Recruit Rockstars 376: Unicorn Founder Shares His 2021 Talent Strategy

Even if you don’t live in his hometown of Chicago, you should know Chris Gladwin.

Because he’s a 6-time Founder… including at least one Unicorn.

Chris is CEO & Co-Founder of Ocient, which has created the leading high-performance database & analytics platform for the world’s largest datasets.

Ocient’s database handles datasets in the petabyte to exabyte range. It’s designed to hold quadrillions of rows of data, ingress at speeds of billions of rows per second, and compute results at rates of trillions of rows per second.

To put that into perspective: Caltech researcher Roy Williams suggested that “all words ever spoken by human beings” could be stored in 5 exabytes of data.

To scale Ocient, Chris raised venture capital from OCA Ventures & In-Q-Tel. He also serves as Co Chair of P33, the ambitious initiative to boost Chicago’s tech economy.

Prior, he founded Cleversafe, the object storage software & systems developer which IBM acquired for $1.3 billion.

In this 20-minute conversation, Chris reveals how he hires Rockstars, what he looks for, and why he does it.