The company that made Cassandra easier to live with is now helping IBM connect AI to enterprise data. Its story begins with a failed intervention and keeps returning to the same problem: making useful technology usable.

He helped name Cassandra, watched Facebook outrun his early growth estimate, and then spent a decade turning those lessons into YugabyteDB. Now Karthik Ranganathan is asking the same old question in a new arena: what happens when the infrastructure must remember, scale and stay awake?