SaaStr 464: From Developer to Founder to CEO: Engineering to Enterprise with Elastic CEO Shay Banon

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is SaaStr's Founders' Favorite Series, where you can hear some of the best of the best from SaaStr speakers. This is where the cloud meets.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
This September, SaaStr Annual, the 7th SaaStr Annual is finally back. We're finally back in the real world. At the very end of September, we'll be back at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds, just south of San Francisco, just north of Palo Alto.
Outdoors, we'll do the first Outdoor SaaStr Annual. First 100% vaccinated SaaStr Annual on over 40 acres at the fairground. It'll be fun. It'll be a little bit like a Coachella for SaaS.
And we'll have tons of great speakers out at the CEOs of Datadog, CEOs of Vimeo, CEOs of Y Combinator, President of Shopify, and so much more. And we'll also have a digital component too, because we've gotten pretty good at that. But please, it's time to get back together. And if you can, if you're vaccinated and you can get to the SF variance, if ever, please join us at saastrannual.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:57)
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Up today, from developer to founder to CEO, engineering to enterprise with Elastic CEO, Shay Banon.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:13)
Um, Shy, let's start at the beginning. Let's start about how you decided to build Elastic Search and you probably, yeah, did you have another job? Like, how did this come about?
What's the deal?

**Shay Banon** (2:32)
I was saying, like, a founder's story is probably always trying to be okay with things that you're not used to. So I definitely still not used to seeing myself in videos, hearing myself speak, and my wife keeps making fun of me because I like, I do these things with my eyebrows when someone fills me and I can't get it off. So I stopped doing it. So that's part of the founder's story is just getting used to every day waking up in the morning and getting used to doing things that you're not used to, or you've never done before.
But yes, my story and history with search goes about 15, 16 years ago, I moved to London with my wife. My wife went there to study to become a chef, and I didn't have a job, and I was trying to explore and learn new technologies. And like anything that you try to do, you try to do it through building something. That's the best way that I know how to learn anything in life. So I try to build something, and that something was a recipe app.
And when I try to build that recipe app, I thought the best experience that you can have with that application is to be welcomed by a search box, because regardless of any type of data that you have, including recipes or histories of locations and wineries and things on the land that you were studying, the best way to explore any type of data anywhere is search. And I try to go and implement that elusive, difficult search box. And ever since then, I've been trying to put search boxes on every application that I get a chance to see.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:01)
Do you always see search boxes in everything you do?

**Shay Banon** (4:04)
I see search experiences in everything that like, it's almost everywhere that I see, I see the search experiences. And to me, a search experience is about empowering users. It's about empathy. It's about putting yourself in someone's shoes and telling them, hey, you can be in control of the data of the session that you're gonna issue with any type of data that you have. Obviously, I'm definitely fond with search boxes and being able to go and use them and put them across anything that you do.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:35)
So let's talk about what Elastic does now. I think some people just because the means of which you do everything is through search.
It's important that people understand the depth and the breadth of what Elastic does. So tell us a little bit about that.

**Shay Banon** (4:52)
Yeah, it was very interesting. The arc of Elastic and the arc of my experience around search. So in the beginning, I felt like search was being put in too small of a box, if that makes sense. And search was about enterprise search and being able to go and take it and put it in organizations and try to find that word document or something along those lines. It didn't feel that fresh, fast, go and put it on a website in millisecond, have that data be provided in real time and accessible, being able to put it on any type of data. Why not take infrastructure information or monitoring and put it in search and make it useful? Why not take security data and make it searchable?