5 minute read · June 18, 2020

Why I Joined Dremio

Ohad Almog

Ohad Almog · Vice President of Customer Success, Dremio

A few weeks ago I joined Dremio as Vice President of Customer Success, and I’m very excited about the opportunity and the journey ahead and wanted to share what led me to join.

Everyone knows startups are hard – long hours, nights and weekends. You’re always working, either physically or mentally, wearing ten hats and trying to improve or fix problems while going 120 mph. It’s a commitment that requires dedication and sacrifice 24/7, and you find yourself prioritizing work over family on many occasions. Finding the right startup to join is not an easy task, but when you do, you have plenty of reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

Personally, I love startups because of the ability to build things from the ground up, hire top talent and lead teams focused on solving problems and making customers happy. I’m passionate about customer success, and value the opportunity to partner with customers to ensure their success with our products. Listening to a customer share how valuable our product is, and the impact it has made on their organization, is priceless. How impactful the product is and how much value it provides customers are the key criteria that drive my decision-making when joining a company. It also has to be a product that is critical to an organization, and not just a “nice to have.”

I joined Dremio because it has a product that challenges the status quo of data analytics and data engineering. It offers an open architecture that is fundamentally different from the existing proprietary and closed solutions that limit the ability to use the most innovative tools available. Dremio dramatically simplifies and streamlines data engineering and enables data teams to “democratize” data access and analytics. Data consumers such as BI users, data scientists or anyone who needs to analyze data in order to make better decisions, can now access enormous data sources easily, quickly and securely, without having to engage and wait for data engineers who are overwhelmed with the demand and complexity of making data accessible.

Data allows organizations to more effectively determine the cause of problems, and make more-informed decisions regarding their present and future state. But without access to all relevant data, organizations risk making decisions that are completely disconnected from reality. One of my favorite capabilities of Dremio is the ability to combine multiple data sources in a cloud data lake, whether it’s files on Amazon S3 or Microsoft ADLS and unlock information that is otherwise inaccessible. Dremio can even combine data from external sources, such as relational databases, with the data inside the cloud data lake. This gives decision-makers the ability to see the entire picture, and make smarter decisions.

Having a valuable product is not the only important criteria in my book. Today, successful adoption is just as important to the economic buyer as is the product’s technical capabilities. No one wants to buy shelfware and dedicate valuable money, time and resources in evaluating it, only to realize the end users hate it and refuse to use it. A key requirement to ensuring strong adoption is product usability. The product has to be very easy to use and understand, with a minimal learning curve for new users. Even the best customer success team will never be able to get to every user in an enterprise organization, so it is critical that users can be successful with little or no training. The Dremio platform is designed as a self-service data platform, with both technical data engineers, as well as non-technical BI users in mind. The interface is clean, clear and self-explanatory, and new users are able to quickly acclimate. At the same time, it is versatile and powerful, and can provide solutions to even the most complicated data needs.

The last important consideration for joining a company is its ability to execute. Even with the best product, companies will fail if the team behind it cannot successfully execute the playbooks for sales, marketing, product management, engineering and customer success. And Dremio has a top-notch roster of highly experienced executives leading very strong teams across the board.

Dremio is changing how organizations consume and analyze data to make better decisions, and I’m excited to be a part of it.


About the author

Ohad is responsible for the entire Customer Success organization at Dremio, including customer onboarding, implementation services, training and adoption, and technical support. Prior to Dremio, Ohad built and ran Customer Success at Harness, a CI/CD platform as-a-service, backed by Menlo Ventures and IVP. Prior to that, Ohad built and ran Customer Success at OverOps, a software analytics company that provides a unique code analysis technology, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. He also helped build the Customer Success team at Capriza, an Andreessen Horowitz company, and led the Professional Services team at MTS, a telecom software company.

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