Shay Banon, Founder and CTO of Elastic: Never Stop Searching in a Startup

**Shay Banon** (0:01)
The past is fake, the future is real. I know where I want to go, I'm excited about it. You know, it's like you can find yourself thinking about the past or decisions that should have gone with X or Y or Z.
You can't change that, the future is real. Focus on the future, focus on where you want to go, imagine it. And to me, like, that's the exciting part.

**Jon Sakoda** (0:20)
Welcome to The Decibel Podcast. I'm excited to welcome my friend, Shay Banon, the founder of Elastic, to the show.
Shay is one of the true pioneers in open source, and his company is at the center of enterprise data, cyber security and AI. He is one of the forefathers of the search industry and still has a lot of unfinished business in the space. And I'm excited to welcome him to our show. Shay, it's great to have you.

**Shay Banon** (0:43)
Thanks, Jon. Excited to be here.

**Jon Sakoda** (0:46)
Shay, you have a really unique founding story. If it's okay, can we start from the very beginning? Where did you grow up? What was life like in your family? And when did you discover computers?

**Shay Banon** (0:55)
Yeah, I'm from Israel originally. And I grew up in a city called Ashdod, which is about 30 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, right on the Mediterranean beach. So I grew up going to the beach a lot and surfing and running around. It's a relatively new town. It's an interesting one. It started because Israel wanted to have another port next to Haifa.
And my grandfather moved there to build the port, one of the first ones that did it. So it's kind of like a city that grew up and kind of like came into being very quickly around the early days of Israel. And it's supposed to be like a very well planned city. It was a fascinating city to grow up at. Because it was such a new city, we got a lot of waves of immigration because Israel had a lot of waves of immigration. So I had a chance to grow up with a lot of diversity when it comes to people coming from many different places. My parents came from Morocco and Turkey, but tons of people coming from Europe and Russia and Iran and Iraq and obviously Morocco and other places.
So I grew up mostly with my grandparents and my mother. My grandfather worked at the harbor. A lot of appreciation for knowledge.
And I'm always fascinated by those generations that just wanted their kids to be very well educated, but they didn't come from an educated background. So it's almost like always living in a conflict, if that makes sense. I grew up working a lot at the harbor when I was 13, when my grandfather used to work. Always like study hard and make sure you succeed. But then there was also the, well, you have a safe place to work at the harbor if things doesn't work out for you. So that was great, very loving and caring family that just supported a lot of where we wanted to go.

**Jon Sakoda** (2:35)
I think a lot of people don't know that they have a safe harbor to return to, but in your case, it sounds like you literally grew up with one. And I think a lot of technical founders can look back and remember the moment when they discovered computers. They became gamers or hackers earlier in their life. Do you remember when you fell in love with programming?

**Shay Banon** (2:53)
I think so. You asked me when I started to work with computers. And to be honest, I wasn't really a tech kid or something along those lines that got a computer when he was seven and then immediately started hacking or something along those lines.
I worked pretty hard to save for my first computer because I needed it for my studies in high school because I studied electronics and computers. But I only studied electronics and computers because that was the most advanced courses that were there. And I wanted to excel. But I didn't do it because I didn't spend my weekends programming or something along those lines. And then when I applied for university, I initially applied for electronics because that was the main thing I studied when I was in high school. And then in one of the weekend newspapers, I counted the number of jobs in the weekend newspapers. I still remember it. And computer science had one more job than electronic engineers. So I called university and I changed my role to computer science. That's how I started to get into computers. I remember arriving at university and I was typing with two fingers very slowly and people were like typing extremely fast. And I think that this is a lot of what at least I learned when I grew up.