E56 - Michel Tricot - Commoditized Data Integration and What It Means for You

Michel Tricot is the CEO and Co-Founder of Airbyte, the new
open-source data integration platform that syncs data from
applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses.


In 2020, he co-founded Airbyte, the new open-source ELT (extract,
load, transform) standard for replicating data.


After only five months, Airbyte raised $5.2M in seed funding from
Accel, YCombinator, 8VC, and some high-profile business angels,
including the co-founder of Segment, the former GM Cloudera, and
the co-founder of Liveramp and Safegraph. 600+ companies have
synced data using Airbyte in the first 6 months.


Michel has been working in data engineering for the past 15
years. Previously, as the head of integrations and engineering
director at Liveramp (NYSE: RAMP), he grew the team responsible
for building and scaling the data ingestion and data distribution
connectors.  Michel’s team was managing over 1k integrations
with adTech partners, delivering hundreds of billions of requests
daily to these partners and ingesting over a terabyte of data
daily on behalf of all LiveRamp customers in a privacy-compliant
way. LiveRamp was acquired by Acxiom for $310 million on July 1,
2014 and is now a $3B independent company.


Michel was also a founding member & Director of Engineering
of rideOS, a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) technology provider
that empowers automotive, autonomous vehicle, ride-hail,
transportation, and delivery businesses to build, operate, and
scale on-demand transportation offerings utilizing both
self-driving and human-operated fleets.


In this exclusive episode, Michel offers a detailed account of
the story behind Airbyte’s success and how Airbyte makes data
integration much easier for businesses.


Here are the major points of discussion:


How Michel built his career as a software engineer and used
it as a foundation to start his own company.

Creating a product that’s not only a good-to-have but a
need-to-have.

How to outreach potential customers to survey their needs and
use the interviews for product improvement.

The ingenious idea of using the same outreach contacts to
test out the MVP.

Advantages of the open-source approach to data integration
and software development.

The importance of community building for constant improvement
and business growth.

What’s the story behind Airbyte’s exponential growth and
getting investment.

What makes Airbyte different and better than others?

Why do you need external and internal data integrations to
grow your business?

How Airbyte makes integrating external and internal data
sources much easier.



If you are a software engineer thinking of starting your own
business or you are already running a business and want to know
how you can integrate external and internal data sources to grow
your business, this is the episode you shouldn’t miss.

BusinessAnalytics, DataEngineering, DataIntegration,
ProductDevelopment, CustomerExperience, DataScience