The RisingWave Labs Playbook: Why This Ex-AWS Engineer Started with Zero Customer Conversations (And Why He Regrets It)

Sometimes the most valuable startup lessons come from what founders wish they had done differently. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, RisingWave Labs founder Yingjun Wu shared his biggest regret: believing his technical expertise meant he could skip customer conversations.

It’s a common trap for technical founders, particularly those coming from big tech. After spending years at AWS Redshift building one of the world’s leading data warehouses, Yingjun thought he understood the database market well enough to start building immediately.

“When I started a company, what I thought is that what I’m building is stream processing database system. Database system hasn’t been there for, let’s say 40, 50 or 60 years,” Yingjun explained. “And SQL is kind of standard… At the time I saw that, okay, I don’t need to talk to your customers. I can probably just write a code and build a system.”

This assumption proved costly. Without early customer conversations, RisingWave Labs missed crucial insights about integration requirements and real-world usage patterns. “If you do not really talk to customers, you don’t really know what a customer’s workload looks like and what customers true requirement looks like,” Yingjun reflected.

The consequences became clear when dealing with integrations. “Think about the integrations. I mean, people nowadays when people build systems, we have to build integrations with some other systems in the stream processing space as a streaming database,” Yingjun shared. “We have to build integration with messaging systems such as apache Kafka. Apache. Paulza rapanda. And also we also need to build integrations with some data lakes like Hoodie, Iceberg, Delta.”

The team found themselves overwhelmed by integration requests. “There are so many requirements. But if you do not really talk to your customers, what do you think is that I should support all of them, but at the end of the day, your bandwidth is limited and you feel that I probably cannot really finish all of them at once.”

The solution? Start talking to customers, but do it differently than most founders expect. “Don’t just talk to them about big ideas because if you just talk about the big ideas, they will say that it’s a cool idea and I fully support you,” Yingjun advised. “Talking about big idea doesn’t really work. You should talk to them about the details of your product even if you haven’t implemented it.”

This insight fundamentally changed RisingWave Labs’ approach to product development. Instead of building features based on assumptions, they began diving deep into specific customer requirements and use cases. The result was a more focused product that better served real customer needs.

For technical founders, particularly those coming from big tech companies, Yingjun’s experience offers valuable lessons. Technical expertise, while valuable, isn’t a substitute for customer understanding. Even in mature markets with established standards, customer conversations reveal crucial insights about integration needs, workflows, and priorities.

The key is timing these conversations correctly. As Yingjun emphasized, “We should talk to customers early, as early as possible. Even if we just had an idea, we should talk to our customers what they really want and talk to them in detail.”

This approach doesn’t mean building everything customers ask for – it means understanding their needs deeply enough to make informed decisions about what to build first. It’s about finding the balance between technical excellence and market reality, between innovation and practical utility.

Today, RisingWave Labs has found that balance, but the lesson remains: even the most technically sophisticated products need to be built on a foundation of deep customer understanding. Sometimes the most valuable expertise isn’t what you know about technology, but what you learn from your customers.