I'm Jake Aaron Vill, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build that are transforming industries. I'm excited to have with us today Dr. Amr Awadallah, co-founder and CEO of Victara, a company that is enabling organizations to leverage trusted Gen AI in business applications by reducing risks from hallucinations, biased, copyright infringement, and intellectual property pollution. Welcome to the show.
It's my pleasure to be here, Nick.
Great. A little bit more about Amr. He previously served as VP of developer relations for Google Cloud prior to joining Google in 2019. He also co-founded Cloudera in 2018 and was CTO for 11 years working closely with enterprises around the world on how to ingest and extract value from big data. He famously coined the concept of schema on read versus schema on write. He also served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo from 2000 to 2008. In fact, his first company was acquired by Yahoo which was a search engine for online product information. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University and his bachelor and master's degrees from Cairo University in Egypt. Well, we're excited to talk with you today here and you have a lot in your background that's I'm sure going to be interesting for a lot of the listeners. Before we dive in here, where are you calling in from today?
Today I'm actually calling from Carmel Highlands in California.
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Yeah. I mean, I typically live in Palo Alto, but we have a heat wave right now in the Bay Area, so I'm escaping the heat as much as I can.
Good strategy. I like that. Yeah, we're located down in Laguna Beach and luckily we have a little bit of this offshore winds and things are a little bit cooler down here, but... Good. Well, thanks for joining. Before we talk about you and your company, what you're building today, give us a little background on kind of your origin story, kind of where did this start and how did you get into technology?
Yeah, so I would say it's really curiosity. The origin all comes from curiosity. I think science and engineering is always driven by that, trying to figure out how things around us work and then how to make them work better. So I'm from Egypt originally. When I was very young, like six years old, seven years old, I liked to just break everything that my dad built. So he would buy a new fridge, a new TV, a new washing machine. I would open it up and then reassemble it. And sometimes I am successfully able to bring it back to life and sometimes it just breaks. I drove my dad nuts doing that. But I think that's the origin. The origin comes from very naturally from a young age. I always had this curiosity for how things work.
Yeah. That's great. Well, the curiosity led to you becoming an entrepreneur and founding companies. Did you have that sort of makeup growing up? I know the problem solving and taking things apart technically makes a lot of sense, but talk about the entrepreneurial side. Were you the type that were selling products or services at a young age? Like where did that part come from?
Yeah. So, believe it or not, it wasn't part of my DNA at all. Like when I was young in Egypt, it's very hard to become an entrepreneur in Egypt. You need to know somebody who knows somebody. The law system is not as fair or nice as it here in the US. Connections matter more than aptitude. So, I wasn't really dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur back in Egypt. My dream was just to become a professor like my dad. My dad was a professor at Cairo University. And he would tell me since I was very young, okay, you're going to be an engineer when you grow up, but you're going to be a professor engineer and you're going to teach engineering at the university. And I did indeed get my bachelor's and master's degrees from Cairo University and then I came to the US in 1995 to get my PhD from Stanford. And then Stanford was a very pivotal point. So Stanford shifted me from being somebody who wants to become a professor and seek a career in academia to being somebody who wants to become an entrepreneur and that comes from a number of reasons. The first one is just landing. When you land in the Bay Area, as you know, Jake, having been here yourself, you see all these companies we hear of. You see Nvidia, you see Intel, you see Google, you see Oracle, you see LinkedIn, like they're all right there. Twitter, Facebook, you name it, right? So, right away, you start grounding yourself that these companies we heard about, they're actually real. They're there. So, that's number one. Number two, at Stanford, from day one, regardless of your discipline, if you're in finance or law or health, they teach you about entrepreneurship right away. How to make a business plan, how to make a pitch, how to approach investors, how to do sales and marketing, branding, messaging. So that equips you with the raw skills that makes it more tractable for you. It's like I used to think starting a company is very hard and I was scared of starting a company. It is hard by the way. I don't want to admit how hard it is to start the company, but part of that fear came from my ignorance of the tools and the techniques you need to make something like that happen. So, they give that to you on a silver plate. So, that's number two. And number three, Stanford keeps inviting all of the entrepreneurs from the industry like the founder of Google, the founder of Yahoo, the founder of HP, the founder of Oracle, the founder of Nvidia to come in and talk at Stanford. So you get to see these people and when you see them in real life, not just in a YouTube video and talk to them in real life, many of them are very, and that's one of the key attractive things about the Bay Area. Despite of their success, they're still very humble. They're very humble and they're very confident at the same time. And that makes it for you more achievable. Like I can be like that. These guys don't have wings. They don't have like halos around their head that make them 100 times stronger or smarter than any of us. They're just like they have perseverance, they have grit, they have determination to get things done and they have great ideas. And so I shifted, like Stanford really, I usually joke and say Stanford corrupted me from the teaching mission to become a professor to instead become an entrepreneur. So I give all the credit to Stanford actually.
Yeah. You just never know where your education is going to take you and the influence it has on you when you go.
Exactly. That's why we go to that. And by the way that's one of the things I love about the university system here in the US is where they let you study many many things. Like in Egypt at least and most other countries you get to specialize, you get to pick one thing and like I'm going to go to the faculty of engineering and that's the only thing I'm getting. No, in the first couple of years in most universities here in the US you get to explore, right? You see economics and you see accounting and you see engineering and you see law and that makes you find your true calling, right? It makes it a lot more better for you to find your true calling than having your mom and dad tell you when you grow up you're going to be this or you're going to be that.
Yeah, 100%. Well, you had some early successes in your startup experience. Epivia being acquired by Yahoo and if I recall correctly, that was kind of the beginning of where search was happening as well as e-commerce and being able to take products and get more visibility to where they were then where do you go to buy it? So you were really on the forefront of technology early on. The company that I think is really interesting because we just read so much about it was Cloudera and it was almost like the company of Silicon Valley for a moment where everyone knew it. Everyone thought it was an incredible company. You guys went public. You really scaled up. And for the listeners that's a dream for them, can you just before we talk about your current company, Victara, and get into that, can you share a little bit about what you thought the experience was going to be like when you started and really built and scaled and went public to what it really felt like in that experience.
Yeah. So, first I will note is I like to remind all of us starting companies is hard. It's not easy and the chances of success is low actually. So, you need to be brave and you need to be willing to take that risk. Willing that I'm willing to risk the stability of a big job in a big company, go start my own company when I'm being paid a fraction of what I'm being paid at that big company. But now I have a big chance of number one delivering on the mission, the vision, the solution that I am a believer in and then number two having the success that might come with that as the company succeeds. Definitely taking a company from four people. Cloudera was four people at the beginning. There was four co-founders. There's just the four of us. That was in summer of 2008. We got together. We started the company in October of 2008. Officially the first round of funding came then in October though we started a few weeks before that. And yeah, that company went from four people all the way to thousands of people and going public on the New York Stock Exchange. And I cannot stress how rewarding it is actually to build something like that. On the day that we were in the New York Stock Exchange, they have this very old tradition to give you a hammer and a bell and you have to ring the bell with the hammer. Like you just hammer the bell and that launches your stock now for public trading. It's a very old tradition because today you don't need ring bells and hammers. Today it's all done by computers anyway. In the old days, they would ring that bell and then people start shouting out the prices and so on, which is funny that they kept that tradition. But when you hit that bell, launching that ticker symbol, I got shivers like all of my hairs in my hands were standing up and I can feel it throughout my whole body. It's like, wow, this company now is born. This company now is out there. It's independent. It has all governance structure, shareholders, and it might survive and live longer than I would live. And I frequently would tell people that the feeling you get from that is very similar to your first kid or first girl or boy that you have. It's like you see this thing that came out like wow I helped make that and same level of thing which is very very rewarding. But I don't want to diminish the importance of you being ready that it's hard, there's going to be ups and downs, there's going to be tears, there's going to be joy as well but it's not easy. You have to keep in mind that it will require a lot of grit, a lot of perseverance, a lot of determination to make it succeed.
Yeah, and a lot of people to make it succeed too and the right people.
About the team, yeah. Some entrepreneurs think it's about the idea. No, the idea is only 1% of the story. It's how you going to execute on that idea. And how you execute on that idea is going to depend on the amazing team that you build around you that's going to make that happen. And if you're from day one, I don't want to say like that doesn't work because there's people that do that like Elon Musk. It's all about him. We know that and he still succeeds. But I'm a big believer that it's really all about the team. And I'm a very big believer that a great team of people will always beat a team of greats. So what I mean by that is a team of greats is a bunch of geniuses that don't know how to work with each other, right? So they're all very smart. They think they are God's gift to creation. They think they're the smartest people on planet earth and they have this arrogance in them. So they don't have the humbleness and hence they don't work very well with each other. I think a great team of good people that are very confident and working together and really optimizing for the team will always win against a team of greats and that's the kind of cultures I believe in and like to build around me. So I agree with you 100% Jake that it's not about me, it's about the team I'm able to assemble around me to make it succeed.
Yeah. And you don't have to be the founders to actually have that experience either or be there to see the rewards. If you're there in the beginning, that's why a lot of people join startups where they might not have the idea, but they can be part of that team and get some of the fruits of the labor in the process which then propel them to be their own founder as well.
And in fact, we did invite a lot of the founding team members, the first 10, 20 employees that joined us at Cloudera. We did invite them to come to the IPO and witness this special moments because without them that would not have been possible. But specifically your first core group of like 20, 30 people they become the genesis, they become the seed of that company in terms of culture, in terms of work ethic, in terms of execution, in terms of focus. They are the seed that make that happen so you really want to reward them very well so that they be, because they were loyal to you and you need to show them loyalty back.
100%. Well that's great. Well, what a story in itself and just the accomplishment to go through that, the experience and the confidence you can bring with you as you go forward can lead to many other things. We're going to talk about Victara today, your current company.
Actually, before we switch to Victara, I apologize to interrupt you. Just I forgot to mention about Cloudera is how did the idea for Cloudera come around actually. So, Cloudera was about big data, like how can we analyze big data in a more flexible scalable way. So previous systems were databases. Databases were very rigid. They're very structured, very rigid. But they're hard to evolve with the different types of data that you have. And databases have a language called SQL which you use to ask questions but it's not always the perfect language. Like sometimes you want to ask questions with other languages and that was the genesis for Cloudera. Now how did that idea come to me? That came directly from my work at Yahoo. So while I was working at Yahoo I was towards the later years I was responsible for business intelligence, meaning reporting back to the business how they're doing and how can they optimize the products better to increase retentions of users and engagement with users and as part of that we had to build a very very scalable flexible data processing system that can do that and none of the legacy databases were hitting the spots. They were not flexible enough, they were not scalable enough and they were very very expensive to be honest. And that's where the genesis for Cloudera came to be. So one of the best, the summary of that why I say that is one of the best lessons for anybody listening to the show right now in terms of what is the next big idea I should be working on usually comes from your job. It comes from a problem that you're facing yourself and because of your experience and knowledge of that problem you come up with a very unique and differentiated way for how to solve that problem way better than others. So always be looking at that if you're thinking about starting a company. Always be looking at your job for clues for what's the right problems that you'll be going to solve.
Yeah, it's great. Thanks for adding that to the conversation here. If you look into business, yeah, sometimes it's about understanding the problems you're trying to deal with in your own role and that becomes the idea that ends up being your next startup. But it's really about understanding what problems are in the market that you can help solve. We talk about your current company of Victara. What is the problem you're looking to solve today?
Yeah, so there's two problems. There's the meta problem and then there's the technical problem. So the meta problem is AI is finally here. AI is finally here. Meaning technologies that can reason, read, plan, think, generate in the same way that we do as humans. And our goal is to help companies leverage that capability within their organizations. So our primary goal at a very high level is what we refer to as trusted generative AI. How can I use my generative AI within my company while maintaining the trust with that technology to help me do the right things. The more technical explanation for what we do, for the listeners that know, the solution is called retrieval augmented generation or RAG as a service. And retrieval augmented generation is this technique that allows Gen AI to produce responses and take actions that are grounded in your own data, right? So ChatGPT for example is what was trained on the web data, what's available on the web, Wikipedia and New York Times and number of other sources of contents. We, when we're doing this for a customer, it's based on their own data that we're doing that and then helping them find very good actions, solutions, responses as a function of that data by leveraging Gen AI within RAG. When you're doing this technique that's called RAG, meaning Gen AI for business, there's three key problems that the businesses really care about that you have to solve. If you don't solve these problems within Gen AI then they're not going to be able to deploy you, they're not going to be able to use you. The number one problem is accuracy of the responses, which is this hallucination issue. The large language models which are these techniques behind, unfortunately, they have this very small probability of about 2% where they might make up stuff, they might make up completely made up facts that are not true but say them in a way that appears to be so correct to the extent that it tricks us as humans, we think that is the right answer. And there's many scary stories last year about lawyers that lost their jobs because they believed the AI and just used the AI to build their lawsuit or airlines that had to sell a ticket for $1 because a user tricked the large language model into offering that or somebody getting a car for free by tricking a car dealer large language model Gen AI to do that. So that's all a manifestation of this hallucination issue. So that's number one. Number two is security. These systems need to be secure. You have to make sure that they don't reveal secrets that they should not reveal or if they're revealing them, they're only revealing them to the right person with the permission level to be able to see these secrets. So, believe it or not, that's the number one concern actually that businesses have in terms of using Gen AI within their organizations. And then the third number three problem is explainability. If you're using Gen AI, if you're using AI in general actually not just generative AI and using it within a regulated industry business like finance, insurance, legal, accounting, health, manufacturing, telecommunications, government, all of these regulated businesses, most of them require you to explain the response. You cannot just tell me here is the answer. You cannot just tell me here is the plan. You cannot just tell me here is the action plan that you need to execute right now. You need to tell me why. Explain to me why, how you came up with this plan. Why is this the right plan? Which of my documents and PowerPoint presentations and PDFs did you depend on to come up with these conclusions? So that's a very very key problem as well. So we solve all these problems. We solve the problem of hallucination and accuracy. We solve the problem of security and permission access control and the problem of explainability and explaining the responses that you get back. Hopefully that makes it very concrete to you what we do.
