database
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Ben Haynes Spent 22 Years Making the Database Feel Human
Before headless CMS had a name, a Brooklyn agency founder was tired of rebuilding the same back office. Two decades, five self-built versions and one beloved rabbit later, his workaround has become a lesson in patient software.
Sam Lambert
Sam Lambert is the CEO and President of PlanetScale, the database company built on Vitess, the MySQL scaling technology that once powered YouTube. A database engineer by trade, he started as GitHub's first DBA in 2013 and spent roughly eight years there, rising to VP of Engineering leading a 350-person infrastructure and platform organization through the era GitHub scaled to tens of millions of users. After a short stint at Facebook working on internet-scale video infrastructure, he joined PlanetScale as an investor and advisor, became Chief Product Officer, and was named CEO in July 2021. He is known for a product philosophy centered on databases that 'just work' and never go down, a bias toward taste and craft, and blunt views on leadership.
Eliot Horowitz
Eliot Horowitz is the founder and CEO of Viam, a New York robotics-and-automation software platform that lets developers build, deploy, and manage machines in the physical world. He wrote the original core code of MongoDB, which he co-founded in 2007 and steered as CTO for 13 years through a 2017 IPO and a market cap that climbed into the tens of billions. After tinkering with a cat feeder, a chess-playing robot, and a smarter sprinkler during the pandemic, he concluded that robotics hardware had outrun its software, and built Viam to close that gap.
Philippe Noël
Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.
Spencer Kimball
Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.
Will Manning
Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.
Dylan Cui
Dylan Cui is a co-founder of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - one of the world's most widely adopted open-source distributed SQL databases. A software engineer by trade, Dylan co-built TiDB from scratch starting in 2015 after experiencing firsthand the pain of database scaling at scale while working at Wandoujia. PingCAP has raised over $341 million and TiDB has more than 33,000 GitHub stars, serving thousands of enterprises globally across fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.
Aaron Katz
Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the world's fastest OLAP database company, which he has built from a 12-person open-source project into a $15 billion enterprise serving 4,000 customers including Tesla, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI. A veteran of Salesforce (12 years, from $20M to $4B in revenue) and Elastic (CRO, $5M to $500M), Katz assembled a founding team mid-pandemic, relocated engineers from Russia to Amsterdam, and raised over $1 billion in funding. In January 2026 ClickHouse closed a $400M Series D; by May 2026 the company surpassed $250M ARR, growing 250% year-over-year.
Fangjin Yang
Fangjin Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database he helped create at Metamarkets in 2011. He turned a side project born from the millisecond demands of programmatic advertising into a $1.1B unicorn, raising $215M along the way. An original Druid committer and University of Waterloo-trained engineer, Yang now leads Imply's mission to power interactive, high-concurrency analytics applications at scale - with customers including Netflix, Atlassian, Salesforce, and Confluent.
Gian Merlino
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
Hitoshi Harada
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Max Liu
Max Liu (刘奇) is co-founder and CEO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - an open-source distributed SQL database designed for hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP). He co-founded PingCAP in 2015 after stints at JD.com and Wandou Labs, solving the database scaling crisis at hyperscale. Under his leadership, PingCAP raised $341.6M in total funding including a $270M Series D, and TiDB now serves customers including Pinterest, Plaid, Bolt, and Atlassian. In 2025, Liu was named one of The Top 50 Software CEOs of 2024 by The Software Report.
Frank Zamani
Frank Zamani is the Founder, President, and CEO of Caspio, a pioneering low-code platform that has powered over one million business applications in 150+ countries. Born Farhang Zamani in Tehran, Iran, he fled religious persecution as a Baha'i in 1986, was smuggled across the border to Pakistan, and received U.S. asylum in 1988 - arriving in San Francisco with his brother and just $70 between them. After earning a CS degree from Cal State Chico, working on Microsoft's PowerPoint team, and co-founding Autoweb.com (which IPO'd in 1999 at a $938 million valuation), he started Caspio in 2000 with a single conviction: business professionals should not need to code to build the tools their organizations need. By 2024, Caspio had grown to $120.7 million in annual revenue, 15,000+ customers, and roughly 230 employees.
Matt Cain
Matt Cain is a technology executive who served as Chair, President, and CEO of Couchbase from April 2017 through September 2025, guiding the company from a growth-stage NoSQL database startup through a 2021 NASDAQ IPO and ultimately a $1.5 billion acquisition by Haveli Investments. With an engineering degree from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford, Cain built his career across a decade at Cisco Systems, senior roles at Symantec, and the presidency of Veritas Technologies' worldwide field operations before joining Couchbase. Under his leadership, Couchbase expanded from pure NoSQL into a multi-model developer data platform powering AI-enabled applications for global enterprises.
Ajay Kulkarni
Ajay Kulkarni is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tiger Data (formerly Timescale), the company behind TimescaleDB - the world's leading open-source time-series database built on PostgreSQL. A serial entrepreneur with MIT roots, he previously co-founded Sensobi (acquired by GroupMe/Microsoft) and iobeam before building TimescaleDB into a developer-beloved unicorn with $184M raised, 50,000+ developers, and enterprise customers like Akamai, Cisco, GE, IBM, Microsoft, Uber, and Walmart.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan
Kannan Muthukkaruppan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB — a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for cloud-native applications at global scale. A gold medalist from IIT Madras and UC Berkeley alumnus, Kannan spent 13 years at Oracle (PL/SQL compiler) and Facebook (scaling HBase for billions of users) before co-founding Yugabyte in 2016. Under his technical leadership, Yugabyte raised $298M in funding, achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation, and built one of the most respected open-source distributed databases in the industry.
Thierry Cruanes
Thierry Cruanes is the co-founder and CTO of Snowflake, the cloud data platform that executed the largest software IPO in US history in September 2020. A French-born database architect with a PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, he spent 13 years at Oracle leading query optimization before betting everything on the cloud in 2012 - when Hadoop was supposed to win. He holds over 40 patents, writes code on weekends for fun, and helped architect the compute-storage separation that redefined modern data warehousing.
Andy Grove
Andy Grove is the original creator of Apache DataFusion and a PMC member of Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion. With over 30 years of software engineering experience, he specializes in query engines and distributed systems, currently serving as Principal Distributed Database Engineer at Apple. He's the author of 'How Query Engines Work' and creator of sqlparser-rs, one of the leading open-source SQL parsers for Rust. His open-source contributions have shaped the modern data processing ecosystem, with DataFusion powering hundreds of data-centric applications worldwide.