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Amr Awadallah

How a “geek from Egypt” built a billion-dollar data company Cloudera

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Amr Awadallah, an American computer scientist of Egyptian descent is a pioneer in the usage of Apache Hadoop for the analysis of data. He co-founded the company Cloudera. Today, Clouder has a valuation of over US$4.1 billion.  The company provides cutting-edge data management and advanced analytics using Apache Hadoop and the most current recent open-source technology. 

Amr Awadallah
Image Source: bizjournals.com

Early Life

Amr Awadallah worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners before joining Cloudera. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Yahoo!, where he oversaw a team that employed Apache Hadoop for business intelligence and data analysis across all of Yahoo’s web businesses. Amr Awadallah has a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University as well as a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University in Egypt.

Success Story

Amr’s journey is in many ways the essence of Silicon Valley. The story of a determined immigrant, a fateful turn, and the significance of being able to innovate while addressing a genuine customer problem.

Amr didn’t consider starting his own business when he was younger. Large incumbents controlled Egypt’s economy, making it difficult for newcomers to flourish. Amr moved abroad to pursue his doctorate studies because, like his father, he hoped to become a university professor. But when Amr moved to Palo Alto to obtain his Ph.D. at Stanford University, he was surprised by how close the big technology firms he had grown up hearing about were to him.

The “pivot” or change in the situation occurred at Stanford. He discovered that starting a business was feasible and that his experience as an immigrant had benefited him as an entrepreneur. Being an immigrant, he felt at ease with taking chances. He was prepared to leave his native country and everyone he knew, just like other immigrants, in order to embark on a new journey.

Amr thinks that a large number of technology companies are founded by immigrants in part because of this. At Yahoo, Amr held the position of VP of Product Intelligence Engineering. Amr was charged with creating an intelligent search feature for Yahoo, probably in an effort to take on Google.

Amr encountered numerous issues with performance, pricing, size, and flexibility when working on sizable BI and analysis at Yahoo that were caused by platforms like IBM, Oracle, and, Microstrategy. He was asked to explore Hadoop by Doug Cutting, a Yahoo coworker and former chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.

Doug built the original Hadoop software in 2004. Amr started using Hadoop at work, and over the course of the following two years, he was able to reduce the information processing pipeline and complete tasks 10 times more affordably than previously. Amr was persuaded about the effectiveness and affordability of Hadoop.

The same issues Amr had with BI and analytics were being experienced by many other businesses. The remedy turned out to be Hadoop. Soon a brand-new tech business was ready to launch; the founders presented the initial idea to Accel Partners and received the initial funding. In 2008, Amr Awadallah, Christophe Bisciglia, Jeff Hammerbacher, and Mike Olson together established Cloudera, Inc.

About the Company

American software provider Cloudera, Inc. offers enterprise data management tools that heavily rely on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers the Cloudera Data Platform which is a set of cloud computing and data processing-related technologies. Several of these solutions are delivered through publicly accessible cloud servers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, whereas others are subscriber-only private cloud services. These products are marketed by Cloudera for use in data analysis and machine learning.

Alteryx

Alteryx – An American-based Software Company That Develops Products For Data Science And Analytics.

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Founded in 1997, Alteryx was established as a software company in Irvine California. The products of Alteryx are used for making significant advancements in data science and analytics that help several organizations. The company offers a series of products as a part of its platform including Alteryx Connect, Alteryx Designer, Alteryx Promote, Analytics Hub, etc. It also hosts a cloud-based website which is called Alteryx Analytics Gallery. In the last two decades, Company has expanded worldwide with approximately 1,200 employees. Currently, the CEO of the company is Mark Anderson. Under his leadership, the company has acquired a lot of companies.

History Of Alteryx

The foundation history of Alteryx began with the establishment of SRC LLC in 1997. This company is the predecessor of Alteryx as the name of the company was changed in 2010 after its core product. Dean Stoecker, Duane Adams, and Ned Harding are the three founders of the company. When the company was newly launched, SRC was building a data engine that was the first of its kind to deliver demographic-based mapping with a very short reporting time. After one year, the company released Allocate, a new product 1998, It was a data engine that incorporated geographically organized US census data. This data engine allowed the users to analyze, manipulate, and map data.

The product line of the company eventually started growing as it rolled out another product, Solocast in the same year. This product was developed for the main purpose of customer segmentation analysis. After two years, a modified version of the Allocate software was developed as per a contract between SRC LLC and US Census Bureau. The bureau used the updated software to integrate on the CD-ROMs of Census Data. In 2006, the company developed a new product called Alteryx. This product had both spatial and non-spatial data environments for building various applications based on analytics.

Alteryx
Image source: medium.com

Expansion And Acquisitions

After the rollout of Alteryx, it became the core product of the company, and thus in 2010 SRC LLC changed its name to Alteryx. The funding received by Alteryx started escalating during this time as in 2011 the company raised $6 million from the Palo Alto investment arm of SAP Ventures. After two years it again raised $12 million from SAP Ventures and Toba Capital. The company conducted its Series B funding in 2014 where it was able to raise $60 million from existing investors and Insight Venture Partners. After this funding round, the company decided to expand its workspace by 30 percent.

In 2015, Alteryx raised another $85 million in a funding round led by ICONIQ Capital. The company announced that this fund will be used to expand internationally, improve their R&D facilities, and increase sales and marketing efforts. In 2016, Company was featured in the Forbes Cloud 100 list and a year after that it filed its IPO and went public. After the company started trading publicly, it made a series of acquisitions starting with a software company called Semanta in 2017. Later in 2017, Company acquired a data science startup, Yhat for $10.8 million. Some of the other companies acquired in the last few years are Alteryx ANZ, ClearStory Data, Feature Labs, etc.

Awards

The company has become one of the noticeable companies in the data science platform. In 2018, Gartner recognized Alteryx as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. Gartner Peer Insights also named the company “The Best Business Intelligence and Analytics Software of 2017.” KeyBanc Capital Markets named the company a Top 20 AI All-Stars Technology and the former CEO and co-founder of the company Dean Stoecker received the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2017.

About The Founders

Dean Stoecker is famous as the co-founder and former CEO of Alteryx. He went to the University of Colorado followed by Pepperdine University to complete his MBA. In 2019, the net worth of Stoecker was $1.2 billion.

Duane Adams is one of the co-founders of the company and the Chief Advocacy Officer of Alteryx. One of her main goals in the company is to diversify the workforce and upskill the people of the company to keep up with the constantly evolving business world. Before co-founding Alteryx, she worked at Strategic Mapping, Donnelley, and VNU Business Media.

Ned Harding has recently retired from Alteryx. But, while he was a part of the company he served as the Vice President and CTO of the same. Before co-founding Alteryx, he worked at several companies as a software engineer.

Deepnote

Jakub Jurových: Young Entrepreneur to set up Deepnote and to set name in list 30 under 30 of Forbes

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Data science is most popular for solving many business problems. In fact, it is capable of doing more than that. Also, Data Science is useful to humans in the decision-making process. With it, one can make better as well as quicker decisions. So, all must aware of these basic features of Data Science. However, the growing importance of data science generates opportunities to develop many projects in this field. Deepnote is one of them, we can call it as a simpler notebook of data science. Jakub Jurových set up Deepnote in 2019.

What is Deepnote?

As said earlier, we can call the company Deepnote as a data science notebook. Its purpose to build was to make data science teams more productive. Headquarters of Deepnote is at Prague, Czech Republic.

The special part about Deepnote is that one can use it across any platform. For example, one can use it for browser across platforms like Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. Also, it is Jupyter-compatible and allows for real-time collaboration. As well, the easy deployment of a Deepnote is possible. Additionally, for any updates from the developer side, no downloads are required. All the changes are saved automatically and instantly.

How does it work?

One can create a project in Deepnote. For that, several options are available. Like, you can either import the GitHub project or can upload own files. One more option to deal with this is one can create an empty project. However, these Deepnote projects consisted of data, code, and all runs in one environment. These projects can also share with other collaborators similar to Google Docs.

The Backstory of Foundation

A data scientist, Jakub Jurových was known to the fact that data science is not a cakewalk. As well, tools available for this are not easy either. While, also being an engineer, he always wanted that data science project codes should be scalable as well as easy. However, to make this happen a powerful and easy tool is a must. Such a tool is efficient as well as simple to use. Also, it should be scalable with a growing data science team. And that’s how the concept of Deepnote sparked into the mind of founders. Finally, in 2019 Jakub Jurových with his team build the Deepnote.

Features of Deepnote

With Deepnote one can see the internal state of the program. Also, it offers various explorer as well as various interactive plots. Such as code intelligence, command palette and shortcuts, APIs and more. 

Furthermore, one need not compromise with their existing infrastructure and the workflow they like. Because Deepnote integrates with those too. It offers integration with GitHub and GitLab, GSC buckets and Amazon S3. Also, the Deepnote team is planning to offer integration of Spark, PostgreSQL connection, MongoDB in the future.

Glimpse to Founder Life- Jakub Jurových

Early life and Education

He is hailed from Zvoleno, Slovakia. However, Jakub attended the University of Cambridge where he studied MPhil in advanced computer science. Also, he went to Masaryk University Brno for graduation in computer science. In fact, he received Dean’s award for his Bachelor thesis. So, the subject was Techniques for JavaScript debugging.

Career

He founded Deepnote in 2019. Earlier, he worked as a CTO at Operam, Inc for over 2 years. Also, he served as CTO at Unite Inc since 2014-2016. However, in 2019, he was an advisor at Operam, INC. As a matter of fact, Operam inc is a well-known firm that assists to promote several Hollywood films. But he shortly left that job and plunge into entrepreneurship. Apart from this, Jakub also helped in establishing Hack Cambridge. 

Awards and Recognition

Forbs Magazine included Jakub Jurových’s name on the list of 30 Under 30. Apart from this, he is trained in four languages including English, French, Slovak, and Czech. Also, achieving all this success at the age of 24 is a great achievement of Jakub.

Bottom Line

The success came to Jakub is a result of his focus and organised efforts. However, the foundation of Deepnote is the outcome of his optimistic view about the future of Data Science. Though Deepnote is a new company, it is thriving impeccably and will hopefully deliver the best service for the data science community in the future. Jurových is not yet 25 years old and still, he achieved so much in a short duration. Today, he is an inspiration for many new start-up founders.