Khwaja: So that was one piece.
Khwaja: And then we also learned we realized that we were learning a whole bunch of operational lessons one outage at a time.
Khwaja: And then we also realized that it's the same lessons that every other team at Amazon was learning because Amazon has that operational metrics meeting and we realized that caching is a really common place where people get in trouble and it's the same set of things.
Khwaja: And we can productize those.
Khwaja: Like little things like tuning your clients, having the right, you know, exponential back offs, timeouts, retries, you know, managing capacity, having enough capacity available to you, you know, optimizing the capacity, making sure that you're not just over utilized, you know, heat management, dealing with hot keys.
Khwaja: All of these things are you know, outages that that happen and then teams have to go fix and rearchitect.
Khwaja: And we figured we could productize that and that's our contribution to humanity is to, you know, let the developers that are building interactive experiences focus on their um differentiating aspects instead of worrying about the number of shards in their backend cache.
Nataraj: Uh, so you sort of identified this hypothesis and this is a problem and you want to sort of uh, you know, create a solution for that. Nataraj: What was that initial process of, you know, going from zero to one?
Nataraj: Um, you know, how did you hire your team? Nataraj: Um, you talked about your co-founder.
Nataraj: Talk to me a little bit about that, you know, zero to one phase where you're where you're hiring, you know, where you're building that MVP, um, sort of that journey. Khwaja: Yeah, so um Danielle and I firmly believe in hiring ourselves.
Khwaja: Like we this is a the craftsmanship of building your own team is incredibly important to us. Khwaja: We take a vested interest in every single employee, especially in the early days of the startup.
Khwaja: So almost like pretty much all the hiring at the company and certainly all the hiring on the engineering and product side has been done by us together as opposed to it being outsourced or being a problem of a recruiter inside of the company.
Khwaja: And the people matter, the people matter a lot and if you have the right team and you know, and that team has the right passion, you can accomplish anything.
Khwaja: Then the second order bit is, well what is the what is the thing that you want to accomplish? Khwaja: And we knew that, you know, this is a large enough market, but whatever we build has to be grounded by customers.
Khwaja: So then we started approaching customers for design partners. Khwaja: We started having some hypotheses around, hey, this particular customer is running at scale and we anticipate them having these kinds of problems.
Khwaja: And what we were looking for is not somebody to write us a check. Khwaja: It's the somebody who's willing to be a design partner, somebody who's willing to share with us what are the infrastructure challenges they're having with their caches.
Khwaja: Let us experiment, they have to be early movers and, you know, get us feedback on our product when running at scale.
Khwaja: And that process was very gratifying because the team of passionate individuals that we hired took this responsibility of a design partner very seriously and they built a culture of operational excellence and this culture of not letting a customer down because we are in their mission critical path.
Khwaja: And as a result, you know, we found our first few customers and, you know, in some cases we got them out of something that was having constant outages and in some cases we helped them with their product launches and with unanticipated scales and so forth.
Khwaja: But every step of the way, I think our customers have not only loved the product, but they've loved working with the team and the level of ownership that the Momento team has in their success, not just the revenue that a company is is generating.
Khwaja: So that was the zero to one. Khwaja: You hire the people, then you find the customers who can be your strategic partners and can give you the product grounding that you need.
Khwaja: You make them successful and now we're at a stage where we have a bunch of these customers, design partners have been successful and we're now figuring out how to double down on our go-to-market strategy and get our product into more hands and and get more um even more real world traction for our services.
Nataraj: Are there any specific type of customers that were looking like when you talked about design partners, like are these your video streaming companies or are these your companies like building lots of chat application?
Nataraj: What type of companies were uh you know, interested in the solution? Khwaja: Yeah, this is something I did pretty badly at first. Khwaja: So I I used to go around telling my team, like we we built, we're building a cache.
Khwaja: A cache is a it's like selling a water bottle. Khwaja: Every vertical, every customer needs a cache. Khwaja: And and what that led to was a pretty um broad go-to-market motion in terms of which customers to go after.
Khwaja: What we realized that we don't have the luxuries of a larger company. Khwaja: There's very few of us and we need to specialize at first.
Khwaja: We need we can't over specialize to a point where we're on a particular vertical, but we need to provide, you know, exert concerted efforts towards a specific set of verticals so that we can recycle the messaging and and find look alikes and so forth.
Khwaja: So the core verticals where we do really well are media entertainment, so like video streaming like you said, and not just the actual streaming part, like video companies have, you know, they have identity management, you know, like how do you log into your uh to your box for a direct TV?
Khwaja: What what what um you know, movies do you have access to watch? Khwaja: That's called entitlement, you know? Khwaja: What CDR workflows need to be, you know, recording at 8:00 and at 8:30 o'clock.
Khwaja: That's you know, there's lots of spikes there. Khwaja: So, and then each of these companies have, you know, lots of mobile applications to make the experience more interactive.
Khwaja: So we found our niche and we found a bunch of really happy customers, like large media customers. Khwaja: And the second niche was gaming. Khwaja: Um, same thing.
Khwaja: So we identified our core power for Momento comes when you have like unprecedented, unanticipatible scale and like spiky traffic. Khwaja: That's what we do really well.
Khwaja: And media, gaming, and then Fintech and specifically in the areas of like fraud detection, payment processing, like those spikes, we absorb really, really well. Khwaja: So go back to our core ICP.
Khwaja: It's, you know, spiky workloads, unanticipatible traffic and there's one other part which is if there's an outage, it really hurts. Khwaja: Like it has a financial impact on the company.
Khwaja: So that's how we identify now the, you know, the next generation of design partners that we look for. Khwaja: They have to have large scale, unanticipated spikes and mission criticality. Nataraj: Got it.
Nataraj: I mean, at how many customers did you feel like, you know, you were good enough and okay, we we really have a product market fit or are you still think that you're still figuring out product market fit?
Khwaja: Um no, I I think, you know, we have dozens of customers that are in the, you know, that that we consider as like large enterprise um customers. Khwaja: Um and there's coherence in their asks, right?
Khwaja: Like they we we had to add a whole bunch of features that we never thought we would. Khwaja: Like we had to add data structures.
Khwaja: We we thought, you know, most users are using key value, but you know, people do like using data structures in their in their caches. Khwaja: So, but it wasn't like a one-off thing. Khwaja: It's not one customer asking for a particular item.
Khwaja: So the fact that there's coherence across the dozens of customers that we that we work with in our early stage, gave us assurance that there is product market fit.
Khwaja: And then it's about, you know, creating that road map and prioritizing it based on what the customers are are asking for.
Khwaja: But it's also about curating the go-to-market messaging and the go-to-market efforts to find more customers that kind of fit uh these uh these verticals and the uh the ICP description that I mentioned as well.
Nataraj: Talk to me a little bit about, you know, how are you thinking about marketing in your context or or growth in your context because B2B growth is slightly I would say less talked about and how you approach is very nuanced.
Nataraj: Um, and it's also very hard like B2C is pretty straightforward, you know, um, you can buy Google ads, Facebook ads and you can go in front of a lot of customers and find the right customer, uh, said that, you know, would consume you.
Nataraj: But B2B is slightly a much more complicated game when it comes to startups. Nataraj: Uh, talk to me a little bit about, you know, what you've learned, um, in terms of like growth and marketing and how are you thinking about it right now?
Khwaja: Yeah, and I'm still, you know, we're we're very early, so I don't know if I've learned uh everything I need to know by any means, but um one thing I learned is the focus really matters and you know, given that we have some of the largest uh names in media and gaming already using us.
Khwaja: Um, it's it became a lot easier for us to say, hey, this is who we're going to focus on.
Khwaja: And you know, um one of my um mentors, advisors, uh Sruti from from Rockset, you know, uh Sruti Bos, she shares that, you know, once you land a pretty good customer, you immediately got to start looking for local likes because when you go to those local likes, they know that they're not the first ones.
Khwaja: They're not the sacrificial lamb that you're you're trying with. Khwaja: And so that's that's important. Khwaja: The focus matters. Khwaja: The look alikes, you know, find the look alikes matters.
Khwaja: The other part is you just you just never want to let a customer down.
Khwaja: And in our case, you know, operational excellence and having the architecture behind ourselves to not cut corners and actually be ready for unanticipated scale is is really crucial. Khwaja: Because when you