Navigating Blue Oceans: Key Insights for Emerging Founders from Vectara CEO/co-founder Amr Awadallah

Amr Awadallah is the CEO and co-founder of Vectara. Previously, he co-founded Cloudera, which went public in 2017 and was acquired for $5.3 billion, and also served as VP of Developer Relations at Google Cloud. His first startup, Aptivia, was acquired by Yahoo, where he later became VP of Product Intelligence Engineering.

I talked to him about his experience as an immigrant in Silicon Valley, the frameworks he’s built to articulate vision and credibility, and what he’s learned about pitching investors and recruiting top talent over the years.

Runtime: 52:43

EPISODE BREAKDOWN

(3:39) “ The more technical definition of what we do is ‘RAG as a service.’”

(5:38)  ”You ask your car, ‘why is this icon showing, what's wrong with you?’ And the car will tell you, hey, you need to go change my oil.’”

(8:07) What makes Vectara a blue-ocean company.

(10:05) How to win an investor’s confidence when your current TAM is zero.

(12:04)  ”There's three things anybody looks for when they're going to join any job, and you need to at least win two of the three.”

(15:06) How Amr connected with the other Vectara co-founders.

(17:24) Why he’s “a very big opponent to building in stealth.”

(21:50) Attending Stanford helped Amr visualize himself as an entrepreneur. 

(24:34) “ Many entrepreneurs think that the idea is what's going to make a company succeed or not.”

(28:54) How he cultivated an appetite for risk again after spending eight years at Yahoo.

(32:44) “ Only get the PhD in one case, and one case only: if you want to be a professor.”

(37:35) “ By definition, more immigrants will be more willing to take risks.”

(41:33) “ There's so many VCs out there pretending they're amazing.”

(43:54) There are two types of salespeople: “coin operators” and “innovators.”

(48:20) You can start up outside Silicon Valley, but “ if you can move here, move here.”

(50:27) Two questions he’d ask the CEO if he were interviewing for a job with a new startup.

LINKS

• Amr Awadallah
• Vectara
• Cloudera
• Google Cloud

SUBSCRIBE

• LinkedIn
• Substack
• Instagram

Thanks for listening!

 

– Walter.