Tarush Aggarwal is the Founder and CEO of 5X, the modern data stack as a managed service that enables companies to answer business questions without having to worry about building data infrastructure or bringing in the right data engineering team.
Chad talks with Tarush about the modern data stack movement, choosing things that make sense on behalf of their customers, and building a team culture at a company with a fairly large time zone distribution.
5x (https://5x.co/)
Follow 5x on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DataWith5x), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/DataWith5x), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/datawith5x/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyOHdgLesV3FesXXl9-8V_w), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/datawith5x).
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Tarush Aggarwal, the Founder and CEO of 5X, the modern data stack as a managed service that enables companies to answer business questions without having to worry about building data infrastructure or bringing in the right data engineering team. Tarush, thank you for joining me.
TARUSH: Chad, thank you so much for having me on the show. Really looking forward to being here and hopefully adding some value for your listeners.
CHAD: Yes, I'm sure that they will. I think many companies are either thinking about how they build their data infrastructure or thinking about how they leverage data for their business now. So 5X provides a path for them to do that, and I'd love to dive in. How does 5X, like I said in the intro, enable companies to get started without having to worry about building this infrastructure themselves or this team themselves?
TARUSH: Yeah, totally. It's a great question. Just to kind of zoom out for a quick second, the data space has been really hot for a few years now, and there's this area often called the modern data stack, which is really led by a few vendors mainly around this concept of the data warehouse, reporting tools, and modeling, and ingestion. And this is really a new area for the data space, which has really become popular. So you also have, you know, ten years ago, you had Hadoop and Spark, and all of these different data tools, which in general have become less popular, and the modern data stack movement is one of the big movements happening.
So at a macro level, we have this new movement. If you zoom in, this movement happens to be one of the most fragmented movements. So what that means is for each different layer, you have different vendors. And so, even if you want to do something today as simple as building dashboards, you have to first ingest this data. In your average company, you've got [inaudible] at different sources. You need to put it in. You need to then store it, you need to model it, and then you can build a dashboard.
CHAD: You also need to make all the different choices about which ones you're going to choose at every level.
TARUSH: Exactly. At each of these levels, you have multiple billion-dollar companies today competing. So the thing about fragmentation of the space and, you know, I think data along with maybe DevOps and security are probably the most fragmented spaces. The thing about fragmented spaces is that they are great for extremely savvy customers; think of large tech companies who have 100% data teams. But for 90% of businesses, if you want to get value from data, it makes it much harder because you have to sign multiple contracts with these vendors, architecture, set up security.
So what 5X very, very fundamentally is doing