Alexey Milovidov and ClickHouse: from curiosity to a company in $15 billion (Category Software)
I watched with great interest a great interview Elizabeth of Ossetia (foreigner) with Alexei Milovidov, creator and CTO ClickHouse. Formally, this is the story of a company with a valuation of $15 billion But I found it more interesting as an engineering project, from curiosity and internal tools to open source and global business.
Alexey started programming on the Soviet BK-0010. The game could be downloaded from a cassette or manually typed ten pages of code from a magazine. If it was wrong, he recalls, the game could have worked "a little bit differently." The older brothers ended up just giving him a book: "Take care of it."
Later, he entered the Moscow State University mechmat, although he wanted to go to the VMC, and then chose Yandex - despite a lower salary. On his first vacation, the web analytics system, which was supported by two people, ceased to cope with traffic. Alexei stabilized it, and then wanted real-time reports with random cuts. So out of practical pain, ClickHouse began to grow.
The name comes from clickstream and data warehouse. When Yandex analysts got answers in seconds instead of hours-long Perl scripts, the technology looked like magic. At the same time, it was almost ignored for a long time - and this turned out to be an advantage: the team did not interfere with the calm construction of the system.
In 2016 ClickHouse is now open source. Alexei calls it a way to "penetrate the market while no one sees." First there were users, contributors and metapas, and only then - the company. The business is built around what is not in the naked engine: scaling, backup, security and integrations. It is free of charge; those who do not want to have a separate expertise are sold ClickHouse Cloud.
The startup itself was also going unusually. In 2021 year 12–14 The man moved from “Yandex”, and the three cofounders knew each other only by Zoom – online dating, jokes Ossetian. The company has already invested $50 There was no cloud product yet, and the hired sales team had a question: "What are we selling?"
The roles were divided pragmatically: Aaron Katz – business and sales, Yuri Israelsky – cloud and teams, Milovidov – technology. Alexey did not become CEO: without experience, he estimated the chance to convince the right people at about one point. 5%. There's more company now. 600 He does not formally lead anyone, works with everyone, and accepts the role of “anxiety creator.”
There are many such details in history. The apartment in Amsterdam, Alexei was rented by the owner, whose sister knew ClickHouse in China. In four and a half years, he learned mostly goedemorgen in Dutch. And an AI employee of Groene AI fixes “red” tests and has already made friends with a particularly sullen contributor.
If you reduce it, you get two main points. ClickHouse grew not from a brilliant pitch but from a chain of well-solved engineering problems. (I remember years. 10 ClickHouse captured the market of analytical solutions in Russia, since there were no other solutions of this class in opensource.) But one technology was not enough, its creator had to see the product through the eyes of customers, entrust sales and the company to people with other experience and continue to build a cool product.
#Software #Data #OpenSource #Engineering #Architecture #Management