Shay Banon, Co-founder & CEO of Elastic, on Galvanizing a Community Around Search

**Shay Banon** (0:01)
The more you can build an understanding that your product of today might become a feature of tomorrow, the better.
Everything that we built, we built just evolving and learning as we do. And 2200 people were probably one of the largest, if not the largest, distributed company in the world. You need to be very active in maintaining the culture.

**Glenn Solomon** (0:22)
From GGV, this is Founder Real Talk, where we get real about the challenges that founders and startup executives face and how they've grown from tough experiences. I'm your host, Glenn Solomon. Without further ado, here's today's episode.
On today's episode of Founder Real Talk, I'm joined by my colleague, Oren Younger. Hey, Oren. Hey, Lem. And we are thrilled to welcome Shay Banon to the show. Shay is the co-founder and CEO of Elastic, a search company that makes data usable in real time and at scale for enterprise search, observability and security use cases. Elastic is deployed globally and the company's origins began in 2004 while Shay was building a search engine for his wife's recipes in their London apartment. We're going to have to ask about that. Shay built Elastic Search, the product in 2009, open sourced it in 2010, then co-founded the company, Elastic, with three co-founders, Steven, Uri and Simon in 2012
And the company quickly rose to the ranks, ultimately raising over 160 million in funding before a very successful IPO in 2018
So today we're going to be asking Shay about the 17 year evolution of Elastic and how the open source community and open source model has helped shape the company into what it is today. Shay, thanks for joining Founder Real Talk. It's great to have you.

**Shay Banon** (1:53)
Yeah, thanks, Glenn. Thanks, Oren. Happy to be here.

**Glenn Solomon** (1:56)
So let's start from the beginning. In 2004, you built the recipe app Compass for your wife.
How did that laid the foundation for what is today Elastic?

**Shay Banon** (2:08)
Yeah, it was interesting. So back in 2004, my wife decided to go and started to be a chef at the Corridor of Blue. We lived in Israel and we decided to move to England because apparently there's a Corridor of Blue in England as well in London itself. So she went to study there. I was out of a job and I was trying to get myself acquainted with all the buzz-worthy technologies that have been going on to make myself more attractive to the employment industry, if you will. I remember landing in London in 2004 It was a very different London. Coming from Israel, I was like, where are all the startups? Let me go and join a startup.
And then I quickly realized that there's not many startups back then in London. Obviously, things have changed. And ended up going and working with the financial industry. And when I was trying to learn this new technology, the best way that I know how to learn things is by building them. So I just try to go and build something, and I thought a recipe app would be great. Actually, the name of the recipe app was iCook, not being very imaginary. Obviously, being an Apple fanboy back then.
And as I was building it, I thought that the best way for my wife to interact with the recipes, and basically it was anything around cooking and culinary, if you will, like a knowledge base. It's a search box. So I started to try to implement that search box, find this wonderful early, early open source tool called Apache Lucene, ended up trying to use it. It was not very easy to use, ended up creating an abstraction layer on top of it, like any good software developer. And if there's a problem, just create an abstraction layer on top of it.
Ended up open sourcing that abstraction layer. So that moment, I think it's, two important things happened, at least to me personally, the first one was getting into search and getting in this journey of continuously being amazed and humbled by the power of search and how much putting a search box in front of someone brings smiles to people's faces.
And they know how to use the data, know how to use a system that is in front of them. And that also started my journey into open source. I just open source something, put it on back then in SourceForge and CVS and what have you, and really started to learn about open source and engagement with community and things along those lines. It's been a fascinating ride since then, both the open source track and the search track, which I'm sure we'll chat about during this episode.