Vendia | Why dedicate a company (and $50M in investor cash) to real-time data sharing solutions?

Why dedicate a company (and $50M in investor cash) to real-time data sharing solutions?

Founders Session: Why dedicate a company (and $50M in investor cash) to real-time data-sharing? - YouTube

Founders Session: Why dedicate a company (and $50M in investor cash) to real-time data-sharing?
Vendia79 subscribers

Episode 2

Guests:

In this episode, Shruthi Rao and Tim Wagner talk about why data sharing matters and why they founded and dedicated an entire company to helping organizations share data better.

Show notes

Transcript

Tim Zonca 0:07 Greetings from the team at Vendia. And welcome to the Circles of Trust podcast: It’s a podcast for leaders across all industries committed to speeding up innovation at scale, making a profound positive impact on business and in the world. I’m your host, Tim Zonca. And we’re about to dive into a conversation with Vendia co-founders, Shruthi Rao, and Tim Wagner. In this episode, we’ll talk about the driving force behind founding a company entirely focused on data sharing. Welcome, Tim and Shruthi. It’s great to have you to the show.

Tim Wagner 0:38 Thank you, Tim.

Shruthi Rao 0:39 Thanks, Tim.

Tim Zonca 0:40 So, you two have known each other for years across multiple companies. Tell us about how your journeys came together and why you decided to found a data sharing company together.

Tim Wagner 0:56 Shruthi, you want to start?

Shruthi Rao 0:58 Alright, this is going to be a fun one. Tim and I met many, many years ago at my interview loop at AWS. It was a business development role that I was interviewing for at Amazon Web Services for the Serverless business that Tim actually started/founded the thesis off, and I was super excited to be interviewing there. During the interview process, one of the questions that I had for Tim was, “Hey, why isn’t anyone using serverless computing for blockchains?” We really bonded over that question during the interview process and even after that.

Tim Wagner 2:42 And, you know, when we worked together at AWS building up the Serverless business, we talked to a lot of customers. One of the things that we heard repeatedly was this unmet need that customers had to build systems that could effectively share data with one another. There was just this large bulk of unmet need, that wasn’t really being well addressed by some of the in-market products.

Tim Zonca 4:11 And then, you know, I’m curious, so the needs aren’t being met, but what about now? What do you see happening that made now the time for you to say we should do this — this is the moment?

Shruthi Rao 4:27 Right! If you dial the clock back, you know, to circa 2018/2019, I started running the blockchain business at AWS, and Tim was at Coinbase running engineering. We both saw this need in the market manifest. One of the things that I saw was I personally met 1,092 unique customers. They all had this one problem they were trying to solve using blockchains.

Tim Wagner 7:29 Yeah, I would certainly emphasize this fact that the market demand is significant. Today, companies are producing and consuming more data than they did the day before. And without re-inventing how data is shared, companies are left with all this data in a lot of different silos.

Tim Zonca 10:19 What do you think you bring to the space that nobody else does?

Tim Wagner 10:19 I think one of the things I bring to the table is having been in both those environments with the opportunity to see the strengths of both and how we could combine them in this unique way to produce a serverless blockchain that nobody else was attempting.

Shruthi Rao 12:44 For me, the most important thing has always been it’s gotta solve a problem. It doesn’t matter how awesome, cool, fun, exciting a technology is. It’s all about solving a problem.

Tim Zonca 16:11 So tell us a little bit about who are your early customers? And what kinds of things did you learn from them?

Shruthi Rao 16:42 My early customers were pivotal in how Vendia has shaped up. Two of them are BMW and Best Friends Animal Society. We started working with BMW in early 2020. The feedback that we’ve gotten from the BMW team has been exceptional. Best Friends Animal Society is a Utah-based, not-for-profit that helps animal shelters. They utilize Vendia to aggregate data across geographical distances to aid in their mission.

Tim Zonca 20:40 What’s your take on the product as you learn from these customers?

Tim Wagner 20:40 These examples teach us that this problem is ubiquitous. Sharing information about dogs and cats might feel different from sharing information about automobile chassis, but the underlying problem is the same.

Shruthi Rao 25:33 Investors have seen the large momentum in the market towards super specialization. Every company is doing one thing and doing it really well, which means that you are all islands that need communication and data flow between them.

Tim Wagner 26:21 Investors also consider the total addressable market (TAM). The operational data space is 10x the size of the analytics space.

Shruthi Rao 29:55 The urgency level increases when there are macroeconomic changes within particular industries.

Tim Wagner 39:48 We’re reaching a world where data sharing solutions are going to become increasingly necessary as more companies adopt cloud services.

Shruthi Rao 39:49 The product must simplify application development, irrespective of where the data resides.

Tim Zonca 46:11 Thanks again to Shruthi and Tim, and we’ll talk to you all before too long. Cheers.