E56 - Michel Tricot - Commoditized Data Integration and What It Means for You

Michel Tricot is the CEO and Co-Founder of Airbyte, the new open-source data integration platform that syncs data from applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses.

In 2020, he co-founded Airbyte, the new open-source ELT (extract, load, transform) standard for replicating data.

After only five months, Airbyte raised $5.2M in seed funding from Accel, YCombinator, 8VC, and some high-profile business angels, including the co-founder of Segment, the former GM Cloudera, and the co-founder of Liveramp and Safegraph. 600+ companies have synced data using Airbyte in the first 6 months.

Michel has been working in data engineering for the past 15 years. Previously, as the head of integrations and engineering director at Liveramp (NYSE: RAMP), he grew the team responsible for building and scaling the data ingestion and data distribution connectors. Michel’s team was managing over 1k integrations with adTech partners, delivering hundreds of billions of requests daily to these partners and ingesting over a terabyte of data daily on behalf of all LiveRamp customers in a privacy-compliant way. LiveRamp was acquired by Acxiom for $310 million on July 1, 2014 and is now a $3B independent company.

Michel was also a founding member & Director of Engineering of rideOS, a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) technology provider that empowers automotive, autonomous vehicle, ride-hail, transportation, and delivery businesses to build, operate, and scale on-demand transportation offerings utilizing both self-driving and human-operated fleets.

In this exclusive episode, Michel offers a detailed account of the story behind Airbyte’s success and how Airbyte makes data integration much easier for businesses.

Here are the major points of discussion:

• How Michel built his career as a software engineer and used it as a foundation to start his own company.
  
• Creating a product that’s not only a good-to-have but a need-to-have.
  
• How to outreach potential customers to survey their needs and use the interviews for product improvement.
  
• The ingenious idea of using the same outreach contacts to test out the MVP.
  
• Advantages of the open-source approach to data integration and software development.
  
• The importance of community building for constant improvement and business growth.
  
• What’s the story behind Airbyte’s exponential growth and getting investment.
  
• What makes Airbyte different and better than others?
  
• Why do you need external and internal data integrations to grow your business?
  
• How Airbyte makes integrating external and internal data sources much easier.
  

If you are a software engineer thinking of starting your own business or you are already running a business and want to know how you can integrate external and internal data sources to grow your business, this is the episode you shouldn’t miss.

BusinessAnalytics, DataEngineering, DataIntegration, ProductDevelopment, CustomerExperience, DataScience