North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy?

We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast. In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Peterson, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast. Let's get to it. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Jordan Tigani. Jordan is co-founder and CEO at MotherDuck, the serverless data analytics system.

Jordan, welcome to the show.

Jordan Tigani

Thanks so much. Great to get a chance to chat.

Lindsay Pedersen

I'm really glad to have you. To start us off, Jordan, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Jordan Tigani

My favorite thing is that it's never boring. I have ADD, so sometimes I like to have different things coming at you. As the CEO and co-founder, the job is different almost every day.

Sometimes it's hiring an HR person. Sometimes it's getting deep into product stuff. Sometimes your bank evaporates overnight.

Sometimes it's working with customers. There's all sorts of things. As the company grows, the job changes

.It's never boring. It's always a new challenge and requires you to continue to stretch yourself and to continue to grow if you want your company to make it.

Lindsay Pedersen

The variety and the novelty, is that something that's always been important to you in any role you've served in?

Jordan Tigani

Not necessarily. Although I think in other roles, sometimes you feel like you're only using half of your brain if you try to do the same thing day in and day out. I used to love being an engineer.

I used to love that I could just focus entirely my whole being on a single problem and spend 20 hours a day on it. But it's also nice to be able to do lots of different things and use different skills and also work with people and not just computers.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love the company name, MotherDuck. I don't often come across a name that I'm like, I really need to learn more about this company. How did you come up with that?

Tell me about that.

Jordan Tigani

I was talking to actually a friend who is a mentor who was helping me get started. I had a different idea for the name. I think I was going to call it SubQuery because we deal with smaller queries.

He was sending some ideas my way and he sent me this in the chat. He said, MotherDuck, plus the domain name is available. I thought, ha-ha, you can't name a company MotherDuck. That's absurd. Then I clicked on the link and the domain name was available for $60,000 or something. I'm like, double ha-ha.

He must be making some sort of funny joke. The reason for MotherDuck is that we are taking this open source database called DuckDB and we're hosting it in the cloud. We're marshalling all the little ducklings and DuckDB instances in the cloud.

That says, hence, MotherDuck. I said to the guy, ha-ha, that's funny. He's like, no, seriously, this is a good name. Trust me, I'm good at naming things. I was very nervous about it. I'm like, I thought nobody's going to take you seriously if you call a company that name.

My initial pitch deck and proposal, it said, MotherDuck, and then in parentheses, working name, because I'm like, you can't call a company this. Then it turned out that it's a memorable name.

People like it.

Even if they have a negative reaction, which we have had some negative reactions to people saying like, oh, I can't tell my boss that I want to implement something called MotherDuck. Even just that kind of reaction, that visceral reaction, makes people remember it. I think it's been super helpful to us as we've gotten started.

Plus all the duck associations, you can probably tell we have a lot of duck swag and all sorts of duck iconography as part of our brand.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, it's fun. Actually, I've heard you talk about how at MotherDuck, you all try to keep a good sense of humor. It shows.

It shows with the MotherDuck visual identity, the name, and something that, did you call it subquery? Like almost the other end of the spectrum in terms of tone. Yeah, it emanates.

Jordan Tigani

Yeah. One of our internal sayings is embrace the duck. If you're going to be called MotherDuck, you might as well go all in.

I think one of the key things of being at MotherDuck is not taking yourself too seriously. I try not to take myself too seriously. My title on LinkedIn is Chief Duck Herder.

We try to have fun and we try to make it a good place to work and to be, and to have that sense of fun also extends to the public perception of the brand and how we show up and how everything works. We just want sort of a lighthearted feel about the company and also as something different from how other typical SaaS, B2B SaaS companies are, which tend to be very staid and stodgy.

And we want people to think - Hey, these folks are doing something a little bit different.

And I kind of like that. And people that like that, we want those people to be our customers.

Lindsay Pedersen

Was it a deliberate choice? Was there like a conversation like, we're going to be the kind of company where we don't take ourselves too seriously and we embrace humor? Was that a deliberate conversation or did this just sort of like gradually come into being because it's something that you wanted?

Jordan Tigani

I think it was partly just a reflection of the co-founders and the founding team. At first I was very uncomfortable with the term CEO. It sounded like I treated myself very, I was like, Oh, I'm the CEO. You must do what I tell you to do. And I wanted it to be different. So I called myself a duck herder instead.

And people are like, what the hell is a duck herder? And we also had just some, it's just fun to play with the idea and the names and the duck puns. And, you know, we went to an early conference data conference where, you know, we hadn't bought a booth or whatever.

And one of my co-founders showed up in a duck suit and inflate a giant inflatable duck suit. And, you know, just got so much attention and much more like actual people talking to us than, you know, had we spent a bunch of money on marketing. And it also, we, you know, we thought like, Hey, there's something here to this.

And then we did when we, we talked about, talked about branding, putting our initial website together. You know, we went through kind of a, an exercise where, you know, it was like, how silly or serious do you want to be? And, and, you know, somehow we just kept pulling the slider all the way to the, all the way to the left of like, Hey, you know, this is who we want to be.

And this is how we think of ourselves.

Lindsay Pedersen

Well, I love how it's coming from a really genuine place because it's part of the co-founding team's sort of vibe and also just the market value of being different. Like you just said, we didn't have to spend a lot of money on marketing. So surely by virtue of the breakthrough factor of being really different.

So, I mean, I'm picturing like there are other categories where that wouldn't have been as different, you know, if it was like, say like candy or like a children's, I don't know, a children's toy company, it wouldn't have been breakthrough actually would have been breakthrough to be stodgy. Right. Like, so it's also like just really taking into consideration the context of the market of the competitive space of what like competitors are used to seeing.

So that was brave. That's cool. I love that.

Kind of along the same lines. There's also a really contrarian tone that I love. You have a famous blog post titled big data is dead.

And I'm curious if that too was coming from a let's break out and feel different. Like was that coming from the co-founders or contrarian? So the company is going to be contrarian or how did that what was behind the inspiration for that?

Jordan Tigani

One of the things that I strongly believe is that if you hew to the conventional wisdom, it is extraordinarily difficult or even impossible to build something really interesting. So we, we kind of looked at, you know, what are the things that we think about the world that are different than what people would, would otherwise think? Because if you just go with what people think the world is going, then essentially the innovations and the ideas are like, everybody is focusing on that stuff and kind of stuff has already been priced in.

And then you have to basically fight on the same terms as everybody else. And they tend to be way, way ahead of you. And if you recognize something that's true about the world that the rest of the world doesn't see, then you basically can set the terms and you can fight on your own turf and on your own, in your own way.

And you have to have something that, you know, is actually true and is actually meaningful and is actually different and important. And one of the things that I had noticed having worked on big query, and I'd helped start Google big query is that most of our customers didn't have big data.

And, you know, I was describing this to somebody and it's like, you know, why would you use big query if you didn't have big data?

And it was because it was easy. Like we made it really, really easy to use. And so I kind of wanted to sort of kind of almost capture that like ease of use.

And especially if you're not focusing on building these sort of giant distributed systems, you can make something that's much easier to use, much kind of faster, much simpler. You can do it less expensively. You can move faster.

And you can also kind of set yourself apart from what the rest of the market is doing. And I really noticed that some of the other companies, you know, competitors in the space, I saw them, they had this sort of war over benchmarking performance, database benchmarking performance. And the size of data that they were using was enormous, you know, a hundred terabytes.

And so I had, you know, in big query, we had had some of the largest customers in the world. We had Walmart, we had Home Depot, we had HSBC, Equifax, like these are big companies with a lot of data and they never ran queries over data that was that large. Like they just, it just didn't happen.

And meanwhile, the two biggest like players are off fighting about like, Hey, we're better at this size and like than anybody else. And I'm like, Hey, if everybody is off chasing that sort of mythical giant, massive data, there's an opportunity here to come in and basically do a better job by focusing on the size, you know, that people already have. And so, yes, we were trying to be contrarian, but it was based on a real belief about, you know, how the world works and what the real market is.

And then we also kind of, we're working with this open source database and the open source database works really well, works amazingly well at like data that can fit on your laptop and can expand to sort of other larger sizes in that. So we basically had an advantage, competitive advantage at that size and a recognition that this is actually the size that's meaningful to the vast, vast majority of users.

Lindsay Pedersen

Wow. Well, I hear a couple of really big insights in there. One is that, and this is, it feels so, it's so human for other companies to kind of be chasing on something that they've forgotten to question its customer relevance, like just because it's like, it's the thing that seems like we should be getting bigger and bigger or faster and faster or cheaper and cheaper, or, you know, fill in the blank variable.

And sometimes it's just like, wait, that actually, A, is not customer relevant. And B is a race to the bottom on price. Like it's hard to differentiate yourself.

So just the willingness to kind of stop the madness with that, like that's one thing. And then another you said is, I mean, it has to be true. Like it's not like contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, if it's based on something contrived, we'll read as contrived.

So you were also saying something that is true and that you had heart for, but I just kind of come back to the, it wasn't customer relevant before. It's not customer empathetic to focus on the size of the data when that's not what they're doing. That's not what they're using.

Jordan Tigani

The interesting thing is if they think that they are like, I think the kind of this whole big data movement and everybody's talking about big data and like Google talking about, you know, how giant your data is. And I used to talk about how giant data that we could handle. And, you know, you see these graphs that show exponential increase of data sizes over time.

And everybody thinks that all I'm going to have, if I don't have giant data, I'm going to have giant data. And they don't really ask themselves, like, is that true? And I remember just talking to a potential customer who would talk about going to these data conferences and like seeing these like people describing their architectures, how they did things at Netflix.

And he comes home and he's like, I get all excited. I want to build what they did. And it was like, wait, what am I going to do?

Run like a one node spark cluster, like connect all these pieces together that aren't really relevant for the size, you know, that I'm actually, actually using. And that was sort of one of the other conversations that I had that made me think that, yeah, that people are going to be ready for this kind of thing.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And I'd love to hear you talk more about the customer experience element of this. I heard you say, this is a quote, with small data, because the architecture is simpler, we can focus more on building better experiences.

So for example, simpler tools to use. So the net cognitive load goes down. Talk about the experience and how that itself is a competitive advantage for MotherDuck.

Jordan Tigani

Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned that the open source DuckDB projects, one of the things that they have done is they've really focused on like, on how to really provide great ergonomics for people that are doing analytics. And, you know, so SQL is a language that's been around for 50 years now. It's the language that people write their queries in. And it's very awkward at times. There's some things that are very difficult to express.

And so one of the things that the DuckDB folks did is they just said, hey, what if we added some of these shortcuts? And some of the shortcuts that they've added have now started to take off, but they have a bunch of things and a bunch of things that they do that just make it easy. And I'll give one example.

CSV files, as much as people want to use kind of better file types and CSV files that people just, you know, they email them around their CSV files are everywhere. So lots of data analytics is done on CSV files. Now, one of the problems about CSV files, you know, comma separated files, like if you export from Excel, like it ends up being a CSV file.

And it's a super, super simple file format. On the other hand, like, because it's so simple, people implement all kinds of goofy things. And there's all kinds of problems with CSV files.

And so if you're an analyst and somebody gives you a CSV file, it might take you hours or days to actually get that into your database and be able to start to do any analytics on it. And so what, you know, one of the things about DuckDB is they said, hey, we're going to solve that problem.

They put like a PhD researcher on or like full-time for like several years have had, you know, written papers about how to do kind of inference and figure out the schemas and all this stuff.

And, you know, they attacked that problem, which everybody else had been ignoring. Like when I worked on Google query, we had a kind of a new hire just out of college, we had to work on it for a couple of months. And, you know, we were, I was done like, okay, I was like, hey, we did the CSV problem.

And so then customers would have like, they'd complain. And I'm like, and we'd be like, oh, fix your CSV file. And of course, that's really hard to do.

And, you know, I think one of the things we, you know, like to think about as like database companies, they focused on like, how do we make the database faster once you get the data in and everything working and the rest of it is sort of somebody else's problem. And by focusing on the broader problem, it was like, hey, how do I ask questions and answer questions about my business and about the data that I have? That expands the aperture of what you're trying to do.

And because we're not trying to worry about like these massive, you know, datasets and massive systems, we could kind of more directly address the problems that, you know, we believe that actually slow you down and actually make it hard to go from sort of, I have a hypothesis or a question about my business to then getting an answer about that business.

Lindsay Pedersen

And again, I get this kind of customer empathy here. Like, what's it like to be that analyst who's interrogating a file and kind of the frustration of that? And then what are they really trying to do? Like, is this file like, let's take a big step back. How can we solve the problem they have and like, ignore some legacy stuff or some vestigial stuff? Because it might be that that actually is part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution.

Am I saying that right?

Jordan Tigani

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one other interesting side of things is DuckDB, the database we're using runs on your laptop, runs locally, runs in your web browser. We run it in the cloud and we can kind of connect your local environment to the cloud.

You know, so one of the things that sometimes is just hard for people is just sort of like, kind of managing the gap between, you know, my local environment and the cloud. And, you know, very often these days, you know, people have really powerful laptops, you know, the most power, you know, recent, you know, Mac hardware, the M3s, like they're effectively supercomputers, they're, you know, just incredibly powerful. And kind of the way that systems have been designed, have been assuming that the thing that you have locally, the thing that you have, like, you know, on your desk is incredibly underpowered.

And then if you need power, you need to go to the cloud. And we can sort of kind of start to change that and start to move more work down to where you are, because you have this super powerful computer. It's like you run a query and it basically has to go send the query off to run in, you know, somewhere in the cloud, there's very expensive, hotly contested, you know, hardware.

And meanwhile, you have this just supercomputer on your desk that's sitting there idle, waiting for the results. There's a better way, there may be a better way of kind of allowing that to participate, at least in that computation.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And so much more empowering for the user to not be relying on the cloud. It's like, just by sort of updating our brains to know, actually, it used to be that you did need to do that.

It's not the case anymore. So just bring it back, just bring it to the local environment. You mentioned earlier, you're sort of teasing yourself subconscious about not wanting to be called CEO.

But I know that you've transitioned from you've been executives at other companies, Google, for example, to a founder and CEO now and an entrepreneur. What's that been like going from an executive at another really big company, certainly a leader, to being the CEO and co-founder and entrepreneur now at Mother Duck?

Jordan Tigani

I was very lucky that I had a stopover in between Google and startup land. So I was the chief product officer at a company called Single Store. It's kind of a late stage, scale-up company, also a database company.

And I got to see sort of how the world actually works. Because, you know, I was at Google for a long time, and there's so much you just take for granted and assumptions that's easy to make. To be honest, I didn't have a whole lot of respect for marketing because, hey, we started BigQuery, we really had no marketing budget, and that turned into a multibillion-dollar business.

And so, well, marketing turns out to not be all that important. And Google never was big on marketing. But of course, we had all these tailwinds of, but we're Google, and everybody paid attention to what Google did.

And then I get to a late-stage startup, and then I realized, no, no, no, marketing is war. Marketing is like, it's war for eyeballs, war for people's attention. It is so important because nobody is going to pay attention to you just because you have cool technology or because you built something interesting.

You have to fight, you have to demand, and you have to make yourself visible. And that takes a different type of thinking about problems that's just as hard as any of the other ways of thinking about the problem. And so understanding that marketing was important, understanding how the go-to-market works and how the incentives of the salespeople is so important, and how if you have a self-service motion and as well as an enterprise motion, you can get channel conflicts and clashes.

And there's just a bunch of stuff that I learned and was able to glean from this job in almost two years in between Google and starting up this company. So incredible amount of just learning what to do, what not to do, what things are going to look like. If we're lucky, a few years down the road.

And then starting the company is sort of, okay, I knew so much more than I would have had I just started from Google. There's a little bit of a, maybe a lot of sort of hubris from Google people where you think that their world works like Google and alas, maybe alas, it doesn't.

Lindsay Pedersen

And it's like, you can't see the inside of your own eyelids. Like you're inside a company that's just monumentally successful like Google. And you don't know just how kind of what a special circumstance it is, as opposed to the universal circumstance that all other businesses or most other businesses are.

Of course, the irony is that Google is like a world-class brand. So it's funny that there isn't quote-unquote respect for marketing because they're like absolutely genius. The result is so compelling.

Jordan Tigani

Yeah. We had good marketing people. I don't want to denigrate our marketing folks.

They did a lot with very few resources.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yes. Yes. Totally. Yeah. Nowadays, what are you working on as a leader? What's your leadership growth edge?

Jordan Tigani

Good question. So I think we're going from, we have something like 55 people now, and we're at a transition point from kind of the smaller company where everybody kind of knew what was going on to just having to be a lot more concrete with communication and over-communicating and setting up shapes for what things are going to look like. As things get bigger, hiring some additional leaders, we're just getting started with sales.

So we hired our first sales person a few months ago and kind of getting that sales off the ground.

And so there's just a whole set of like learning about how companies work and how to grow and scale to the next part. I've led organizations have been a lot larger.

And so I kind of have seen at least how to manage, but that was all, this tended to be all kind of technical people. And so this is just sort of very, very kind of different about how to tie all these pieces together. And you have technical people and customer people and you have sales folks and you have marketing and managing all the personalities and the relationships in that is really kind of difficult.

And I guess that's what I'm learning is how do we do this and how do we do this in a way that's true to the values of the company that we're building that kind of makes sure that we set up the right patterns for the future. And that's sort of really what I see kind of the biggest challenges right now.

Lindsay Pedersen

It sounds like it calls you to draw on different parts of yourself than from zero to 55 employees did that things that maybe you drew on in your last roles that you haven't had to yet. And as a variety seeker and as a novelty seeker, it's new, it's another leadership challenge, but it's different.

Jordan Tigani

It is different. I remember when we got started, there was so much that I didn't know. There was just like, I had no idea how to raise money or what a term sheet was. I didn't know what a term sheet was, let alone what a safe was or what a good VC is. And I had to learn a bunch of those things. And now I can advise startups and people because I know a little bit more than they do are people in that role.

And so I kind of, for a while I'd been in like this sort of, okay, I get this, I get the role. And recently the role has been changing. And so now I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing and I need help, but I need to learn.

And it's both invigorating and terrifying at the same time. Also the stakes get higher. And when you start to really care, I think that's one of the things that has been thrilling and scary is this sort of like, I care a lot because so much of myself is in this company, but also some of the employees and leaders and early folks and other people, they care and you don't want to let them down.

You don't want to not live up to what they think the company can do. And so if you're lucky, the stakes continue to keep raising.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. There's this, on one hand, the roots of the company and sort of the key elements that you put in place and the key insights from early on are still vibrant and there's a need to get larger.

And so there's already sort of a dance there.

Dancing as you get larger, you have to be more formal with communication and so on, and you care more. So the consequences of not doing it, quote unquote, right, feel higher. And the consequences of succeeding are higher as well.

So that's like a self-management tool to keep your body in the present and able to just sort of not future trip. Thank you so much for sharing that. And this has been such a fun conversation.

I have a few rapid fire questions for you as we finish. Are you game?

Jordan Tigani

Sure. Yeah, sounds great.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. And these are kind of like one word or two word answers. Okay. What is your favorite meal?

Jordan Tigani

Pizza.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is your favorite trait in another person?

Jordan Tigani

Being caring, caring for other people.

Lindsay Pedersen

What's a TV show that you're enjoying right now?

Jordan Tigani

We're watching The Lincoln Lawyer.

Lindsay Pedersen

Ah, yeah. My husband loves that. Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Jordan Tigani

I'm an introvert.

Lindsay Pedersen

And what was your last splurge purchase?

Jordan Tigani

Last splurge purchase. I went to London for New Year's Eve. So I was in the East coast and it's also my birthday. And so I went and visited some friends in London.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, that's awesome. So it was kind of a birthday celebration in London. Awesome.

This has been so great. So Jordan, if folks want to learn more about you or about MotherDuck, where should we send them online?

Jordan Tigani

My LinkedIn is, you know, I think it's just LinkedIn slash Jordan Tigani and my full name and motherduck.com. You can sign up and give it a try.

Lindsay Pedersen

Awesome. Thanks so much, Jordan. Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders.

Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star Leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.