Venkatesh Seetharam

Background

Venkatesh has spent his career building data platforms at scale and the teams that ship them. With Harish Butani, he co-created Apache Atlas — the very first open-source metadata catalog — built on an extensible type system that let any entity, relationship, lineage path, or governance policy be modeled as a first-class type. That design became the pattern modern data catalogs still follow. He also envisioned and created Apache Falcon, a distributed data-pipeline management platform. Along the way he built and retained engineering teams at Hortonworks, Yahoo!, and a series of earlier-stage startups, and has most recently been an investor at 8VC.

Selected work

• Apache Atlas — co-creator, with Harish Butani. The first open-source metadata catalog, built on an extensible type system for entities, lineage, and governance.
• Apache Falcon — envisioned and created. A distributed data-pipeline management platform.
• Hortonworks & Yahoo! — built and retained high-performing data-platform engineering teams at scale.
• 8VC — investor across the modern data stack.

Why us

We are a team of diverse, experienced engineers and leaders spanning infrastructure engineering, business-intelligence engines, and analytics practices at Fortune 1000 companies. We have built platforms and products at Yahoo!, Oracle, Hortonworks, and numerous startups. We have built and retained high-performing teams both onshore and offshore, led analytics organizations, and established best practices grounded in user empathy and a product-centric approach.

Why we’re uniquely positioned

• Customer obsession is the only winning strategy. We have led data teams at Yahoo!, Hortonworks, and others — so we know intimately how data teams are structured and how they work with the business. We understand our users.
• We have built BI before — many times over. Between us we have built four BI engines (including OLAP on Spark, sold to Oracle), co-created the first open-source enterprise data catalog (Apache Atlas), and built an open-source distributed data-pipeline platform (Apache Falcon).
• We intend to make a deep impact. We are determined to be the change agent the analytics industry needs.