Overview

Gender

male

When it comes to databases, Srini Srinivasan is one of the recognized pioneers of Silicon Valley. He has two decades of experience designing, developing and operating highly scalable infrastructures. He also has over a dozen patents in database, web, mobile and distributed systems technologies.

‘I just took to programming early on. There was a professor in college who tossed out a challenge, and I ended up winning it. That’s when I discovered I really enjoy thinking through how to solve problems in code. I invented an algorithm to do online index operations – it was used in the Tandem product line. That was my first significant thing. At IBM I was on a team where we built the first Internet database product – DB2-www – in three months. It was way ahead of the curve.’

Srini co-founded Aerospike to solve the scaling problems he experienced with Oracle databases while he was Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo. ‘I moved into database development because nothing that I saw would actually work – it was a lack of flexibility. They weren’t designed to do what people needed them to do. They were too manual and labor-intensive. We put together a simpler, much more effective solution. It’s based on fundamental database technology – to ensure you don’t lose any data. And the apps are easy to write. But then we added the third, key element: our database is self managing. 24/7. It never goes down. No loss of data. Others claim to do this by slapping some attempt at self management on later. But with Aerospike, it’s at the core.

Today we’re building a company that we hope will have a culture of innovation and service that other companies are simply not providing. It’s funny, we’ve been at this for about three years now. There were lots of people who said what we’re trying to do is impossible. Fortunately, we didn’t listen to them.’