Our guest today is Israeli serial entrepreneur Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO of Redis, a data management company in Silicon Valley. In this conversation, Bengal talks about how Redis has grown to be a popular data management platform for customers around the world to make their software applications go faster. Bengal also has some simple advice for Indian entrepreneurs aspiring to build deep engineering-based companies.

(00:40) Intro to The Daily Tech Conversation

(00:57) Our guests today — Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO of Redis

(1:55) Redis — a data management company tackling the data-latency bottleneck to make software apps go faster

(04:10) The founding of Redis — identifying the data layer choke point and the parallel development of open source software and Redis Enterprise

(06:20) The first commercial product and its capabilities; adding additional versions of Redis Enterprise

(09:55) Scale of operations and popularity of Redis; revenue well above the $100 million mark; growth of 50 percent year over year

(11:50) Examples of how customers are using Redis — credit card companies, large e-commerce operations and online ad serving businesses

(14:40) Trends in open source software adoption among developers, communities and enterprise businesses

(18:45) India as a market for Redis and customers like Freshworks, GoMechanic, Razorpay, Sharechat, Sony Liv; plans to start a development centre in India

(22:15) Funding and plans ahead — promoting Redis’s adoption as more than a caching system, as a primary database itself; applications of AI

(25:50) The serial entrepreneurship experience — taking RIT Technologies public; designing aerospace components; selling toy concepts to US and Japanese toy makers

(28:05) Advice for India’s aspiring deep engineering entrepreneurs — don’t wait too long to talk to potential customers

(33:04) On taking Redis public