Oliver Schabenberger is Chief Innovation Officer at SingleStore. He is a former academian and seasoned technology executive with more than 20 years global experience in data management, advanced analytics and AI. Oliver formerly served as COO and CTO of SAS, where he lead the design, development and go to-market-effort of massively scaleable analytic tools and solutions and helped organisations become more data driven. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, has co-authored three books, and earned Ph.D and M.S. degrees from Virginia Tech.

Sponsor Information

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Interview transcript

Hadley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. Oliver. It's an absolute honor to have you on. 

[00:00:04] Oliver: [00:00:04] Thank you, Hadley. I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to be on a curious life. And I'm curious what we're going to talk about in this podcast. 

[00:00:13] Hadley: [00:00:13] Well, as you know, like Peter pan shadow, we're going to go off and find the essence of Oliver today.

[00:00:20] Oliver: [00:00:20] I'm curious, curious what that essence is.

[00:00:23]Hadley: [00:00:23] Let's do it. So, you know, this is a show where we look for a window into the lives of our guests. What makes you tick and, and essentially to understand the essence of you and to understand that the trait of curiosity has impacted your life in Korea. So how we do that is we imagine that we sitting around a campfire sharing stories about our life and tag.

[00:00:44] You all right. So where we'll start is where you were born, whether you had siblings, you know, what were your parents like? What was your early life like? And we'll take that all the way through to today and onto tomorrow. But before we do that, the question that I ask all my guests is what does curiosity mean?

[00:01:00] Well, I think curiosity is something in eight and all humans to different degrees. To me, it's a quality that relates to exploration, uh, inquisition and learning, you know, the drive to find out about something it's really the pursuit of knowledge. I sometimes call it lifelong learning. Um, but to me, it's about the strive to continuously improve and get.

[00:01:26] Better at something. Awesome. 

[00:01:28] And do you, do you think that's innate in children and suppressed as you get older or just inmate and the individual? I think it's 

[00:01:36] Oliver: [00:01:36] innate in the individual. Um, but I think you can suppress it and, and you could, could block us around it. And I think we should encourage the opposite.

[00:01:46] Um, for example, when we, when we look at the qualities we like to see in individuals, we work for, we went from defining skills to emotional quotient, and today it's also something called the adaptability quotient. And that's really the, your ability to ask what if questions instead of what is right. And so what would happen if, what would happen if your top five customers leave you tomorrow?

[00:02:14] How would you deal with this? The ability to explore something. Overexploiting something and there is an immediate sense of, okay, what do I have available as technology right now? What have we built in the past? Let's start with that and build on top of that. That's exploitation, right? That's building on what you already know versus, okay.

[00:02:35] Let's step back. Let's get, give our curiosity some room to roam and imagine what it would be. And sometimes you start from marketing, you start from scratch and you can actually get you to, to where you need to go faster because you're not encumbered and you're not weighted