E27: From Unix Coder to Enginer-Founder - Rob Woollen's Journey Founding Sigma

02/13/25 • 30 min

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, engineer-turned-founder Rob Woollen gives a refreshingly honest take on the founder journey. Rob shares his path from Unix coder to BEA Systems architect to Salesforce CTO, and finally to pioneering data analytics at Sigma.

Get Rob's reflections on turning deep tech into market wins and navigating the AI revolution from an engineer who's built it all.

1. 00:00 - Introduction and Early Career
2. 04:25 - Salesforce Years and Career Evolution
3. 06:51 - Path to Entrepreneurship
4. 10:41 - Sutter Hill Ventures and Sigma's Genesis
5. 14:38 - Building Sigma
6. 20:30 - AI and the Future of Business Intelligence
7. 28:55 - Closing Thoughts

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Get Rob's reflections on turning deep tech into market wins and navigating the AI revolution from an engineer who's built it all.

Tickets are selling out fast, buy yours today!

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E26: Balancing Open Source and Business with Spencer Kimball (Cockroach Labs)

In this new episode of the 0P podcast, we welcome back Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to discuss the evolving landscape of software licensing in the cloud era. Spencer shares insights on how companies are innovating with new licensing models to bridge the gap between open source ideals and sustainable business growth.

Drawing from his experience leading Cockroach Labs, a distributed database company, he offers a unique perspective on finding equilibrium between community collaboration and commercial success.

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Next Episode

E28: Classical Pianist to Observability Pioneer - Charity Majors CTO of Honeycomb

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, we chat with Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, who traded piano keys for keyboard commands on their journey from classically trained pianist to a systems firefighter.

Tune in to get Charity's unfiltered thoughts on why engineers should toggle between coding and management, challenging the "three pillars" monitoring model and insights on how AI introduces non-deterministic challenges to software engineering.

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