Meet HarperDB, Winner of the Startups of the Year in Denver

Meet Stephen Goldberg

Today, we hear from Stephen Goldberg, the CEO of HarperDB, Denver’s Startup of the Year Winner. Stephen began his career interning for Sequoia Software in the mid-’90s. He soon found success in the tech space, working as a CTO and CEO of multiple startups and in other roles at larger organizations like Red Hat. He is well-recognized as a leader in the industry.

Q&A

What does it mean for you to win this title?

We are thrilled about winning Hackernoon's 2023 Startup of the Year! For us, community-driven awards are the most authentic and meaningful awards of all. It is further validation of what we have developed and continue to build upon as a company. We are grateful to all those who supported us in winning this award.

What sets you apart from the competition?

HarperDB was founded by developers who spent decades fighting the limitations of multi-system architectures. After exploring the logic behind systems like MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, and Node.js, it was apparent that combining the underlying systems into one distributed technology would have significant benefits from a performance, cost, and ease of development perspective.  From that realization, we created our unified system architecture that backs HarperDB.

Aside from its performance advantage, I think HarperDB’s simplicity motivates companies to make the transition to our technology. We’ve seen distributed applications built in weeks with HarperDB that easily could have taken several quarters to plan and build with other technologies.

Ultimately, HarperDB was a database built by developers for developers.  We built a product we would want to use. As our product continues to advance while we are focused on solving large enterprise problems, we still want to create a product that seamlessly integrates into a developer's workflow and is fun to build and deploy.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team is made up of amazing people. One of our core values is authenticity, and what I love about our culture and our team is that people bring their authentic selves to HarperDB.

We have a team of weirdos and misfit toys who are extremely passionate about innovation and solving complex problems.  We like working on hard things, and we love delighting developers and customers.

Our team is made up of people who do not let existing paradigms and patterns stop them but will push through to create something new and incredible.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Sleeping. We have been building HarperDB for almost seven years.  It has been an incredible journey, and we have had many amazing moments and a lot of hard ones.

At the end of the day, everything that we have achieved has been due to the people who make up our team.  When we founded HarperDB, it was all about technology, and while that remains a huge part of what we do, I have learned that people matter more.

If I weren’t running HarperDB, I would be doing something to help improve people's lives in meaningful ways. What that looks like exactly, I am not sure.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

From a business development perspective, proofs-of-concept (PoCs) are our number one metric. Although we also track npm and Docker downloads, PoCs are the key metric leading to business success. Since what we do is a first for the software development industry, people need to experience the benefits firsthand. We find that engineers tend to experience a light bulb moment with HarperDB once they fully internalize the breadth of value a unified system architecture can bring. After the light bulb moment, HarperDB tends to be part of nearly every deployment since building without it feels cumbersome and counterproductive.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

HarperDB changes the world on many levels.

For software engineers, we simplify their workflow by giving them more capabilities with less effort.

For companies, we empower innovation by providing them with systems that improve their agility and cost models.

For software users, we make the technology they use substantially more performant, cutting down load times and delivering real-time experiences they did not have before.

For the world, we dramatically cut down on the infrastructure required to deliver software. Sometimes, by as much as 90%, making platforms that run on HarperDB more sustainable than systems that run on legacy alternatives.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2024?

This title is a recognition that we are building a tool developers want to use. To embrace that, we will continue delivering features and performance improvements that help drive their software products forward. Today, nearly every feature we release is a direct response to requests from development teams worldwide. We will continue to serve them cutting-edge features that make their processes and products more performant.

Furthermore, we want to continue to build a company where developers want to work.  We are successful due to the passion of the great technologists who have joined us on this journey, and we want to continue building a developer-led, techno-centric, authentic organization.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?

2023 was a breakthrough year for HarperDB in many ways. Our product gained significant traction with three releases that embedded data streaming capabilities deep into our technology. This was a welcome addition for many companies courting standalone data streaming solutions since they now had all the power they needed without the multi-year journey standalone streaming solutions required.

2024 so far has been customer and market-focused.  We have seen a strong reaction in the market to our product and tremendous validation, with many large organizations implementing mission-critical workloads on HarperDB.  We plan to spend 2024 growing our customer base while continuing to innovate.

Which trend(s) are you most excited about in 2024? Share your reasons.

For the last several years, people have been exploring what distributed computing really means. We have seen containers explode in their usage and other distributed deployment methodologies.  That said, that has created new paradigm shifts in how people think about application development, compute, deployment, security, and many other areas.

We are seeing 2024 as the year where experimentation becomes a reality.  Organizations, large and small, are embracing new architectures that unlock the true power of distributed computing to improve customer experiences, do more with AI and ML, reduce cost, and build high-availability architectures.

In a lot of ways, this leads to the democratization of technology.  It allows people to build bigger and better without being locked into a single cloud vendor.  I am most excited about the things people will build with this newfound freedom.

2023 had been another crazy year, especially in tech, with layoffs and the Generative AI takeover! Which trend are you most concerned about? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

We have had a pretty clear vision for where we wanted to take HarperDB from the beginning and what we wanted to build both as a product and as a company. We try to stay focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Ultimately, trends in the tech industry are cyclical, and there are booms and busts. High valuations and low valuations. Lots of hiring and lots of layoffs.

Quite honestly, the trend that worries me the most is worrying about trends. People keep building great stuff.  Great people need jobs.  Good companies need funding.  Large companies need help solving big problems.  These things remain the same regardless of the current trends.

I think the thing I worry about the most is people losing sight of the fact that this will all repeat itself.

Share your biggest success so far and/or your biggest failure so far.

Our biggest failure by far was that we were way too early for the market.  People thought we were CRAZY when we started HarperDB.  We were too early because we didn’t realize the problem we founded HarperDB to solve was not a common problem at that time, and only a handful of companies were experiencing it ten years ago.

We should have done more research, talked to more companies, and paid closer attention to the market.  We were just so enamored with solving the problem that we didn’t do our homework.   We let passion get in the way of reason.

Our biggest success has been our resilience as founders and as a team as a whole.  We are extremely proud of the team we have built and have had relatively little turnover in our time. We have also managed to stay alive and continue to build a tremendous product to reach the point where the market has caught up with our crazy ideas, which have become a commonplace everyday problem.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

We love HackerNoon! We have enjoyed using HackerNoon as a publication platform. In addition to our own articles, we see many independent creators writing HarperDB-related content for your site. It’s this robust community that has driven us to Hackernoon.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

Be very careful who you take advice from.  We have gotten a lot more bad advice along the way than good advice.  It has cost us a lot of money and a lot of time.  We have gotten some really good advice as well.  Ultimately, if you're getting advice and following it feels inauthentic to who you are or the vision or values of your company, ignore it.  Trust your gut.

This interview series celebrates all the phenomenal Startups of the Year Winners. Congratulations! Well-Deserved, Champion.The HackerNoon community is excited to learn more about you!