Why I Joined Yugabyte as Director of Events and Campaigns

Background

Coming from an open source database background, my focus over the last number of years has been working with, and supporting sales teams globally through field marketing and events. I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the open source community through running Percona Live and participating in many other industry events.

What I love about the open source community is that it’s far more than just a place to build and contribute to software and projects. The open source community brings mutual respect, appreciation, and values for people from across the globe, no matter your background, qualifications or technology choices. Even for those, like me, who are not technical there are many ways you can still get involved and contribute back to the community. Yugabyte is an advocate for open source and the community remains at the heart of everything we do here and I am excited to be with them on this journey!

Shameless plug: A great way to start or to get involved is to join the Yugabyte Community Slack!

The last year has been an uncertain time for many people, especially working in events and the thought of change in the midst of that can be quite daunting. I had to consider and had conversations that went like this: ‘You’ve successfully grown the conferences you run, you’ve quickly adapted to a virtual event strategy, you’ve built a strong events and field marketing team around you. Why not wait to see what happens to the world etc.’ But I honestly felt like opportunities like this don’t come around everyday and I was ready to take on something new. That’s exactly what I did! So after one big event completed and three months in, here’s why I joined Yugabyte as Director of Events & Campaigns.

I was familiar with YugabyteDB as some of the Yugabyte team had presented at Percona Live conferences and I noticed a lot of engagement and excitement around distributed SQL and what the team was presenting. I was intrigued and when an opportunity opened up, I was excited to learn more.

Through the interview process, I had the opportunity to meet with people across various business units and it allowed me to really get a sense of the work environment, colleagues, priorities, and projects. A few things really stood out for me.

Opportunity

Team members spoke with passion and excitement about the opportunities not just within the company but around distributed SQL. There is a massive shift in the transactional database space, and Yugabyte is in the right place at the right time with the best offering

Leadership, team and culture

This is probably the highest on my list of things to consider. While I’ve been getting to know people across various teams there is a real sense of collaboration, inclusion and some of the smartest and most hardworking people I have come across!

Company culture is not something that can be built overnight. Many companies can struggle with getting the balance right especially with a distributed, global workforce.

Our CEO and founders are active and involved in all aspects of the business, they are communicative, hands on and extremely passionate about everything we do and work hard to ensure everyone plays a part and is involved and is contributing to the future successes.

Within marketing, we’re part of a rapidly growing team under the leadership of Suda Srinivasan. I think it’s so important to be able to form good working relationships with your leaders and peers and Suda made that easy.

The rest of the marketing team is distributed across North America and Europe and I feel very fortunate to work among talented, creative and supportive team members.

Distributed SQL Summit

My first major project when I came on board was to pull off the Yugabyte-hosted industry event for cloud native app developers, architects, and database aficionados – the Distributed SQL Summit (DSS)! We had less than 3 months to formulate a virtual conference with ambitious goals encompassing a vision of a multi track event, awesome speakers and engaged attendees who saw great value from attending.

Immediately I saw how the teams instantly worked together to make this happen. Running an event like this really does take a village and it was so encouraging to see how many people happily offered help and wanted to be involved.

One thing which stuck out was the caliber of speakers which presented at DSS with executives from some of the worlds largest companies talking about their various use cases of going cloud native and using Yugabyte. This was very impressive and made me proud to be part of an organization doing incredible things in the cloud native world.

It was also amazing to see such growth in the attendee numbers with an uptake of nearly 250% on last year with attendees also representing some of the worlds largest companies across the globe.

With that, I’m only three months into this journey and I’m really optimistic and excited for what’s to come. We’re just getting started! If you are thinking about joining Yugabyte, I encourage you to do it!

Keep an eye out for our events program across Distributed SQL Summit, Distributed SQL Days, Executive Round Tables and many other industry events and tradeshows across North America and Europe coming soon!