The Future of the Cloud

Today, I spoke with Amr Awadallah, the founder of Cloudera, a hybrid data cloud company. Amr is now a vice president of developer relations at Google. Awadallah grew up in Cairo, Egypt, and then moved to the U.S. to obtain a Ph.D. He went on to found Cloudera, a hugely successful company that helped define the whole idea of cloud-based computing. 

In our discussion, Amr recounts how Cloudera started and evolved, the challenges he had to overcome, and how a strong disagreement with the board prompted him to leave the company in 2019. Shortly thereafter he joined the Google Cloud team. In the second part of our conversation, he shares details on his daily activities, as well as his excitement for innovations such as serverless/FaaS and Anthos, an “Android for Enterprise apps” as he defines it.

“Make sure you’re solving a real problem. I can’t tell you how many entrepreneurs I see that are so excited about a problem that they created or a problem that is only happening to them and will never happen to anyone else. Those startups will fail.”

– Amr Awadallah

At the end of our conversation, Amr shares advice and tips for startups and entrepreneurs—emphasizing that they should focus on real problems with real solutions if they want to succeed.