The following article comes from Tengyuan, the author of the latiao
Introduction:
From an introverted technical engineer to the co-founder of the “Internet celebrity level” open source enterprise; From a technologist, I have been transformed into an entrepreneur who sets corporate strategy, runs the commercial model, and pulls the “market” to see the growth… He shows technologists’ love for open source, open source entrepreneurs’ challenges to entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs’ stubbornness to overcome themselves. How does he view and face all these changes, and how does he think about the future?
Today, we take you into the inner world of Zhai Jia, co-founder of StreamNative, member of Apache Pulsar and Apache BookKeeper PMC, and mentor of Tengyuan Club.
The original intention: don’t want a good project to be buried
When it comes to the original intention of starting a business, Zhai Jia is like a passionate young man — a choice made by the indelible ideal in his heart.
Prior to founding StreamNative, Zhai worked at EMC in the design and development of distributed storage, file system, and streaming storage. In the community, BookKeeper, a distributed storage, and Pulsar, a distributed message flow platform, are the two projects he has devoted most of his time to and contributed to.
In recent years, a number of Internet companies around the world, including Twitter and Yahoo, have incorporated BookKeeper into their storage systems, and Zhai’s team is no exception. In the process of using BookKeeper, Zhai Jia is very optimistic about the application space of BookKeeper. With the increase of usage scenarios and frequency, he is more and more recognized for the value of BookKeeper. Therefore, Zhai Jia and many contributors in the BookKeeper community often preach outwardly at that time, but unfortunately, The market adoption rate for this project is still low.
Until the Pulsar project was opened to the public, Zhai Jia saw more possibilities of this project because of the convenience of accessing community maintenance and contribution, the ease of access and accessibility of users, and the demands of many users’ pain points.
Zhai jia wanted to promote the technology faster and better. He saw this as a great opportunity, so he and Guo Sijie, a member of the founding team of Apache Pulsar at that time, founded StreamNative and have been maintaining and updating the project. They are also major contributors to the project and the surrounding ecology.
Inspired by the two technology founders, StreamNative now employs some of the best Pulsar developers and technology experts. StreamNative is the original home of Pulsar, an open source messaging infrastructure project.
In the messaging scenario, faced with increasingly complex business requirements, the entire ecosystem might not be able to move forward if only Kafka or only traditional messaging systems were available. Zhai jia believes that this project, whether successful or not, will bring a certain role in promoting the ecology. Thus, based on his love for the project and pursuit of the ideal of open source, he set foot on the road of entrepreneurship.
In Zhai jia’s eyes, he is a relatively introverted person. From leading a technical team to leading a commercialization and marketing team, it is a very challenging change for an introverted engineer, which is also one of his biggest changes recently.
Instead of recruiting for such a role, they chose to take on the responsibility themselves. ZhaiJia said.
It is difficult to recruit the right people. Besides, StreamNative is a product to B, and its core is product-driven, which is different from sales and commercialization of C and projects. It is necessary to understand the product, so that people will be interested in talking about commercialization. Therefore, when the team of engineers in the company gradually grew up, and many big customers had service demands, I chose to jump out and try to do business.
Explore with users to create excellent product design
The current market situation, Pulsar has more small and medium-sized customers abroad; At home, it is easier to build benchmark customers. Zhai Jia’s StreamNative currently focuses on finance and IoT industries in China.
The reason for this is that users in both industries have some major pain points in MQ scenarios: the difficulty of supporting large data scales and scaling, operating and maintaining traditional MQ. In these areas, Pulsar is very good at addressing users’ pain points.
Speaking of the reasons for choosing StreamNative in the relatively closed financial industry of open source in recent years, Zhai Jia said:
Finance has high requirements on consistency, high availability and security, and Pulsar can meet their needs. The idea of open source reduces the tying of manufacturers, and the functions of operation and maintenance products are all open source. The development team can also quickly master the technology, do some peripheral development, and quickly solve the subsequent technical problems. Therefore, open source has a great promotion effect for them.
Pulsar has been adopted by many large domestic and foreign Internet and traditional industry companies in artificial intelligence, finance, telecom operators, live and short video, Internet of things, retail and e-commerce, online education and other industries.
In more application scenarios in the future, more triggers of StreamNative will come from users. The infrastructure is available in many scenarios, and one of the challenges is “how does the product meet user needs?” The default configuration may only meet 80% of users, but what about the other 20%?
The StreamNative team has chosen a path from understanding the requirements, accumulating scenarios, and experimenting with users to create great product designs that meet the needs of the scenarios.
In terms of product commercialization, StreamNative, like most startups, chooses SaaS. Infrastructure has an advantage in the SaaS direction because it is targeted at multiple usage scenarios, has a good user base and potential paying customers, and Pulsar has a cloud-native architecture, making cloud services a particularly natural process.
The success of Confluent, a Kafka commercialization company, is evident. Every year Kafka’s services on the cloud grow by more than 100 percent, which gives Zhai great confidence and confirms StreamNative’s current path for the future. Last October, StreamNative completed A $23 million Series A round of funding, which was approved by the company and opened the door to commercialization.
Many former Kafka users are switching to Pulsar, including Tencent, Didi and Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company. Kafka and Pulsar are currently in a mutually promoting game state, Pulsar has the advantages of cloud native architecture, but also has a lot of very rich enterprise features, can solve many problems Kafka can not solve before, compared to the previous traditional MQ advantages are more prominent. Kafka, spurred on by Pulsar, is rolling out new features.
Full telecommuting, internally driven by employees
StreamNative currently employs more than 70 people, two-thirds of whom are engineers, most of whom are contributors to the Apache Pulsar project, and all of whom work remotely.
But will telecommuting continue in the future as companies grow to 1,000 people or more? Zhai jia said seriously, “I hope 1,000 people can do the same.”
Zhai Jia believes that remote collaboration is a particularly efficient working mode. First, commuting time can be saved, and employees will be physically and mentally better and have higher concentration. The second processing is more continuous and efficient.
At present, commuting in first-tier cities takes 1 to 2 hours. Telecommuting can save this part of commuting time, which can be used to exercise and deal with trifles. It is very high for improving physical fitness and improving work efficiency.
While work in an office is discontinuous and prone to interruptions, remote workers can process information at their own pace and become more productive.
When it comes to the challenge of remote management, Zhai Jia also said that it must be an objective existence. At present, many domestic companies are trying the remote office mode, but for infrastructure companies, it is not strongly related to the business, but a decouple relationship, so it is a suitable mode although challenging.
A transparent and open working environment will naturally drive and motivate employees to get their work done. Zhai said he hopes more like-minded people will join StreamNative in the future.
About StreamNative StreamNative
Apache Pulsar is an open source infrastructure software company founded by the founding team of Apache Pulsar, the top project of Apache Software Foundation, to build the next generation cloud native batch streaming converged data platform around Pulsar. StreamNative is an Apache Pulsar commercialisation company that focuses on open source ecology and community building. Its founding team members have worked for Yahoo, Twitter, Splunk, EMC and many others.
Click on thelinkJoin StreamNative!