Welcome to Hacker Noon Interview Series! See other Interviews here.
HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I am an engineer who likes what he does. Computers and databases are my life. Since the beginning of the '90s, I have been working on creating many different business applications. When I discovered SQL, it was a real revelation for me. What used to take time and enormous resources to achieve could be obtained with just a few lines of code. My love of relational databases has not ended and may have even increased over the years.
What's your company called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
The company is called Vertabelo. We help people and companies around the world get more out of data. We provide solutions supporting data analysis and data science - interactive SQL and Python courses, as well as our great database modeling tool.
What is the origin story?
Vertabelo was first. It's a tool that will transform your browser into a fully professional database modeler. You can design at any level you want. Logicality, physicality, it's all there. Over time, we thought that more people would be able to benefit from our solution if they learn SQL. This is how the Vertabelo Academy was founded, and then LearnSQL.com followed. Over time, we expanded our offer by adding Python and R courses.
Over the last few years, our services have been used by hundreds of thousands of people and companies, including large corporations such as Uber.
What do you love about your team?
Each of our team members is unique. I really love their ability to keep surprising me with new ideas. I try to surround myself with people who are not afraid to express their opinions. I love that they have a passion for what they do. Without that, work becomes routine and this is a short trip to stagnation.
If you weren’t working at your company, what would you be doing?
I am an engineer, so I would probably deal with databases and business support applications. At some point, I would think it would be cool to create a database modeling tool and SQL courses, and I would get to the same point that I’m at today.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
The basic measure of our success is the number of users using our products. The level of user involvement is also equally important. We constantly monitor their behavior and see if they manage to learn without any problems. We want everyone entering our educational platforms to be able to fully access their potential.
Of course, we also measure all the typical business indicators: effectiveness of marketing activities, cost of customer acquisition, registrations, conversion levels, purchases, etc. But these are, in a way, secondary indicators, only confirming that our value proposition is appreciated by the customer.
What’s most exciting about your company traction to date?
I am constantly amazed at how much we have already achieved. We started as a group of enthusiasts, and today we have a good position on the market and recognition among professionals. We are constantly developing and reaching new areas of the market.
I really enjoy watching my colleagues evolve. They often come to the company as young students or people with little experience and turn into full-fledged experts in their fields. I observe their actions and successes, how they achieve their goals, and I try to learn as much as possible from them.
Recently, we have been paying most of our attention to the development of LearnSQL.com. We constantly listen to our users and try to provide them with the best online hands-on learning experience.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
Recently, I have been watching the progress of work on artificial intelligence the most. Especially in the context of our e-learning solutions. I see a great potential for development here, related to the dynamic adaptation of the content and the educational process of an individual user. This gives hope for reaching new user groups for whom the current educational tools are difficult to access for various reasons.
I am not afraid of artificial intelligence or other technologies like many people are. I treat these as a normal manifestation of scientific and technical progress, which of course brings both good and bad fruit, but which, looking from a long perspective, is inevitable by its nature and practically uncontrollable in its course.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
What I like the most about HackerNoon is the style in which you write about difficult matters. Unlike other platforms of this type, you keep a healthy distance and humor, which is not always obvious in the IT world. It's fun to be part of this community.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
I could tell myself to treat everything with more calmness and distance. However, this is wisdom that comes with age. Most of the things that we fight life and death for at one point, in fact, most often in the perspective of passing time, do not matter that much. At the same time, it is not about neglecting duties or work, but about reducing the excess of emotions.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
I have learned many things recently, but I will give you an example of something that results from my many years of observation of the world and activities on various fronts: technological, business or marketing. No matter how much theoretical knowledge you have, how many different enlightened concepts you have learned, how many examples of successes and failures of others you know, in the end, the only thing that matters is whether you are able to apply this knowledge in practice.
This means real implementation of specific processes in your organization, the ability to recruit the right colleagues, define goals, ensure their implementation and constantly grind the whole thing.
Brilliant ideas, not put into practice, remain only a printed piece of paper. That is why I encourage you to maintain a healthy balance between inundating yourself with new ideas and trying to implement the concepts you have learned.
If you approach learning properly and practice the acquired skills in practice, you will achieve your goals. This is my path to success.