Dr. Stavros Papadopoulos is the founder and CEO of TileDB, Inc., which was created in February 2017 out of Intel Labs and MIT. Before launching TileDB, Dr. Papadopoulos was a Senior Research Scientist at the Intel Parallel Computing Lab, and a member of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data at MIT CSAIL for three years. He also spent about two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Dr. Papadopoulos received his PhD degree in Computer Science at HKUST, and held a postdoc fellow position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We met with Stavros to discuss his journey with TIleDB. Here's what he told us. 

Tell us a few things about TileDB. How did it all start and how did you discover the market opportunity for your solution?

TileDB was a research project I worked on while at Intel Labs and MIT. It was born from the observation that, although data is an extremely valuable asset for all organizations, traditional approaches focused mostly on tabular data, and were not suitable for efficiently managing other, more complex data modalities, such as genomics, imaging, video, audio, text, point clouds, and more. I created TileDB based on a powerful data structure, the multi-dimensional array, which shape-shifts to efficiently capture all data modalities, not just tables. Today, TileDB is being used by top pharmaceutical companies for drug discovery, hospitals for identifying rare genetic diseases in newborns, climate companies for climate simulation data management, defense companies for satellite imaging, and many more.

How do you differentiate from other similar offers in the market? What value does TileDB bring to the customers and partners?

The main differentiation of TileDB is that it can efficiently manage “multimodal” data, i.e., data that is diverse, complex, and very large. The vast majority of traditional data management systems focus solely on data that can be modeled as tables, which is a limited data structure. TileDB is architected around multi-dimensional arrays, a more powerful and versatile data structure than tables.

TileDB enables organizations to efficiently, manage, analyze, and secure govern all their data (no matter how diverse and complex), hence discovering scientific and business insight much more rapidly and of greater quality than with traditional approaches.

What would you consider to have been (or are) your biggest challenge so far?

Every stage in a company’s lifetime poses different challenges. During the seed stage, the challenge lies in finding the first amazingly talented individuals to share your vision, and build initial proof for the product. During the Series A round, the challenge is to prove that you can sell your product to large organizations, and make sure that they are successful. During the Series B growth rounds (and beyond), the challenge is in building an amazing culture and processes that help the company scale. And during all the rounds, you need to be able to inspire your team, and convince investors to invest a lot of funds to realize your vision. However, no matter how difficult this endeavor is, it is absolutely rewarding and, through the numerous learnings, it changes you for the better.

What are the biggest learnings from your journey so far?

This is the first company I have created, and I have already seen the company shaping throughout multiple different stages, so I am very fortunate as I have learned a ton of different things and acquired different skills. Similar to the challenges, the learnings also depend on the stage. In the beginning, you learn how to grind and build a product that people love. Later on, you need to learn how to transition from a founder to an operator, so that you build the company for scale. Although it is very hard to enumerate all my learnings in a paragraph, what I strongly advise anyone embarking on a similar journey is this: read the books and get surrounded by experienced investors and mentors who have done this before. Do not improvise with the process, this has been battle-tested by numerous people. Trust the process of building a company, and focus all your creativity on inventing a product that customers love and are willing to pay for.

Your professional journey started in the academic world. Tell us what it takes for a researcher to bring his work to the market, successfully. Does it take hard work, money, attitude, luck, a bit of all, and more?

Being an entrepreneur who started in the academic world with a strongly technical background has some advantages and disadvantages. Big advantages include the fact that you are probably inventing something in a domain you deeply know, you can inspire other strongly technical people to join you, and that carries a certain credibility when talking to the initial customers and later the broader market. The main disadvantage is that an academic founder typically knows nothing about business, and I observe a common pitfall that academic founders look down on anything business-related. That’s a huge mistake. In addition to creativity, hard work, good personality, and work ethic, it takes a lot of discipline and studying of all these super important aspects of the business that have nothing to do with academia. Money is absolutely important, but if you can’t convince investors that you know how to build and run a business, your chances of raising funds diminish. Finally, luck, as always, is super important, but training yourself to properly build and run the business reduces the effects of not being lucky or of being unlucky. It makes you determine your own entrepreneurial fate.