Q&A With DataStax Co-Founder Matt Pfeil

Dolphin and Jonathan Ellis were impressed by Apache Cassandra's peer-to-peer architecture and resiliency, leading them to start a company supporting it. They faced challenges in the early days due to the rapid emergence of new NoSQL projects, but they focused on ensuring community users were happy. The Cassandra Summits played an important role in attracting bigger companies with larger use cases. Initially, the biggest challenge was convincing companies to adopt a pre-V1.0 software, but as more big names used it, the focus shifted to implementation challenges. Dolphin's advice for someone working on early stage technology is to get users and make them successful in production, encouraging them to talk about their experience with the world.