Venture Passport

S1E5: Nicolas Hourcard, Co-founder @ QuestDB

Jack Richardson Season 1 Episode 5

This week's episode is with Nic Hourcard, Co-founder & CEO of QuestDB

QuestDB is an open-source database for time-series data unlocking more performance; higher ingestion throughput, fast queries, compression, downsampling the data, and much more. 

The company recently reached the 11,000-star mark on GitHub with an impressive number of monthly active databases and a 2000+ strong community on Slack.

The company participated in the first remote cohort of Y Combinator and has since announced a $12m Series A in November 2021 at an $80m valuation, led by 468 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures and a list of industry angels, including the co-founder of Reddit.

We discuss:

  • The ins & outs of Y Combinator
  • Battling between building bespoke features for first users and true scalability
  • Fundraising in the US vs UK
  • Monetising open-source propositions
  • Reflecting on board leadership