In this employee spotlight blog, read about how Head of Engineering at Revefi, Vikram Verma, navigated his career through the Big Data space at Oracle, Yahoo, and Informatica and what led him to joining Revefi.
1. Before joining Revefi, you had previously co-founded a company called FundsTiger. How did you leverage your experiences, and learnings from the FinTech space when building Revefi?
Ans) There are quite a few things you learn and need to do as a co-founder. I believe in the 4 Ps, which is to “Focus on the Problem that you are solving for People”, build a strong team around you that is agile, iterate fast and test your Product that adds value for your Customers. One needs to Prioritize very consciously and carefully as you have limited resources to build and test your product in an early stage startup. So being very mindful of the choices you make as a founder is crucial.
2. When you were scaling the tech team at Yubi from a pre-Series A to a $1.5B valuation company, what were those unique challenges you came across and how did you overcome them?
Ans) Hiring the right people who are suitable for your team at the stage of the company is crucial. People having prior startup experience, who have worked in small teams, those who have worked with ambiguous requirements to iterate on the go, those who are excited and passionate about the problems being solved, and those who share the organization’s vision are all important aspects.
Defining a hiring process suitable for the needs of a fast-growing company is crucial, as you need to maintain the bar when hiring. Then, onboarding new team members across various levels and functions was the next crucial step, so a good onboarding process and assimilation into the team are also crucial.
Finally, building a strong culture that aligns with the goals and values of your organization is critical once you begin hiring at a rapid pace, so that the organization's and team’s development goals are aligned and met.
3. Having worked in cross-geographical teams at companies like Oracle, Yahoo, and Informatica, how has it shaped your leadership style in managing distributed teams?
Ans) Managing across geographies, and time zones definitely comes with challenges. There were times I was collaborating with teams across Israel, US, India and EU for cross product releases at the same time. Key learnings from that exercise is building strong working relationships, which takes time and effort, and being aware of cross-cultural differences and nuances that in turn again help you foster better relationships to achieve positive outcomes.
4. You’ve also found the time to volunteer with social impact organizations like Karunashraya (hospice treatment) and SlamOutLoud (Skill Development). How did this help shape your outlook in life, work, and professional journey?
Ans) I know that I should dedicate more of my time to this compared to how much I was able to do earlier. Volunteering and helping others is very satisfying to say the very least. It also makes you realize the gaps in present society and inequalities, hence making you appreciate your own privilege while keeping you grounded, and more balanced with respect to the crests and troughs of life in general.
5. With a plethora of experience that spans industries and domains, what pushed you towards the Cloud Data Management space?
Ans) I have been in the Data space for a long time, much before cloud data platforms took shape. Having worked at Oracle (building on-prem warehouses and applications), and then working on large-scale data processing using Hadoop at Yahoo, and further at Informatica, where I worked on the first rollout of their Enterprise Data Lake. As the Warehousing world has evolved towards CDWs like Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery, my understanding was that this space was ripe for innovation and expansion to address the complexity and continually evolving customer needs, and Revefi was doing just that!
6. Before Revefi, what were the other avenues that appeared before you, and what made you ultimately decide to dedicate your time and resources to Revefi?
Ans) As we discussed above, this space has been evolving and is getting more complex and interesting with the advent and prevalence of cloud warehouses. Now, the problem statement that Revefi was solving (as well as the novel approach that Revefi had taken to solving some of the problems) is that it would do things in an automated manner while reducing the noise, which appealed to me.
The founding team (as well as the initial team) had strong and relevant experience in the data infrastructure space and seemed well poised to address the problems and complexity in the cloud data management space. So, these were the key factors.
Looking back at the progress we’ve made over the last two years that I have been here, we have taken various innovative approaches such as leveraging AI models to address various aspects of cloud data management, and improving Data Quality, Performance, Usage, Governance, Cost Management, and Automated Warehouse management.
It is amazing to see the value that our enterprise customers are deriving from Revefi.
