ObjectBox: Empowering the Edge

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Vivien, I’m Co-founder and CEO of ObjectBox

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

ObjectBox is a fast database and data sync to empower Edge Computing. We make it easy for developers to store, manage and use decentralized data flows efficiently across edge devices (Mobile, IoT, Embedded) and all the way up to the cloud.

What is the origin story?

Before ObjectBox, Markus (@greenrobot_de) and I did Android apps and two of the open-source libraries Markus had developed for himself and open-sourced were doing very well. One, greenDAO, is an ORM on top of SQLite. It was always the fastest ORM around and at some point, Markus could not optimize it anymore without circumventing the underlying database… when we discussed it, we thought the ORMs were only optimizing on top of a problem; why not get rid of the problem? So, we started developing ObjectBox as a fast local database and alternative to SQLite and ORMs.

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

Well, actually that’s probably a bit nerdy, but we all love “efficient and sustainable code”. We really do care about that and I think it shows… Data persistence and data flows are core challenges every digital project needs to solve. So, at scale, especially with digitalization and data growing so much, choosing the most efficient approach has a huge impact on economics as well as sustainability. Edge Computing has many advantages for many projects: Enabling new use cases, saving resources, and leaving data where it belongs (privacy by design). The cloud itself is great, but it is just not a great solution for everything. With cloud resources seeming endless and being so easy to get started, efficiency and privacy took the backseat... while energy consumption, other externalities, and plain monetary costs were ignored and kept growing. With ObjectBox, we make it easy to add an edge to any project, enabling developers to efficiently work with data across devices, while reducing resource consumption (CPU, Memory, power) and unnecessary data traversal.

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

Hard to imagine anything else at the moment😂, but something that has an impact on sustainability.

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

Usage (building apps), user satisfaction, and performance benchmarks (speed, resource-use).

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

More than 800.000 developers started building apps with ObjectBox.

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

HackerNoon is great for developers and people in tech - and it has a wider variety of opinions and more depth on tech topics than more mainstream media.

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

Start reading the Terry Pratchett books now (I only started them a couple of years later, but they were and are a great source of inspiration)

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

I’d love to nudge all female readers to ask themselves: Did I already help another woman today?

(inspired by: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6838466424877391872/) 🙏