Season 1 | Episode 7

Chitra: Welcome to the seventh episode of The Tech Icon. Hi, my name is Chitra.

 

Aditya: Hello, my name is Aditya, and we're going to be your hosts for the show.

 

Chitra: Our guest today is Zhamak Dehghani, a pioneer, author, and the undisputed queen of Data Mesh. She's the CEO and founder of Nextdata, the tech startup behind the data product container technology and the platform that manages autonomous data products at scale. Her company raised a seed round of $12 million US dollars and is furiously building, as we speak.

 

Zhamak has worked as a technologist for more than 25 years. She's contributed to multiple patterns in distributed computing communications and is a self-confessed troublemaker. Born in Tehran, she did her bachelor's in software engineering from the Shahid Beheshti University in Iran and her master's in information technology management from the University of Sydney in Australia. Today, she lives in San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Adrian and their eight-year-old daughter, Arianna.

 

We are beyond delighted to have her on the show. Zhamak, you are a technology icon. Welcome.

 

Aditya: Welcome to episode seven of The Tech Icon — a show that celebrates and honors technology icons.

 

Zhamak: Thank you so much, Chitra and Aditya, to have me here. I'm super excited to be here and have this conversation.

 

Chitra: While we focus on your journey for most part, Zhamak, let's take a moment to learn about the advent of data mesh and Nextdata. So in 2019, you posted an article, How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh on Martin Fowler that literally took the data world by storm. What was your inspiration?

 

Zhamak: The inspiration [came from] perhaps a couple of decades before that, being in computing and having seen how certain computing principles had enabled us to take leaps at different moments in our industry, unlocking a lot of potential. Maybe the inspiration was really seeing the pain that a lot of organizations that I was working with, had at the time, with data management or generally getting value from data.

 

So it maybe relevant to share with your audience, that at the time, I was working with fairly technologically advanced large organizations. Many of them were based here in San Francisco or generally West Coast of US — that was the portfolio of companies I was working with. And I had come from distributed computing world, building microservices, Kubernetes, distributed systems. That was the area that I was really deep in. And I came to work with these large organizations on their data strategy, and they all unanimously had the same problem.

 

They were grappling with problem of scale, not so much a scale of how do I store petabytes of data, we had solved that problem, not so much a scale of how do I process data fast, we had solved that problem. It was really the problem of scale of getting value from data. By that, I mean the full soup to nuts of data management part of it, from finding the data that we need, to getting the data in a shape that can be useful, to the discovery, to the governance, all those hairy kind of people problems.

 

I took that as a challenge — the grand challenge of solving the data management at scale. And I had seen a similar moment in the industry where we were building monolithic applications with centralized IT teams, and it wasn't serving the digital revolution that was happening in industry with mobiles and webs and all kind of digital surfaces and digital businesses. The solution to that was decentralization. Solution to that was building small applications that really well. Solution to that was a standardization of APIs to reconnect and interconnect these applications. So I kind of applied those principles to the world of big data management. I was extremely fortunate to be in a position to test these ideas in practice by building solutions and software for some of the largest and critical organizations in the world, and see what are the ingredients that need to go into that solution. And seeing enough early results to say, okay, there is something here to share with the wider industry.

 

So, a combination of frustration, anger, and inspiration from something that had happened before and been solved led me to start working on that as a grand challenge.

 

Chitra: That's awesome. So the guiding force was really to maximize the value out of that data.

 

Zhamak: Yes, absolutely. I mean, let's solve the data bottleneck. I was working with the data CDOs to the data engineer, like all the levels. And a lot of my conversations were therapy sessions with data engineers that they were very frustrated with the concept of pipelines and how complex it was to actually get the data in a way that they could make sense of it. Data was coming from application teams they didn't understand. Therapy sessions with downstream business people who wanted to use that data.

 

They never had the data they needed, at the moment they needed, in the format that they needed. Conversations with platform owners or data managers that were responsible to their business as stakeholders to give reports and also enabling the business with ML and AI at time. GenAI wasn't super prevalent, but just the traditional AI, they were responsible to the business and business was frustrated. So a lot of therapy sessions and kind of root cause analysis to see, okay, where is the bottleneck? Like where is the one bottleneck we haven't removed yet to then start solutioning, right?

 

Chitra: Very good. So from therapy sessions to ground breaking work, and then in 2022, you founded Nextdata to build a data mesh platform for the enterprise. What's your vision for the company?

 

Zhamak: Yes, absolutely. A lot of founders, when they share their stories, often their journey starts because they had a pain point, they had an itch to scratch themselves or had a pain point. Mine started with kind of this moment of absolute frustration, anger, disappointment, sadness — all of those emotions combined, because I saw an amazing opportunity for change at the global level. Like as you said, the response to the concept of a data mesh, was a global response. You could throw a rock in every direction and you will hit a data strategy in any company that wanted to move to decentralized way. I was working on the implementation of many of those and I was seeing we are solving the same problem repeatedly with hours and hours of engineering and millions of dollars spent at a bare-metal level; we need to solve this problem once and for all.

 

Then on the other hand, data mesh was also an invitation to vendors and technology providers to invent. And the inventions that I saw at the time, were kind of, for me, were disappointing. There were kind of linear or maybe incremental innovations to the existing strategies and products that existed. It's very hard for incumbents or existing companies that have a tech strategy or product strategy to completely pivot. So then I felt like this is a really magical moment where there is a need and there's a gap in the market and that gap is being filled with suboptimal solutions, custom built every time.

 

And there is an opportunity here to also start from a plain canvas and reimagine the next kind of mutation or the next shift in the industry to solve the problem differently, or even articulate the problem differently, right? So the mission for Nextdata and the vision for Nextdata was, if the target, if the future is about decentralized and suitable kind of access to data for AI and now GenAI and ML or all these other use cases that we can't even see right now, if the future is founded in this kind of decentralized ownership of the data, how can we kind of walk back from that future to present and define a new set of problems and for that define the solution. So it was bridging the gap that we have to date to that future, one step at a time, of course. 

 

Chitra: Sure. And that's a great segue into the next one, which is really talking about trends. What do you see in the industry and do you have any predictions for this year and beyond?

 

Zhamak: Sure. I must preface that by saying that I've been very much kind of operationally on product and R&D (research and development) of the product in the data space. The industry is much bigger than that. And my answer is going to be confined to the space that I'm in, which is data and AI. [Some of] what I'm going to say might be disputable, and we have to just see what happens. And some of it, I think, is non-disputable.

 

The fact that GenAI is making amazing progress is a reality that is here to stay. It's going to only move so much faster from where we are. That is an indisputable reality that we're in. The amount of, we just saw at the time that we're recording this, we just saw the $500 billion kind of investment into just infrastructure for AI.

 

Bring it back to, let's say, the space that I am in, which is enterprises, large organizations, government or commercial: What does that mean for 2025? What I saw in 2024 were a lot of POCs. A lot of leaders trying to grok how this applies to me and where we can deploy GenAI. And that resulted in a lot of POCs, skunk works, and accelerated AI projects. But now I think towards maybe the middle of 2025, some of those haven't even started. Some that have started are hitting this question of, okay, I can understand the art of possible, I can understand what could be applied here but how does this actually integrate to the rest of the fabric of my ecosystem? And many of those have actually hit a kind of a wall in terms of the data side.

 

Again, I'm very much focused on data for AI, GenAI, and multi-use data management, which is representative of some conversations we have. So I think that 2025 is going to be yet another iteration of data management, AI application management, the whole ecosystem, so that we can turn these POC kind of applications and use cases and make that a reality. And that is a multi-year evolution that needs to happen. But that conversations need to begin really fast, because right now that conversation is localized to an innovation, accelerated AI, and that conversation needs to come to the larger gamut of technologies and processes that organizations have. So I think, that GenAI will shift to be a driver for a series of changes of the global data stack and the full kind of ecosystem.

 

The other, perhaps 2024 to 2025 shift that I am predicting is a more aggressive and progressive market in terms of trying new things and making innovation yet another top priority. 2024 really was about, for a lot of companies, just keeping the lights on, right? As I said, there were some accelerated, of course, innovations in pockets around GenAI, but most of the part, it was the business as usual — just reduce costs, consolidate technology, and keep going with less. So there was a lot of budget cutting that happened in 2024 and that slowed innovation. I am really hopeful, and there are signs of that at the macro level, that will change. And what that means is that there were a lot of, just build with what we have, build internally.

 

I think people will start to think more strategically and say, for my organization to not only survive, but leapfrog all the competitors and deliver value, what is the next generation of strategic investments that we have to make around technology? I think we will see a lot faster movement in terms of enterprises, buying decisions versus building decisions. And a lot of kind of do-it-yourself type home-baked projects might shift more toward build what's strategic and buy what's not strategic because budgets will open up.

 

Third one, (I think the one really, really close to my heart) is, what is the shape of the data stack that's going to unlock the next generation of innovation be? I think about that a lot, and I have a perspective that I will be talking and writing more about, which is this evolution of the data stack from an upside down pyramid to a pyramid to an hourglass — an hourglass of data innovation. If you think about data part again, not so much app part or ML, but on the data side, we went from this upside down pyramid with modern data stack which was put the data in one place, put it in your lake, put it in your warehouse, and then throw in a whole bag of tools to perform different operations on this data. Ingestion tools, workflow management tools, orchestration tools, catalog tools, and, and, and... And that top layer of just integration of this modern data stack technology was a very, very costly layer for enterprises or large organizations because we had externalized the cost of centralization to the cost of the single purpose tools to the users to integrate them.

 

That didn't work out quite as much as we wanted to. And I'm a firm believer of, you know, distributed tools and small tools that do one thing, but I think it didn't work out because the fundamental operating model of data centralization is a broken paradigm in my perspective. And that hints, you know, kind of the data mesh point of view. And then we moved in 2023, 2024 into this upside pyramid, which was, keep the data wherever it is, throw, compute it wherever it is, and some integration technologies, but then centralize the control, centralize how it's managed on top. And we saw the resurrection of catalogs or integrated catalogs or catalog plus plus. They need a new name because they're no longer catalogs, right? These are integrated kind of solutions that give a harmonious and centralized experience on a fabric of compute and a distribution of storage.

 

Whenever we are centralizing something, we are compromising somewhere else. That it gives us some efficiencies there. But what we are compromising is experience, is the diversity of experience by forcing everyone into a single tool. Of course, that gives efficiency when you're SMB, you know, small, medium business. But when you're a large organization with a lot of people and they want their autonomy and have their own experience and their tools, that doesn't work out.

 

So my prediction, and because that's where I'm investing our team's time, is that, again, taking lessons from Internet and revolutions that happened before, the data stack needs to be an hourglass. I call it the hourglass of data innovation. And by that, we are seeing that shaping as we speak, which is down the bottom of this hourglass, you have the diversity of where the data sits, you have the diversity of the storage.

 

On top of this hourglass, you have the diversity of experience. Use the tool of choice to discover or use or build data applications, have that diversity. But in the middle, you will end up with a small set of standard technologies that would allow interoperability and connection of diverse set of experiences to diverse set of underlying data storage or compute and so on. And we are seeing that middle of the hourglass is slightly firming, like maybe Iceberg could be called as an example or data formats. But that's like TCP/IP stack, like Internet happened. The innovation, they call it the narrow wave of innovation of a narrow wave of Internet. We had hardware down the bottom, like a lot of different routers and applications and CPUs and so on. And we had diverse set of applications, mobile, web and others. In the middle, we had a small set of standards, TCP/IP, HTTP to connect these two. So I think that's my prediction for where the industry will go. I hope to see a progression to that hourglass data stack model.

 

Chitra: Very nice. Love those predictions. And you put it so well, the hourglass of data innovation; I'll definitely be on the lookout for that. Now, for this next section, let's discuss your early years. And I will turn it over to Aditya. Adi, take it away.

 

Aditya: Sure. How would you describe your childhood?

 

Zhamak: Yeah, I was a happy-go-lucky kind of kid. If I explain the environment I grew up in, it will probably depress a lot of people. I grew up in country of Iran. I lived in the capital with my parents — I had very loving, caring parents and family. But then the context of that was I was about six years old when revolution happened. It was a big revolution. My family and my family members got affected by it. And then war happened. So even though where I lived was away from the border, there were still missiles landing in my hometown.

 

But as a kid (for some reason, you know, children are pretty resilient), I went skiing when schools were closed because of the air raids. And I had no clue that when I come back home, if my home will be still around because these missiles were randomly hitting different infrastructures. So I feel blessed. There must be something broken inside me. Or maybe this is just a survival technique for any children that go through those hardships. But I would, despite all of that, I would describe my childhood [and myself] as a lucky, happy kind of kid.

 

Aditya: Going through such a revolution at such a young age must be really difficult. So did that have any negative effects on you? And how did you overcome that?

 

Zhamak: I'm sure it has had. You have to ask my husband, because he sometimes tells me, you need to go get therapy. I'm sure it has had, because when I left Iran, I noticed that I'm a lot more tuned to detect danger around me. Like if you sat on a train and something fell, like in a public area and there was like a bang noise, I would be the one jumping up, waiting to see what got attacked. And so you develop these ways of seeing the world as a bit less safe, so you become more protective of your family, protective of your environment. So that definitely has its effect. And I think I've used a lot of tools to establish trust in the universe. And you will see that in control, like you want to be always in control, because what's behind control is fear.

 

As a leader, you have to let go of control to allow your people to contribute and to contribute the best that they can offer and all that they can offer, right? So control needs to be contained. And that requires a lot of coaching and help. These sort of scars create fears and lack of trust deep, deep in your soul. And then you need to have the self-awareness to recognize the symptoms of those scars, showing themselves as either control or lack of trust in people. Then you go through the process of recovery after that self-awareness to just be equipped with tools that allow you to evolve from where you are. And I think what I'm just describing is probably generically applicable to any childhood experiences that we have. It's hard to tell where it's going to rear its head in future. So in my case, I think, it's the trust that I need to learn to establish — trust in the universe and trust in people around me.

 

Aditya: Yes, the childhood experiences teach us a lot about how to navigate life. What did your parents do while you were growing up?

 

Zhamak: My dad was an engineer, he was a metallurgic engineer. So it's a combination of like electrical engineering, chemical engineering, and all of that. So it's a very fun field and he loved math, he loved science. He went on and started his own company, his own business. So they were building large, large furnaces, big industrial projects. He was an innovator. He was always inventing new ways of doing things, new compounds for welding. He had a few innovations as part of that. So he loved his work and that's what my dad was doing.

 

And my mom was a teacher at the beginning. And then she went on and opened her own business and she had a kindergarten. So that was also very fun, [it's fun] when your mom has a kindergarten that has a swimming pool and swings and seesaws and all those kind of things that you like as a kid to play with. And she was also very busy with that for many years. They were busy entrepreneurs in their own way, in their own world, and they loved what they did. And we got a slice of their love and attention among those.

 

Aditya: Yes, with your dad being on the STEM side, your mom being a teacher, my follow-up question is if their careers influence what you wanted to do growing up?

 

Zhamak: I'm sure it did. I mean, you probably are experiencing this right now with your mom being on this call, that whether we exactly want to do what they do, maybe not, but we get influenced by how they show up in the world, right? So I definitely got inspired by my mom's fierce drive in life, right? She was a woman in a very male dominant industry, and she was always butt-heading with the government. So I think her fierce drive and her love for all the children that were in her kindergarten, the care for the people that worked with her, really influenced me.

 

I think on my dad's side, my dad was an engineer, [it was his humility and sincerity]. He was still doing a lot of the design of the equipment that they were building. But then he had a factory where factory folks, folks on the ground, engineers on the ground are welding and cutting and building this kind of electrical, mechanical, large stuff that they were building.

 

One of the things that he was really proud of was that despite his position, when he goes to the factory, he changes his clothes and he puts on the factory clothes and the helmet and the boots and goes on the floor, factory floor, to work with his people. And they sit at the same table and they eat lunch together. And coming from an Eastern culture, which is very much of a hierarchical culture, you're the boss, you're up here, you're the worker, you're down here. It wasn't very common, but he was very proud of it. And he loved and mentored a lot of generations that came after him and grew under him. That impacted me. I mean, his love for innovation and writing and the way he treated his work as just a passion, not as work. The people that worked with him were just like his family and [that has certainly influenced me]. And I'm aspiring to be like him.

 

Aditya: Yes. So although you didn't pick up any specific careers from your parents, you were able to get traits from both of their sides, which you were able to carry forward. What did you yourself want to become growing up?

 

Zhamak: Yes. I mean, for me, it was easy because, first of all, if you live in a country where there are not many options for women, and also the country is so under-resourced, that you can't grow and dream all these possible things, you have a very, very small number of choices, because if I dreamed to be an artist, I would have been a hungry artist. I could have never, ever made a career. So right off the bat, you're either becoming a doctor, or an engineer, or a lawyer, so you can survive the future. So my options were already limited. And then for me, I was very much drawn to math and physics from very early on.

 

As luck would have it, during the time that I was growing up, despite the fact that the country was under sanctions, and we had no access to modern stuff out in the world, my dad traveled to UK and brought me a Commodore 64 back [in the day] Now I'm giving my age away, how old I am. So as a teenager, I had exposure to computers when not many other people had. And school certainly didn't have computers back then. So when I saw the Commodore 64, and I learned BASIC, I got a taste of what computers can do, so I was going to be a software engineer, programmer, you know, you name it. I was going to be in computing. And that was it. I never swayed from that, and that was the path I followed.

 

Aditya: That's pretty cool. I hear you're a self-confessed troublemaker. What does that sort of mean, and were you always one?

 

Zhamak: I didn't think about it that way, to be honest, but I probably always was. I always struggled with authority and unreasonable authority. I struggled with the country, as I said, as I grew up the rules and the laws of that country were just in conflict with the natural human needs. If you dance, you get arrested, you're a criminal. If you sing, you're a criminal. If you party, you're a criminal. So I was constantly breaking laws, and there are many people, my generation, who grew up in Iran, have a lot of stories to share of their kind of contact with the law, because you're constantly breaking the law. I suppose without knowing it, I was already a troublemaker just by the fact of trying to grow up a normal life, as normal as it can be under those circumstances.

 

And I think that strong sense of freedom and autonomy, and not wanting to be under a thumb of rule that did not make sense, and coming from a family of activists and political activists, having seen people around me just try to think for themselves and have a critical thinking muscle be trained in them from early on, inspired or gave me the courage to ask questions when things didn't make sense. That, I think, is just the first step to being a troublemaker, because if you ask questions, then you get to the root of truth, which is not necessarily what everybody else believes around you. And from there, you have to establish a new sense of truth. And you have to [do that] in your own way. Some people make things, some people write, some people talk. And it just happened that I found myself in one of those moments where the established truth needed to be questioned.

 

Aditya: Yes, definitely. So through these difficult circumstances, were there certain values that you all believed in as a family that you still hold dear?

 

Zhamak: Yes, I wish I could talk of profound values. I don't know if we ever talked about those as a family, but we always lived like see beyond differences. So seeing the good in everyone — it doesn't matter what class you're in, or what color you're in, or what religion you believe in, or what sect you're from — we see the commonality and see the good. Iran is very [Eastern], and you know, Eastern cultures often have these classes and you don't cross class. You're in this class, in this part of society, and you don't hang around with these other people. And my family didn't behave that way. They always helped people around them, no matter what [the class or differences]. They had friendships that defied the lineation or boundary of classes that was established in the society.

 

So I think that sense of inclusion was something that was always ingrained in our first principles as a family. Now it's a big word. I didn't even know that word at the time, but I grew up seeing it. And really seeing the potential in people, as, again, as a founder, as a leader, you are right now operating under a lot of pressure — financial pressure, time pressure. You have this amount of money, this amount of time, and you have to make something big happen. So for example, hiring the right people is one of those most critical jobs. And if you hire based on, I just need to find the exact best match for this particular job we have to do today, you may hire someone that can move you very fast in the short term, but in the long term, they're not going to be the right people because they may not have the right culture.

 

So being able to see what's possible in people and be able to kind of grow them and think about the longer term and be inclusive of people that are not just exactly like you, but they complement you, is the one value that we live by, and I can see the impact of that in how I hire people today, for example.

 

Aditya: That is really cool. Next, let's dive into your educational journey and get some advice for students out there. So which high school did you attend?

 

Zhamak: Yes. So because I didn't go to this country for high school, the names probably don't make sense to people to mention. The way the education system worked in Tehran is to go to a school just like I guess California, that is close to the neighborhood that you live in. And the neighborhood that I lived in had a lot of expats in it; a lot of German expats that lived there. So there was a German Iranian school that existed. That was the school that I went all the way from elementary to high school. Of course, post-revolution, it became Iranian school. It was German Iranian and then became just Iranian school. And it was a place that created a lot of friendships that are lasting today.

 

Aditya: Then you went on to do a bachelor's in software engineering from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran in the early 90s. How was that experience?

 

Zhamak: It was good and bad. It was a good university. So the university, again, just like US universities have ranking, it wasn't the number one university, but it was probably like number two out of, I don't know, 20, 30 universities. It was a great university. It had great teachers, and the curriculum was a lot of math, a lot of physics, a lot of computer hardware, electronics, computer architecture, and then software and programming. But the part of the experience that was missing, I guess part of it was that social, again, social construct that we were living under, which was a very repressive kind of regime. You put your head down, you go do your study, get out, no socializing, no hanging around in university. So that kind of joy of being a student wasn't there. I would go in, I would go to my classes and I would get out. That was pretty much it.

 

Aditya: And in your country, was it common for women to study engineering back then?

 

Zhamak: It was. In fact, contrary to assumption of the audience and the image that people have from Iran, in fact, because there are not a lot of construction work or heavy, physically challenging or demanding work that women were in (those were very much dominantly kind of male industries), computer science, computer engineering was packed with women, and it is today. So it's actually more than here. Here, if you look at the population or profile of programmers and people in computing, you go to a conference, the portion of women representation is still very, very low. It's the opposite in Iran, because it's one of those accessible kind of fields that you can be in, which doesn't physically demand from you. So yes, it was very common and actually probably more or at least 50% were women.

 

Aditya: That's nice to hear. Finally, what would you say to students grappling with extreme pressure due to school?

 

Zhamak: What would I say? Don't rush. This is the moment to really take your time and dive in and establish a solid foundation that you can stand on. And that foundation is going to be the launch pad into the future. So don't try to cut corners. Don't try to hack your way out of work. Just give all you have to what is being presented to you. There's going to be a time when you are out of university or school and you have options to go and explore different things and build and innovate. Establish a solid foundation because you will not get that opportunity ever again because when you are in the workforce, the demand of delivering results always precedes. Let me go and learn and build. You are learning on the job, and learning the foundations take time. So don't rush, don't cut corners. Just give all you have to build a solid foundation for your future.

 

Aditya: Yes, school is an amazing experience. Students should take all they can from it. Those were some amazing insights. With that, I'll pass it over to my co-host to cover the next segment, work and entrepreneurship.

 

Chitra: Great, thank you. I can't imagine growing up in a neighborhood with missiles going off. That really gave me the goosebumps, Zhamak. You have such an inspiring story. Thank you so much for sharing.

 

Zhamak: Thank you for lending a platform, Chitra.

 

Chitra: Oh, absolutely. Moving on to work and entrepreneurship now, you really are a shining star in the male-dominated world of tech. But initially, did you have to work harder and smarter to really make yourself heard?

 

Zhamak: Yes. Initially, I was so shy that I didn't want to be heard. So I went through quite a transformation to come out of my cocoon. I was a programmer, I was a software engineer. I loved programming, and I was actually pretty good at it. But I was extremely shy and introvert, like typical introvert. You wouldn't believe that I am still an introvert from probably this conversation. So for me, even speaking in a room when there were five people sitting around, would have given me heart palpitations as if I'm being attacked by a saber tooth tiger. So it was very unnatural for me to talk, to speak up. And then slowly, slowly, I felt the confidence to kind of raise my voice even within a small company.

 

And then I moved to ThoughtWorks, which is a consultancy company, working off the platform of thought leaders that had challenged the status quo multiple times, you know, Agile Manifesto, Continuous Delivery, Micro Services. These were all very big concepts that came out of ThoughtWorkers working for the company. So that company's big platform and big mission was software excellence and for encouraging us to go out in the public and talk about that. And I remember the very, very first talks that I did. I was so stressed.

 

I ended up going to doctor and saying, I'm going to have a heart attack giving this talk, give me some medicine. So I was taking beta blockers; things that archers or pianists or violinists at the high performance, high pressure environments take to calm their nerves. I had to take medication to be able to give talks. From there, you know, the more you do it, the better you get at it. And at some point, yes, I developed the muscle to express my voice and not be shy or scared.

 

Chitra: Wow, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on the most recent fundraise. My question to you, Zhamak, is I have a bunch of early stage women founder friends, and they tell me that they face somewhat of a bias while raising venture capital. Now, does that align with your personal experience? And do you have any advice specifically for women entrepreneurs who are looking to fundraise?

 

Zhamak: I'm sure that bias is there. I'm sure for women it's much harder to prove themselves. And there's a reason for it. If you think about what is one job for a VC to do really, really well, that job is pattern matching. All VCs are doing that. They're pattern matching across multiple dimensions — the team, the age, the gender, the education. Have I seen this before? So, if they haven't seen many successful female founders in this shape and size and place in the world, it's hard for them to take a leap and invest, whether they are aware of it or they're not.

 

So then, what naturally happens for us is that we have to be smart to see, okay, if the reality, whether we like it or not, is that there are not many examples of female founders (and luckily, those examples are being created, like a lot of female founders that I know and admire; they're very successful. I love their work and hopefully those patterns are being established) but until then, how can I complement and show signals that then investors will recognize as a potential for success and growth? So for example, for me, when I started Nextdata, actually investors didn't even know what data mesh was about. Now, they're catching up to data products; they were behind the ball a little bit. So for me, I had to show them that there is a market.

 

So I took a move that not many startups take. I took on paying customers earlier than a lot of startups do. Most younger male startup founders go two years in a garage building and they get the money and they don't even care about the market. They don't even, you know, may or may not talk to customers. We had paying customers while we were building the product. These are some of the most amazing leaders that I dearly like, keep close to my heart, I'm still in contact with and we were working with them. We are in production with them. So I think you have to think about how to, this is the reality, you're going to lose some points because you're a minority in that pattern. How can you show your strengths and complement yourself?

 

You have to sometimes take risk and do things that are not that conventional. And that's what I did. So by having those [early customers] and these companies were Fortune 500, or even Fortune 100, some of them, by taking that risk, life was difficult. Like we started building the software under immense amount of pressure, not just time and money, but also commitment to these customers. So you have to take some conventional paths to give signal to investors that they feel more confident and they can overlook some of the biases that they have established.

 

Chitra: That is very, very interesting. Okay, let's lighten this up a little bit, and I will pass it back to Adi for some fun stuff next.

 

Aditya: Let us talk about some fun stuff indeed. So what are your hobbies?

 

Zhamak: Oh, goody. Ask this question from a startup founder and they probably had some hobbies that they forgot by this time. Time is very limited to have hobbies. So unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of time to have hobbies right now. But the things that I do to keep me kind of nourished and alive, of course, is spending time with my daughter. We just got a 3D printer. So it's like building toys on demand, doing 3D designs and printing different things. It's just spending time with my daughter. It's, I guess, a hobby. I play music, so any time I get a chance to play music, I play piano, that's a hobby. And then I love trails and I love being close to nature and I love running and swimming at the same time. So whenever I get time, I spend time in nature. And often it involves running. Do they count as hobbies?

 

Aditya: Yes, they count. And to be fair, who really needs a hobby when you're the entrepreneur of such a big company?

 

Zhamak: It's a big hobby for sure.

 

Aditya: Yes, the company is sort of your hobby, huh?

 

Zhamak: 100%. And there's so much joy. There's a lot of hardship for sure. It's a lot of grit, it's even taxing on your physical health but it's also privilege. There's so much joy to build something from nothing. There's so much joy to build a team that is interconnected, that is thriving, you know, making progress. I cannot explain it with words.

 

Aditya: Yes, that satisfaction of sort of seeing everything come together. Cool. Now, what do you like to share something that very few people know about?

 

Zhamak: Oh, goody. I am a fairly transparent person. I've done a couple of these podcasts. So I'm probably not sure if there is anything to be shared that people didn't know about. Oh, I can give you one that maybe I hinted to. I'm a pretty good skier because when I was young, where I lived was close to the mountains and you could drive for an hour to get to great snow. People may not actually know this, that Iran does have quite high mountains and great powder snow that you can get. And because at the time, schools were being closed because of, as I said, missiles landing randomly on top of our houses. So with no school [and living] close to mountains, every morning, I would get up, get on a ski bus and go skiing. I love skiing and I become a great skier as a result of this tragedy that was happening in our country.

 

Aditya: Finally, what does it take on the part of your family to make you thrive?

 

Zhamak: A lot, a lot. My husband really takes care of all the activities with our daughter. And my daughter is being very patient with her mother. Hopefully, she will forgive me for all the hours that I took away from us to build the company. And I am really grateful for their grace and for their support.

 

Aditya: Thanks for sharing about your personal side. We're now nearing the end of this amazing episode of The Tech Icon, and would love to get some final thoughts in this final segment.

 

Chitra: Thanks so much. I can tell, Zhamak, your daughter is going to grow up being so proud of you for everything that you've done. Now, you're a role model to women and to men trying to break into the tech world across, really. What is your advice to folks who are just starting out?

 

Zhamak: First of all, follow your passion. Don't follow any field if it's just to make money or get ahead or just because you were told so. You will not succeed. So at least for me, a big driver is just that passion, and you've got to feel better at the end of the day when you work on something that you love. You get more energy from your work. So don't do something that sucks the energy out of you. So that's step one.

 

If that's being in tech industry, which is very wide right now, from building mobile to building networking devices to AI, there are just so many options. I mean, the whole world is now a digital world. You have a lot of options. If that's the case, then my advice is twofold. If you're just starting out, find the best place to work and the best mentors to work with. Find the companies that are aligned with your culture and the teams. The [companies that] share the same values with you. And in those teams and in those companies, find the best ones. Because this is when you are learning the fastest.

 

You want to learn from the best. And if it means doing hard work and difficult work, so be it. I actually grew my first white hair in my first job on my first project in my early 20s. Thinking too much, I think my white hair just came up under pressure. Really, it was like pressure of work. But I worked with some of the best minds in the industry and it paid off. So if the environment is toxic, it drains your energy. If you don't get good mentorship and people that care about your growth, get out of there. If the job is not pushing you to learn and grow, get out of there. Go somewhere that it feels difficult and you feel like you're really pushed outside of your comfort zone because early you learn the fastest. It's expected that the people that hire you at that stage expect that they're investing in you to grow. The growth and learning is part of your job description almost, and make sure you learn from the best.

 

Chitra: Such great tips. Thank you. Now, our final question to you is that growing up in the big, chaotic, tightly controlled city of Tehran, did you think that one day this little girl will go on to make waves in the world of data and analytics?

 

Zhamak: I didn't go that far, but I definitely wanted to get out from there. So the plan was always to live somewhere that I have a sense of freedom and a sense of autonomy. I think that was always there. And because, again, I grew up in a family that almost everyone around us left. We were just one of the very few that stayed in the country. The idea of leaving the country and being somewhere else, the idea of freedom and access and growth and abundance was always part of my psyche. But did I see this happen? I mean, I still don't see it as if it's a big deal, Chitra. I know you're being very kind to me here and elevating my work. But from where I'm sitting, I haven't done anything. There's still a lot to do. So I have made a little impact and I hope I'll be around to do more.

 

Chitra: That's very modest. And on that note, thank you very much for joining us in our mission of giving back and inspiring students and entrepreneurs across the globe. We wish you the very best, Zhamak. Thank you.

 

Zhamak: Thank you so much. Thank you for this delightful conversation with both of you and both generations. It's been amazing.

 

Aditya: Yes. And thank you for those answers. I feel like we and the viewers got to know a lot about you.

 

Zhamak: Thank you.