The Future of Databases with Matt Cain, CEO, Couchbase

Databases are exciting! Matt Cain, the CEO of Couchbase, contends that databases are right in the middle of digital transformation and that this reality provides great meaning to Couchbase’s work. Tune in to learn about Matt’s position that leaders must first look inside themselves to uncover the best way for them to lead.

 Main Takeaways:

• Technology in the Family: Matt shares how his parents and grandmother worked at HP for many years, and he mentions the great culture at HP. He talks in more detail about how he learned valuable business lessons from his father’s leadership experience at HP.
  
  
• The Tesla of Databases: Matt explains how Couchbase views its work via an apt metaphor: “We think about our approach to databases like Tesla approached cars.” He describes how just like Tesla builds cars, Couchbase builds its database. But he then goes further to explain how Couchbase has innovated databases in a similar manner that Tesla has innovated cars. According to him, Tesla’s cars and Couchbase’s database may look like other cars and databases, respectively, but their capabilities may be quite different from other traditional products.

• Becoming a Great Leader: Does learning about leadership come more from external sources or a person’s self-knowledge? Matt believes that a process of self-discovery is the best way to grow as a leader. It’s a strong position but holds true. Without self-awareness, acting on constructive external information will be difficult. With self-awareness, necessary leadership adjustments can be understood and implemented.
  
• Self Care: Leaders can only be effective if their own well-being is maintained. Matt describes how he takes care of himself by exercising and having supportive peers to lean on. He shares how there can be a level of what he describes as “loneliness” connected to being a leader and how it has been helpful to discuss the difficulties that come with leadership and life with close peers. 

• Being in the Middle of Digital Transformation: Data is everywhere and an intrinsic part of digital transformation. Matt describes databases as a central aspect of this change. This puts Couchbase in an ideal position to make a substantial impact with their work.

 

Key Quotes:

[26:32] “My vision is a coach. We take the field together. If we're bought into a common vision and we all play our roles, great things can happen.”

[12:28] “We think about our approach to databases like Tesla approached cars. If you think about Tesla, what did they do? Well, there's still a gas pedal and a brake pedal and a steering wheel, and then the car still needs to go forward and backward and left and right, but under the hood it's a completely different approach. Couchbase is very similar [in] that under the hood of our database, our engine or our data model has a very flexible schema and command of structured and unstructured information that allows these applications to perform. And no longer is it these large monolithic applications, but it's this microservice based personalized applications at scale, where instead of managing terabytes of information, you've got petabytes of information that are constantly changing and accessed by thousands of different users.” 

[27:28] “And what I would encourage people to do is say, ‘Where have I been successful in my life? And what led to that success?’ That's the person I am. You don't have to be someone else. So I would say put down the book that says, ‘Here's how you need to do it.’ And instead spend some time inside and reflect on where have you been successful and why, and use that and be who you are. And that is how I think you're going to get the most out of your leadership.” 

[32:18] “People often ask, ‘How do you describe the CEO job?’ And I say, ‘It's Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Culture Officer, and Chief Worry Officer.’ And no one talks about the third… There is a loneliness that comes with it that at the end of the day, most decisions after all the input that you've taken to the world come down to a person making a call.” 

[37:35] “We think we are in the very early innings of digital transformation… Think about how we shop, how we travel, how we entertain ourselves, [and] how we receive healthcare. It's going to be fundamentally different. And we're only getting started on how technology is going to shape those industries… The critical path of enabling all that is databases. And so if you look at the 60 plus billion dollars that are spent on databases, that does not include the adjacent areas like what's happening at the edge and analytics and other technologies that make that happen. The makeup of that spend and what it's going to enable is going to be fundamentally different. And so to be a player in that at scale that can continue to innovate and shape the future, I mean, that's the gift that not many people get to be a part of, and we at Couchbase take that very seriously.”

[45:30] “I'm a big believer that if you stay committed to something and you work hard and you apply the gifts that you've been given, you can shape your life in the direction you want to — understanding what that passion is and the impact of the decisions you're making. Just be conscious about the life that you're choosing. And if you're aligned with that and the outcome is what you expect it to be and based on what drives [you], you're going to be fulfilled. Fulfillment should be the measure of success.”