The following interview is a conversation we had with Chetan Venkatesh, CEO of Macrometa, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $38 Million raised to Build the Hyper Distributed Cloud for the Next Generation of Applications
Chetan Venkatesh
Hi, Brett, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, so I am an engineer turned startup company founder and CEO. I’ve been doing this for 22 years now, and this is Macramenta is now my fourth data infrastructure startup. So it’s a space that I’ve been in for many years, and it’s a space that I continue to be extremely fascinated with. And I think it’s also a very important space in terms of where developers and customers are trying to innovate with their next generation of data powered applications on.
Brett
And how have you seen the space evolve over the last 22 years?
Chetan Venkatesh
Oh, wow. That’s the whole history of computer science right there in those 22 years. Right. I mean, went from the personal computer, the old IBM PC and the XT and that whole thing, right. To the advent of client server computing after that, the invention of the Internet, and then mobile computing and then cloud computing. Right. And underneath all of that, the data infrastructure has always been one of the most important types of infrastructures for building applications. Especially the minute we sort of moved into a shared model with client server computing, where there was a shared server that many people accessed different types of application services on. And as that sort of went into a more cloud like architecture and broken of web services and things like that. The data infrastructure probably is sort of like the giant beating heart of all of that stack. And so that evolution has been really fascinating because we’ve gone from being able to build applications that maybe served a dozen customers to a point where maybe in the 90s an application was being used by a few thousand.
Chetan Venkatesh
People at the same time we thought was a pretty big application to now, where people build applications on the cloud. And you can have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of potential users hitting the application at the same time. So the scales have changed incredibly. The complexity has changed also. As a result, it’s a lot more complex and then there’s just a lot of more risk, especially in things like cybersecurity, which is really a whole domain onto itself now. And the data infrastructure layer again, just being such a critical part of it, because applications need data means that this is an area that is very challenging to stay on top of. And you really need a smart team of people to work with who can help you build solutions that address these types of emerging new opportunities.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what about Silicon Valley in general? How have you seen Silicon Valley change over the last two decades?
Chetan Venkatesh
I can speak maybe credibly to the last 15 years. I haven’t been here two decades, moved here about 15 years back in the valley and I think it continues to just be at the center of the universe when it comes to tech. As much as every year you read articles about such and such city becoming the next Silicon Valley or that you don’t need to be in Silicon Valley anymore, you can do a startup anywhere and it’s true. The truth is that the opportunities that exist over here to find smart, passionate people to work with who have relevant domain expertise, who also have sort of an instinct for risk and company formation and all the startup challenges that come with trying to go out and build something in the great unknown, right. Those are all things that I think make Silicon Valley still very unique.
Chetan Venkatesh
And you don’t get that to the same level of maturity. And sophistication anywhere else in the world, whether that’s in Europe, whether that’s in the Middle East or in emerging economies, growth economies in Asia, it’ll get there, maybe, but the Valley tends to still, I think, attract the best of the best. And there’s a culture of startup building and knowledge and deep understanding of all facets of that over here that makes it unique. Within that I’ve seen a lot of change in the last 15 years. I think the way we build startups has changed considerably. Where we used to build a startup and potentially try and build a product in two to three years and get to your first revenues right in year three. Now you got to do all that in year one, so it’s really compressed. In the old days you used to go and get a you never did a seed round, you sort of went and did a Series A round when your product had some legs and you wanted to put it in front of more customers.
Chetan Venkatesh
Nowadays there’s a precede round and a seed round and a post seed round, and a Series A and a post Series A and there’s just all these different types of financings for very granular stages of a startup as well. So I think Silicon Valley and the way it deploys capital has considerably changed and I also think that work has become more specialized. I don’t think full stack developers cut it anymore. You need specialists, folks who understand front end, middle and back and really have very deep but narrow knowledge of things when you’re building products, especially in the data domain that I operate in. So that’s probably the third thing that I see has changed, is substantially people have become specialists and with very deep specialization in different aspects of the stack and the types of applications that are being built. Other than that, it’s gotten health, expensive over the last 15 years.
Chetan Venkatesh
That’s probably the other thing that probably stands out. We were fortunate, I think, to come and settle at a time when it was still reasonable to do that. And the disparity between San Francisco and the Bay Area and different parts of the country was not as great as it is today. I really hope that’s something we can address, because that’s probably the number one constraint and limit on actually smart people, young people, folks who are starting their careers, coming and settling over here. I worry that we’re going to end up with a generation of old folks who got here. Real estate was still reasonable, and unfortunately, everyone else is priced out. So there’s just going to be an old population of engineers and company builders that doesn’t get replenished with new ideas and new energy.
Brett
Hey, there’s a lot of commercial real estate that seems to be open in downtown SF, so at least hopefully, that’ll be converted to residential and they’ll solve some of that problem.
Chetan Venkatesh
I hope so. I really hope so. Yeah.
Brett
And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a CEO and as a founder. Is there a specific CEO that you admire the most? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I think Jamie Dimon comes to mind. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase? I see in someone like Jamie Diamond so many incredible values and principles that he operates from. I think One is just one of the largest banks in the world. It’s a giant multinational corporation that needs to deal with an incredibly complex and dynamic environment. Customers have so much a choice when it comes to financial services. There are startups they can go to, there are established other banks they can go to. But I think JPMorgan just has an incredible innovation culture because of Jamie Dimon. And that comes across in the way they build products and digital services and the way they serve their customers. So I think I look up to him a lot because he’s someone who I think has to analyze and internalize a very vast surface of knowledge about reality, about what’s happening in the markets, what’s happening within his organization.
Chetan Venkatesh
What’s happening with broad macroeconomic conditions and translate all of that into operational strategy, into product innovation, into building and channeling a very large workforce of hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of countries. I think he’s the master of scale, frankly. And if you put a gun to my head and there are several people I could name, but if you really put a gun to my head and said, name one CEO. Be jamie dimon.
Brett
Nice. That’s such a great call out. I get major presidential vibes from Jamie Dimon. I don’t know if that’s true, but there seems to be a lot of speculation that he’s going to run for President of the US. Which would be pretty cool.
Chetan Venkatesh
It would be very cool. I think someone of his caliber and expertise and temperament could be a great precedent for our amazing country.
Brett
Absolutely agree.
Chetan Venkatesh
And what about books?
Brett
Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? And this can be a business book, or it could just be a personal book that’s really influenced how you view the world.
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I’m going to break your rule and maybe talk about two books, because this is just extraordinarily hard. Name one book. But I think there are two books that I’ll call out. The first one is and by the way, I think Bill Gates called this out a couple of weeks back. But it’s a book that I read a few years, and it’s the inner Game of Tennis, and it’s an incredible book that talks about how to fundamentally learn the right habits and the right ways of thinking and turn them into the core set of values that you operate from. So that when you’re in the heat of competitive moments right. You can still sort of automatically express these good habits. You don’t have to think about them. They become second nature to you. And there’s a small anecdote over here. My dad is a competitive tennis player.
Chetan Venkatesh
He’s really great at it. He played competitive tennis at almost the national level back india, where he grew up and where I’ve spent a part of my childhood before I moved to the States. And he always wanted me to be a great tennis player. And I think I was talented from the shot making and the technicals of tennis, but I just did not understand the inner game of tennis, the mental part of it, the spiritual part of it, of playing sport and things like that. So I struggled a lot in competition, and I think as I went into the professional arena and built my career and then became a founder, for example, many of those challenges have equivalence in the professional world. And as I read this book a few years back, I realized there was such great advice in that book for how to handle those moments, how to think about certain types of problems, et cetera, that had I found that book when I was in my preteens or teens, I think it would have been an incredibly valuable book for me.
Chetan Venkatesh
But I still think it’s incredibly valuable because there’s so much I learned from it. And also I realized that, hey, I’ve also evolved and come to the same conclusions as that author and realized those lessons on my own as well. So it was a good way for me to validate my own experiences and some of the learnings that I’ve had over there. So Inner Game of Tennis, I think, is probably my number one book. And then I read a book recently that also had a pretty interesting set of principles and it had a big impact on me. It’s called be your future self. Now. And it sounds really new, AG hokey pokey, but it’s not because I think what this author does, his name is Dr. Benjamin something or the other, can’t remember his last name, sorry. But look it up on Amazon. Be your future self now.
Chetan Venkatesh
What he does is he forces you to really be clear about what you’re working towards. And I think that’s one of the things that founders and CEOs and startup people really need is a very clear understanding of where they want to go. Because if you sort of drift along, startups can be extremely hard and can be punitive if you drift along. And I’ve seen a lot of folks struggle with that earlier in my career. I struggled with it myself. But understanding how to set goals for yourself, for your team, and more importantly, having a very clear vision of what you want to grow into is so important and it acts as your template and compass for you to grow into that. This book actually crystallized, I think, 1518 years of Learnings for me in 45, 50 pages, which is great to read because you can go back and sort of refresh yourself very quickly about what it takes.
Chetan Venkatesh
Or maybe you can do a quick assessment and see where your gaps are in terms of how rich your vision is and whether you really painted all the colors and all the detail of your vision. Because if you don’t have that clarity, there’s no way you can give it to others. And this was a pretty amazing book in that respect. Amazing.
Brett
Yeah, I found it. Benjamin Hardy, I think.
Chetan Venkatesh
Right? Oh. Benjamin Hardy. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I couldn’t remember the last name. Yeah, no worries.
Brett
Just shouting out there for the listeners. Very cool. Those are two books I have not heard of and it’s very refreshing to have a founder come on and not say the hard thing about hard things or zero to one. So thanks.
Chetan Venkatesh
Value. Those are good books too, but I don’t think they’re necessarily the books that I call out as having the greatest influence on me.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely.
Chetan Venkatesh
Awesome.
Brett
Well, let’s switch gears here now and let’s talk about what you’re building. So can we start with the origin story behind the company?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, well, our origin story is kind of like it starts really in the technical domain, both me and my co-founder, Durga Gokina, who’s our CTO and head of engineering. We’re both from the distributed systems domain. And so over the last ten years, I think it was 2013, 2014, when were both working on our last startup together, that we started to ask ourselves a pretty important question, which is, okay, this cloud thing is huge, and obviously everyone’s going to be on the cloud by the end of this decade. What comes after that? And when you’re sitting in 2013 and 2014 and you’re trying to think about what the world looks like in 2023, which is where we are now, you tend to think it’s more of the same. And I’ve been wrong every time I’ve sort of linearly projected that it’s more of the same.
Chetan Venkatesh
Things get faster, things get better, things get cheaper. Yeah, they would do those things, but really the big life disrupting or innovating innovations are completely unexpected. And so as were thinking about it, we knew that whatever came after cloud was sort of going to be, in many ways, the thing that did things that the cloud can’t do. It wasn’t just a faster, better, cheaper cloud, it was actually orthogonally opposite to cloud. And so if you want to understand what it is, you’ve got to go and ask, what does the cloud not do well? And when we started to ask the question, what does the cloud not do well? It became pretty clear to us quickly that because of the way the cloud is technically architected in these giant data centers in remote regions around the world. And every time we use an application, our mobile phone or web browser needs to talk to a back end server that’s very far away in a different country, in a different continent.
Chetan Venkatesh
Usually things get really slow. And the more and more humans go online, the more and more the services that are interesting to us are digital data driven services, AI ML services, and underneath all of them is just data. And so if you can make data faster to process, faster to understand, and faster to act on, that’s going to be incredibly valuable. In the post cloud world, the challenges of almost all our computer science is designed for handling large amounts of data, but not fast amounts of data. And so we saw an opportunity to build a new kind of a company and a technology that allowed data to become much faster and serve real time experiences anywhere in the world. So we built a platform that we call the Global Data Network, which consists of a software layer that connects hundreds of regions around the world, hundreds of little data centers around the world, and makes data available in all these regions locally.
Chetan Venkatesh
So that when your application that you’re using, right, it needs data, it doesn’t go out of the country into a different data center in a different part of the world to get it. It’s always available in literally the same city that you’re in or maybe in the same state if it’s not in the same city, but it’s no more than 50 milliseconds away from wherever you are as a human being with some sort of an internet connected device. 50 milliseconds is crazy fast. I mean, to put that in perspective, if you look at a professional athlete, right, their reaction time, the best athletes have a reaction time of about 75 milliseconds and the average human has a reaction time that’s over 100 milliseconds, right? So something happens 100 milliseconds later, you react to it. So literally in a second, a human being can maybe react eight or ten times.
Chetan Venkatesh
Their brain can only comprehend ten events in a second if they’re exceptionally attentive. Average human probably can grasp two or three events in a second. A professional athlete might be able to get up to 15 events in a second. We’ve built an application platform and data network that can deliver events, data and data driven services and experiences in 50 milliseconds, which is faster than the brain can comprehend it. And that becomes really important in a world where we’re relying more and more on digital services, on our mobile phone, where we’re interacting with people virtually, where potentially we’re going to go and get a lot of our data and news and social interactions through augmented reality or virtual reality, where we’re potentially substituting esports for physical sports. The world’s changing a lot and you need a new kind of a cloud infrastructure to support that new world.
Chetan Venkatesh
Apple is going to bring out a virtual reality device later this year that could potentially be 100 billion dollar platform for all these next generation virtual reality, augmented reality, and dare I say the ugly word metawarse type of use cases, right? And for that you’re going to need a new kind of a cloud that does low latency, really fast data that’s faster than the human mind and that’s what we’ve built.
Brett
Amazing. And what market category are you in? Is this part of an existing category, transforming an existing category or are you creating a totally new category of tool here?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I think it’s sort of maybe at some blurry gray area between creating a new category and extending an existing category. Fundamentally what we’ve done is creating a new category that we call the global Data network. It doesn’t exist because there’s really no network out there that pushes data and allows these types of services for data to be built. But at the same time there are analogs for that in the old world. As an example, there’s something called a content delivery network or a CDN that is a very important piece of infrastructure that most people have never heard about. But frankly, without the CDN the internet would be unusable. The CDN is what allows a website to potentially serve tens of thousands of users. A CDN is what allows almost all our modern applications and websites to operate at the scale where a billion users can be online, a billion humans can be online and can go to Google and can go to all these different web services and make them usable.
Chetan Venkatesh
The CDN is really a way to extend the scale of the web and to make the web accessible at a cost point where billions of humans can use it. Now it works for the web, but it doesn’t work for the cloud. The cloud is really a set of application services and it needs something like the CDN, but the CDN can’t handle the cloud because it’s a very different technology. And so our platform, the GDN, the global Data network, is kind of like a CDN because what the CDN does for the web by making it scalable and cost efficient and high performance, we do the same thing for cloud and data. And so in some ways it’s sort of an extension of that old CDN category because it looks and smells like that, but it’s a completely new category because no such infrastructure exists for cloud applications.
Chetan Venkatesh
We’re the only game in town for that.
Brett
And when you were first starting the company, did you start with that intention that this would essentially become its own new market category?
Chetan Venkatesh
I love to say yes, but I wish I was that smart. It’s more organic, I think, as were just fascinated by the idea that a network like ours could potentially solve some immediate use cases that customers had and boring things like ecommerce. Right? A simple example you hit a website and you’ll quickly dump the website if it’s a shopping website, for example, if search takes too long you’ll go somewhere else or if the information is inaccurate. So we started with boring problems like that and as we built out and customers started to adopt our platform for solving some pretty unique problems, that’s when we realized that there might be an opportunity to build a category in and off itself. But no, we didn’t conceive of it in this grandiose way when we started out we kind of were just trying to solve a couple of interesting problems that we thought customers would pay us a little bit of money for.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And I would have to imagine that’s the majority of market categories are created right? It’s not something that happens from day one, it’s more of an organic journey that leads them there.
Chetan Venkatesh
I think so I don’t think I’ve come across any category creating product that was by design. Almost all of them sound accidental. And if by chance I think founders or people have said I’m going to go create that category, they’ve probably failed when trying to do that. It’s almost a whimsical accidental thing, I think, rather than a conscious and a directed thing. Maybe there are people who do it, but I certainly don’t know anyone.
Brett
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And in terms of adoption, are there any numbers that you can share that demonstrate the traction and the growth that you’re seeing right now?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I think we’ve gone from zero to 60 plus paying customers in 1820 months at this point, and it ranges from some of the largest customers in the world. Large enterprise customers like the third biggest Internet service provider in the US. Cox Communications, to the largest wireless network, Verizon, to some of the largest web services companies in the world use our platform. One of the largest cloud and CDN companies is an investor and a partner. Name of the company is Akamai. And all of that has fueled a spectacularly fast amount of growth and adoption of our platform in just 1824 months. What we’ve built is a very hard problem to solve. So it took us a couple of years to get the underlying technology viable and working at scale, but once we got it there, what we have found is that it’s a problem that doesn’t have an obvious solution, and our solution is pretty obvious for this and there’s a lot of demand for it.
Chetan Venkatesh
And I think even though it’s early days and we’ve gone from zero to 60 in 1824 months, what I’m excited about is that we’re probably going to triple or quadruple in the next year and the year after. Given that more and more customers are now starting to realize that they need an infrastructure like ours to be able to differentiate themselves going forward. And so our order book is just oversubscribed at this point, knock on wood. And we just have a lot of demand for our platform and product and so we’re heavily investing and fulfilling that demand right now.
Brett
And what percentage of those 60 came from founder led sales as opposed to being closed by other team members? Because that’s something that a lot of the founders that we interview on the show talk about is making that transition from founder Led and having a sales team. So what was that journey like for you and are there any numbers you can share there?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I think the majority of them are founder Led because it was just me and my co founder and we started to really build a salesforce only about twelve months back and we’ve added a few really smart and energetic folks into the sales organization. So I’d say out of the 60, maybe about 30, 35 or founder Led 40 probably is sort of where I would say the founder led sales motion was, and then we transitioned it to much more of a rep driven model and then a partner driven model. And so today the remainder of that 20 accounts, I’d say maybe 15 of them, have been sold and closed by my colleagues in the sales organization, and maybe four or five are pure partner Led, where the partner just sold our solution in and then closed it. And that’s starting to become a bigger growth piece for us.
Brett
And were there any lessons that you learned as you made that transition away from founder Led sales?
Chetan Venkatesh
Lots, I think. I think the biggest challenge you have in founder Led sales is that the founder tends to have very deep domain expertise. And things are just obvious to them because they are so context rich in the problem. They’re obsessed with the problem. They’ve been thinking about it for years and it’s the first thing they think about when they wake up and it’s the last thing they think about when they go to bed. And so I think the biggest challenge you have when you bring in and start building a salesforce is how do you give them enough context and understanding to be able to be effective in positioning the product and understanding whether the product is a real solution to what the customer needs? And then how do you go about solving it? Qualification, I think, is the biggest challenge that the sales reps have because they don’t know how to qualify a deal.
Chetan Venkatesh
Everything looks like it’s a fit for an early stage product because the early stage product literally is embryonic and it can become anything, it can do anything. So the rep feels like, hey, I can solve every possible problem with this. And I think a lot of teams really struggle with that phase in nailing down exactly what they’re going to do and what they’re going to walk away from. Learn to say no and to which customer and why. Right? That qualification is probably the most important thing. That transition between founder Led to sales Led has, subsequent to that, I think, institutionalizing that knowledge and turning it into a repeatable process where as you hire more people, they can easily on board understand how to sell and then go and become productive as quickly. That process is sort of the next step and I think that’s where most founders will struggle because to them, it all seems obvious that people should know these things.
Chetan Venkatesh
But the truth is, when someone you hire someone to come in and run sales, they’re going to have a fairly broad understanding of things, but not necessarily as deep as the founder does. And for technical products that can be, the difference between qualifying a deal correctly versus wasting your time with the customer is never going to buy makes a lot of sense.
Brett
And that’s super useful insights to have for our listeners. Another question I wanted to ask you is getting to 60 customers, I’m sure that’s not easy. And rising above the noise today is very difficult to do because there’s so much competition and just so much noise out there. What would you say you’ve gotten right there and how did you rise above the noise and capture the attention of those customers?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I think the culture of my company is kind of unique. We’ve got a big focus on what we call the three H’s. We call it humility, Honesty and heartfulness. And every company has culture and values. I think everybody says these things, but this is my fourth company and I’ve realized how important that is, that you sort of have this culture that is prescriptive, that is something that you really ascribe and commit yourself to and try and live that every day as a team. One of the, I think, consequential and positive benefits of that is that we have a very authentic and unique voice as a company. We don’t market like traditional companies do, with a lot of hyperbolic bullshit, a lot of claims. We’re the best in chest thumping. In fact, when you say there’s a lot of noise in the market, that’s what the noise is.
Chetan Venkatesh
Everyone’s trying to out shine and outdo the next one, right, by shouting louder. And so we’ve done the opposite, which is we’ve let our product and our technology do the talking for us. And we focused very much on enabling customer success and customers to be successful and advocate for us. It’s a really hard job because it takes a long time to build those 60 customers as a result. But once you start to get recognized for having an innovative product that’s reliable, that’s dependable, and a team that stands behind it, good things automatically come. Later this year, you’ll hear about things that customers are building with us at enormous scales. I mean, we’ve got customers who are frankly building something that’s as big as YouTube right now on top of our platform, and it’s going to serve 100 million plus users worldwide. There are very few companies that can actually deliver a platform at that scale.
Chetan Venkatesh
And we’re incredibly fortunate that we have a team that’s been able to build a platform that can support such large web services. Right? And so it allows us to cut through the bullshit because nobody’s done it. We’re the only ones who’ve actually done it at that scale. There are very few companies that have done it. Sure, Facebook is done it, sure, Google has done it, but then you sort of go to the next year and ask, where are the startups that can do these things? A lot of them claim they can do it, but have they actually done it? No, we’ve actually done it. And we’ve got maybe six or seven of the world’s biggest, most gnarly customers right in terms of demanding a certain scale, a certain type of performance, and we’ve put them in production and we’ve made them successful. And I think that’s allowed as that reputation that we’ve been able to do it at the scale with these types of big demanding customers has really been the secret to growing so quickly.
Brett
Amazing. And last question here for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for the company?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah, I think there are three horizons that we think about as we think about the next three years. The first horizon is sort of where do we want our customers to get value from us as a platform. And over there, our focus really is on helping customers take advantage of real time data and data opportunities. Today you really can’t do anything in real time because by the time something happens in the world, you collect information about it, bring it into the cloud, analyze it, process it, feed it into your AI or your machine learning and get something out. It’s too late and it’s too d*** expensive to create that loop for your data even, right? But the truth is that almost every digital service in the future is going to be real time. It’s going to be aware of what’s happening in your environment, it’s going to incorporate all those variables and it’s going to assist the way you do your work, the way you entertain yourself.
Chetan Venkatesh
All of those things will be augmented by EIML, powered by data. And so a big focus for us is how do we guarantee that we can deliver data and events at trillion events scale, right where trillions of events are happening worldwide. And our platform can carry that and turn that into knowledge and actuation for our customers. So that’s sort of a big area for us and more importantly, turning that into something that’s simple that any programmer can use in their work. As long as they know a little bit of JavaScript and a little bit of how the web works, they should be able to use our platform. It should not require a master’s degree or even a bachelor’s degree to use our product. That’s sort of that big focus. We have that’s one area. The second area is we want to be a company that really is incorporated and sold by partners rather than directly by ourselves because partners tend to be the trusted advisors to lots and lots of customers.
Chetan Venkatesh
Obviously we can’t go and build relationships fast enough with everyone. Our partners are out there who already have that and so we want to go and partner them. So becoming a partner friendly organization is sort of the second one that I care a lot about for the next three years. And the third thing I care about, just from a long term perspective, is something that we call carbon conscious computing. And it’s something that we are making a lot of investments in at Macrometa. And what it is really simple. By 2035, data centers and cloud computing will be the biggest, if not one of the three biggest contributors to carbon and global warming and climate change. And that’s because just the amount of energy that we’re going to need to provide AI, ML services around data and et cetera is just enormous. It’s a big environmental impact.
Chetan Venkatesh
Now, programmers today don’t really understand the consequences from an ecological standpoint or from a clipboard standpoint of what it costs when they build an application. I woke up last night with this great idea in my head to build the next Twitter, right? Something that’s better than Master Dawn, for example. I’ll go out, I’ll bang some code out, I’ll put it out there, I’ll charge some money for it. The truth is, I actually don’t know. How much is it costing me in terms of number of grams of carbon that my application is emitting as a consequence of consuming energy? For example, where is that carbon coming from? Is it coming from renewable resources? Is it coming from non renewable? Is it coming from fossil fuels? So we’re building awareness of that deeply into our platform, so that when programmers use our platform, they don’t just know the financial cost of how much it costs to run an app, they also know the ecological cost.
Chetan Venkatesh
It’ll tell you exactly how many grams of carbon footprint is being created by the application, and then we can bring in AI, ML, and we can optimize that. We can help the customer build apps that are more energy efficient, that are more carbon efficient. And I think that’s sort of a big deal because the more we can make our customers and developers aware of what the footprint of their application is in terms of carbon cost, that awareness is going to drive a change in their behavior and they’re going to be far more responsible in how they write code. And so that’s the third horizon for us, which is providing the tooling for people to build carbon conscious computing and data experiences that minimize energy use and minimize ecological footprint when they write apps.
Brett
Wow, that’s incredibly exciting. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Chetan Venkatesh
Yeah. So follow Macrometa@www.macrometa.com. That’s our website. Come sign up, use our platform. I’m on Twitter at Chaitan. My first name Chetan underscore. You can find me there. And my handle is Mr. SuperCloud and I tweet about cloud and I tweet about milkshakes, especially milkshakes in the San Mateo County area of Northern California. We’ve got some amazing milkshakes and I consider myself quite the connoisseur. So, yeah, or hit me up on LinkedIn. Chetan Venkatesh. My full name. Amazing.
Brett
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat and share your vision. This is all super exciting and we look forward to having you back on to share updates as you continue to build.
Chetan Venkatesh
Look forward to it. Thanks for the opportunity, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Keep in touch.
Chetan Venkatesh
Bye. And.
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