Every Monday morning we fire five questions at a leading C-suite figure in the business technology sector. Today we’re pleased to be joined by Ariel Assaraf, CEO of log analytics startup Coralogix.
Ariel – What’s the Biggest Challenge for your Clients?
Diagnosing operational problems continues to be a major challenge for most companies today. The growing complexity of distributed cloud applications has made this problem even worse.
Coralogix CEO Ariel Assaraf
To combat this issue, companies continue to make huge investments in aggregating and parsing all of their log data. Problem is they are left with mountains of log data and don’t even know how to reign it, let alone put it to use.
This has created a situation in which log data is viewed as a problem rather than a solution because logs that are kept as a reactive tool are extremely expensive to maintain.
This is why we do what we do. We help companies instantly narrow down hundreds of millions of logs to suspected logs, broken flows, error trends, and problematic version upgrades to ensure they are bringing sound products to market.
Technology that Excites You Most?
I’m excited by the potential of a semantic-talking AI assistant that could summarise complex text in audio using ML. I believe this technology can help companies save huge amounts of time in analysing their data and create a more natural human to machine interaction.
Greatest Success?
Our turnaround story. Back in 2017, our company was nearly shut down. We only had a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and were down to five people. We didn’t have a CTO, and our CEO had left us that year.
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With some restructuring and tireless hours of work, we were able to reinvent the company and our product. Today, we have more than 1,000 customers globally, and recently closed a $10 million Series A round of funding.
Worst Failure?
Back in 2015, we thought we had put together a nice launch with some very positive press and a big promise to revolutionise the monitoring market. Initially, things went very well and we got more than 100 sign-ups within the first week of launching.
Unfortunately, due to integration, support, and product issues, only one small customer converted out of those 100. We also made too many bad decisions about our product market fit, our initial go-to market strategy, and closing our technical debt.
Since then we have re-written the product twice until we found our sweet spot.
We also made a very smart decision by treating our customers as the domain experts, and making it easier for them to share their expertise with us by adding an in-app chat capability. We also made a team-wide commitment to answer each conversation, professionally, in less than two minutes (we were six people at the time).
Today, through more than 3,000 chat conversations, we have managed to maintain this criteria as our team and business has grown.
In Another Life, I’d Be…
Probably a doctor, I read any medicine book or research that’s coming up and most of the time know how to diagnose my friends before they see a doctor.
