The RisingWave Labs Strategy: Why They’re Saying No to AI and Yes to Customer Obsession

In an era where every startup seems to be pivoting to AI, RisingWave Labs is taking a deliberately different path. Their reason? An unwavering commitment to customer obsession, learned from one of tech’s most successful companies.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Yingjun Wu shared how his experience at Amazon shaped RisingWave Labs’ contrarian approach to growth. “In Amazon, people care most about is to make customers happy, to be customer obsessed,” Yingjun explained. “Jeff actually mentioned a lot about, okay, you probably don’t need to focus too much about what your competitors have done… That the thing you should do, and the thing you should focus on is the customer.”

This philosophy has led to a bold stance on trending technologies. “We want to be focused within the next three to five years probably. We are not spin across different domains. We will not do AI and we are not do RAM,” Yingjun emphasized. Instead, they’re doubling down on their core mission: making stream processing accessible and valuable for customers.

This focus becomes particularly striking when you consider the pressure they face. “Every single people, every single user asking for different things,” Yingjun shared. With requests pouring in from both open source users and commercial prospects, the temptation to chase every new technology trend is constant.

But RisingWave Labs maintains their course by going deeper, not broader. Rather than spreading themselves thin across multiple technologies, they invest in understanding customer needs at a fundamental level. “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 approach has proven effective. Within 28 days, they achieved over 5,000 deployments globally and established more than 100 long-running clusters. Their GitHub repository has garnered approximately 5,000 stars, showing that focus doesn’t mean sacrificing growth.

For RisingWave Labs, customer obsession isn’t just about listening to customers – it’s about understanding them deeply enough to know which trends matter and which are distractions. “We’ll also be focusing on the customers and we hope that within the next three to five years when you talk to all customers, our customers should tell you that we are so customer obsessed,” Yingjun shared.

This stance offers valuable lessons for B2B tech founders facing similar pressures to chase trending technologies:

1. Customer obsession provides clarity in decision-making
2. Saying no to trends requires a strong alternative focus
3. Growth can come from depth rather than breadth
4. Understanding customer needs deeply helps resist market hype

The key is having the courage to maintain focus when everyone else is chasing the next big thing. As RisingWave Labs demonstrates, sometimes the most innovative strategy isn’t adopting every new technology – it’s staying focused on solving customer problems exceptionally well.