[00:00:43] Eiso: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of developing leadership. As always, you have Jason and myself here, but today we also have our guests Emil. Before we get to introducing Emil, Jason, you've gone ahead and completely changed up, your role. You've gone from CTO of GitHub to now MD at Red Point. Tell us a little bit about what happened.

[00:01:06] Jason: Well, I figured I was going to make the very natural transition from engineering leadership to growth stage investing on the VC side seems like a very well-trodden path. Just joking. I think I might be one of the second or third, you know, high-level CTO is to make that, but it's a stage of my life, where I've realized what I, I like to do, what I'm good at, and what I was getting a lot of energy out of these days.

[00:01:29] And I love working with startups is what I've been doing for 20 years of my career. And when I started angel investing about 18 months ago, pretty rigorously. And I just enjoyed working with the founders again, and I felt I got a ton of energy from it. So I love it so far. I'm two weeks in asking me what I'm 10 years in, and then I'll, I'll have a different answer, but we'll see.

[00:01:50] Eiso: No, that sounds amazing. And, uh, I think there's a wealth of knowledge that a lot of founders are going to really appreciate from you having been a CTO before. And I think that's a great segment into introducing you Emil because you're the founder of Neo4j one of the most interesting database companies that have been built in the last few decades. And you actually just went and raised a very large round of funding. So I can imagine that you know, in your earlier days you probably would have enjoyed having a board member and investor who really knew what was happening on the tech side.

[00:02:20] Emil: Yeah, totally. Jason, what took you so long?

[00:02:23] Eiso: So Emil for those who don't know you or Neo4j can you give us a couple of minutes about who you are? And then we can dive right into today's topics.

[00:02:31] Emil: Sure. Yeah. So I'm Emil Eifrem and I'm one of the co-founders of Neo4j, and I've been the CEO from, from day one. I guess we'll talk a little bit about what that means. CEO day one and CEO today means two different things. I was also originally the kernel programmer and then API designer and then the documentation author and then slowly but surely my commit rights got revoked, and you know all that good stuff right. Then I transitioned from kind of building the product to building the organization, that builds the product then stops there. I think we'll, we'll spend some time on today, and the product is a graph database, and I think they'll probably be familiar, the category might be familiar to, to listeners of this podcast. I would imagine.

[00:03:18] We actually coined the term, we put the word graph and database together for the first time. And so one way of summarizing the previous decade is that I basically have evangelized graph databases to the world. Defined what they are, we've articulated the benefits, when to use them importantly, when not to use them. And really with the small asterisk at the end saying " hey, if you like these concepts feel free to use Neo4j you know, we're not going to be offended, but you don't have to, dear developer who does not want to be sold to. That don't, don't feel like you're being sold to, but feel free to check out Neo4j. And today we are, I guess it depends on when the podcast is being released as we're growing fast, about 500 people now. Uh, as mentioned, we just raised a big series round of over $300 million, which we just talked about as the biggest round in database history and feel really, really good about. We defined graph databases together with, you know, other vendors graph database vendors in the previous decade, and this decade is really where we feel like it's our moment to shine and bring graph databases to the world.

[00:04:24] Eiso: That's super interesting, and you mentioned something, and we had a little chat before this, before we started the podcast around, you know, you've gone from CEO and solo contributor pretty much on day one. You know, the first I think you told me in the past, the first 400-kilobyte jar file, if I remember correctly, you know, was, uh, was version 0.01, to, uh, having to go from, from being an engineer, to actually being a CEO, and Jason, I know you have some interesting things to share on that as well. I'd love to hear a little bit from you, Emil. Like, what was that journey like?

[00:04:57] Emil: Yeah, it happened really organically, honestly. Right. It was one of those things where I feel like I was always focused on, well, I was always really interested, genuinely interested in what I perceive to be the biggest blocker for our success, right? And of course, initially, it was riding the kernel. Right. And so together with my co-founder, that's what we focused on. How can you get like connect the data, right, operations and connect the data to perform, back in the days of spinning desks and completely different ratios between Ram and Disk. It was actually a pretty hard problem to make that work.

[00:05:33] So that was kind of the initial. And then it was like, all right, how can we make this easy to use for developers? Right. So that kind of the API design. And then afterward I was like, well, okay, we need to start hiring people. We need to raise money. We need to get the word out there. And so I always was kind of intrinsically interested in whatever I perceived, right or wrong, perceived to be the biggest block or the biggest kind of thing that could unlock the next level, uh, for the company. So I always had that interest and that drive, but certainly, it's shifted a lot. Like even how I look at how I thought of my success for myself, what is success? It used to be, I always had a team view. Like I always thought of engineering as a team sport. Right. So it used to be like, how can I make the team successful as an individual developer? Like, I'm going to try to write clean code, you know, and, and, and things like that. And that's actually probably wrong. I probably like, as a teenager, I didn't look at it as a team sport. Then, then my, the success was like, I can write this fastest putpixel, right. Like any assembly on x86 architecture. Right. And it's a somewhat mature program, but that's how I looked at it.

[00:06:40] And then it kind of transitioned to, okay, as a manager, as an engineering manager, kind of that moment when I actually was the role that this podcast is targeted to, right. Then it's like, how can I, how can I unblock the team? How can I hire? How can we collaborate well? Like what does success look like for the team? How can I enable others to be successful, with no kind of a stream of work for myself. And then of course, now that I've transitioned into a CEO and executive, it's changed again, right. Where it's much more about the overall company, how's that successful and you know, what are the broader components? How can I fund the company appropriately? What is the division between the two and, and things like that.