'At the Coalface of Implementing Data Stacks': kleene's Co-founder & CEO Andrew Thomas

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Starting out in the first cohort of data folks at Just Eat, my co-founder and I built their data org through to IPO before I moved onto doing the same role at Not On The High Street and most recently Zego, through to their unicorn status.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

kleene.ai is the ‘third wave’ of data stack tooling. End-to-end data processing automation, without any engineering requirement. Kleene provides the fastest speed to insight for data analysts and business users, whilst establishing a robust, full-scalable infrastructure.

What is the origin story?

With Matt and I’ve been at the coalface of implementing data stacks across different businesses, we’ve seen the painful reality of building technical teams and still not delivering value to business users fast enough.

We got our heads together to map what ‘great’ looks like and how future stacks could work FOR the business. kleene’s third wave approach was our output and it’s resonating excellently with those who are seeking a better future for their data.

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

Of course, our fundamental experience in the space has set a strong platform for delivering a better way, but what’s most exciting is how our team of hungry, high-caliber colleagues has bought into the vision and continues to take it to new levels.

We’re a growth mindset first hiring company, so we’re looking for everyone to come in, contribute and move our vision forward.

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

More than likely repeating the same problems and challenges of my previous roles in a new Chief Data Officer position. Hopefully, I’ll never have to build a data stack from scratch again thanks to kleene!

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

We’re all about building repeatable engines in every department at this point, so I’ll give you headline metrics:

Revenue - New ARR

CS - Net Revenue Retention

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Honestly, it’s repeatability.

We reached a crux point and it’s consistently scaling from there Q on Q, which is ideally what we were looking to achieve from the outset.

Equally, we’re very buoyant about the types of customers we’re bringing on board, as they’re the most exciting growth companies in their respective spaces!

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

This might seem cliche from someone in data, but AI is the thing I’m believing most strongly in. We’ve seen some amazing projects like the ‘Deep Mind Folding Project’ really start to deliver meaningful value to the world. Long may it continue!

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Having been a HackerNoon admirer for a while, it was brilliant for the team to be nominated as part of your ‘Startups of the Year’ Award and we wanted to ensure we’re feeding back into the community.

We’re also always open to chatting with the community about data!

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

You hear this a lot from founders - ‘starting my own thing earlier’. Until you’ve done it, you don’t realize how much can be learned so quickly!

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

We’ve seen some incredible resilience and ambition from our clients and team throughout the challenging Covid period, so it’s that no matter what life throws at us, you can still build a great business by focussing on execution.