Shay Banon, Founder and CTO of Elastic: Never Stop Searching in a Startup

Shay Banon is the Founder and CTO of Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) the open source leader platform that enables enterprise search, observability, and cybersecurity. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Shay on his path to starting Elastic, and his success building a commercial open source company in the era of cloud providers:Learn To Overcome Fear and Embrace the Future  [6:10- 8:43] - Shay was diagnosed with a rare and incurable kidney disease at a very young age. He was told he might not live a normal life and his condition could change at any moment. He has learned to overcome day to day fear and to embrace the future. Why Google Didn’t Win in Enterprise Search  [17:24- 19:50]  - In 2010, Google was a public company and everyone assumed they would win the war for search. But the enterprise market was different, and Elastic ended up being successful due to their focus on unlocking knowledge from diverse data stores. Google eventually exited the market and transitioned customers to products built on Elastic. How to Compete with Cloud Providers [27:50-33:16] - Amazon famously copied Elastic’s search service and launched a competing cloud offering called Amazon ElasticSearch. Elastic fought back by changing its open source licensing to defend its IP, and is now a partner to Amazon. This form of licensing is now commonly used by open source companies.