016: The SOLO but YOLO move from India to Establish his Data Company – Amandeep Khurana

Background on Amandeep Khurana:

Amandeep Khurana is a CEO & Co-Founder of Cerebro Data. His company works with cloud native data management and governance software for enterprises. Before this he was the Principal Solutions Architect at Cloudera Inc, where he worked with Cloudera’s customers to help them with their adoption and usage of the Hadoop ecosystem. Amandeep has been been involved in the big data ecosystem since 2009 and worked at AWS prior to Cloudera. Amandeep has also co-authored HBase In Action, a book on developing applications on the popular NoSQL datastore, HBase.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

[0:46] He is one of the founders of an enterprise data management product company Cerebro Data. They provide data access product for analysts.
[1:16] He is the CEO of the company and started the company with his friend Nong Li.
[2:44] He worked in a company called Cloudera where he was part of a technical field team.
[5:18] While they were starting the company, money became a problem. Both of them gave up their salaries and savings.
[5:51] They tried raising money but failed.
[7:01] One of the reasons why they failed to get investors was they were not working full-time in the company.
[8:21] They quit their jobs and started focusing in building up the company.
[11:34] He was born in New Delhi, India.
[15:10] He came to the US with the intention of finding his own education.
[15:37] His first three months was very difficult due to financial constraints.
[17:36] He worked part-time in Cisco as a graduate researcher.
[20:27] One the biggest achievements of Cerebro was when they closed a deal with a large bank and it was a licensing deal for the product.
[23:53] They closed their second customer, a retail company, just this year.
[25:02] The company has now 7 people and will be growing to 12 by the end of the year.
[28:05] “Go beyond what your job definition or title says.”
[28:38] He believes surrounding yourself with amazing people will push you to also up your game.
[33:30] “We believe that what we are doing have the potential to be a self-standing business in the long run and we want to give our all.”

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