From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel (Part 1)

Eric and his co-founder Nikita left Facebook to join YCombinator to develop their idea for MemSQL. The company has blossomed into a robust enterprise software business with a solid customer base.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Eric Frenkiel: I was born and raised in Southern California. I studied at Stanford when I actually decided to specialize in engineering. I looked at a lot of schools and I thought that Stanford was the best place for me to grow and learn. I graduated in 2008.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of engineering did you study at Stanford?

Eric Frenkiel: Operation Research. You would call it industrial engineering in another time. In Stanford, it’s called Management Science and Engineering.

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, you were done with Stanford. What happens next?

Eric Frenkiel: During my time at university, I always enjoyed programming. I took a pretty rigorous battery of computer science subjects. I always had various projects in summer that I would work on. I have a pretty good engineering background. By the time I graduated, I just knew that I wanted to get into startups. I joined a startup over the summer of 2008. I started working there and learned a lot. I turned down going through the consulting route. I wanted to take the most challenging path and correspondingly, the least amount of pay.

Rather than going to Wall Street, I went to downtown Palo Alto and started working as an entry level junior engineer. This was a really interesting exposure because at that time, the first company I worked with was a consumer company called Cooliris. I really gravitated more towards the business side. I loved the enterprise model. I went to another startup called Marin Software where I was doing more sales engineering work. That appealed to me in particular because it was a good balance of engineering and talking to customers. I had an immediate affinity for sales engineering.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very good background actually. Sales engineering is one of the best backgrounds from which to go into product marketing. Having both the product perspective and the sales perspective is a very good training ground for engineers and entrepreneurs.

Eric Frenkiel: I agree. You basically have to learn how to talk two languages and communicate clearly. Engineering speaks one language, sales speaks another and there are few people who can jump between these two teams. I was able to code, speak to customers, and I was always doing something interesting.

Then Facebook came knocking. They found my profile on LinkedIn. They offered me a position there to work on their platform with partnerships. It was a similar use case or skill set where they needed engineers that could interface with external engineering teams. They called this Partner Engineering. I would work with big companies like CNN or Zynga and help them integrate with Facebook API. That was pre-IPO. I joined in 2010. That set the groundwork for what would happen next in my career, which was starting MemSQL.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Y Combinator to Customer Traction and $50 Million in Financing: MemSQL CEO Eric Frenkiel
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