Karthik Ranganathan is Founder & CTO of Yugabyte, the PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database for cloud native applications. Their open source database, also called yugabyte, has almost 10K stars on GitHub.

Yugabyte has raised almost $300M and sits at a $1.3B valuation. They've raised from investors including Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed, and 8VC.

In this episode, we dig into the enormous interest Yugabyte had at the onset as transactional databases were due for innovation, the key architecture choices they made, the initial launch, key early customer wins, the importance of positioning as a distributed SQL company, their evolving open source strategy, building alongside the Postgres community, the decision to bring on an outside CEO & much more!