E12: From Vertica to Starburst - Data Processing for Analytics with Matt Fuller

Today on the podcast, I interview Matt Fuller, the co-founder of Starburst. Matt has worked in data for years ....

Highlights
[1:00] - How Matt got into data & the C-Store paper which led to him joining Vertica, an early columnar database prior to technologies like Hadoop, HDFS or Parquet
[3:45] - The increasing adoption of OSS data storage tools and the growth of the Hadoop ecosystem that ultimately led up to Presto/Trino
[6:00] - How Matt took the plunge as an engineer-founder to become a co-founder of Starburst and had to wear many different hats across customer support, GTM and product
[10:20] - Matt's experience as a bridge between customer problems and the engineering team, and how to tailor your discussions to the appropriate place in the org that the customer contact sits
[14:20] - How  OSS changes the GTM dynamic of an enterprise product
[16:30] - What Matt is excited about regarding the future of Trino - the lakehouse architecture and open formats for data lakes (like Iceberg), and the Starburst SaaS product (Starburst Galaxy)

--

Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!