AtScale founder Dave Mariani explains why it’s not shameful to demote yourself

AtScale founder, Dave
Mariani
AtScale

• When David Mariani launched a startup in his 40’s, he
  struck out badly trying to raise funds from VCs — he was told
  he wasn’t “blue
  flame enough,” as in, too old to really fire on all
  cylinders as a founder.
• Today AtScale is doing well, and Mariani thought
  it was high-time he demoted himself.
• He had to fight with his own board to let him hire a
  replacement CEO.
• But, he 
  says, founding CEOs need
  to understand their own weaknesses and take action, rather than
  forcing someone else to do it for them.

---

David Mariani, founder of five-year-old big data startup AtScale,
is happy, he tells Business Insider.

In June, he replaced himself as CEO by hiring someone he’s
admired for years. And together they sweet-talked another
successful entrepreneur, also well-known in the big data field,
into signing on as chairman.

“It’s OK to hand the reigns over as a founder/CEO. It’s not
shameful to realize and recognize where you need help and to
bring in people proactively to help you versus waiting for
someone to do it for you,” said Mariani. He’s taken a new
role at the company, as VP of technology.

To replace him, Mariani hired Chris Lynch as the new CEO of
AtScale in June. Lynch is well-known in the Boston tech community
as the CEO who sold Vertica Systems to HP for $350 million. He
was also the founder and CEO of a company called Acopia, which he
sold to F5 Networks for $210 million in 2007. 

The outspoken Lynch had been doing the VC thing for about six
years in Boston. After joining AtScale, Lynch helped talk another
big name, Jit Saxena, into joining as chairman. 

Chris
Lynch
Chris Lynch

Saxena is a serial startup founder, best known as the former
founder and CEO of big data company Netezza, which he took public
and then sold to IBM for $1.7 billion in 2010.

Saxena’s personal story is a triumphant one, too. Some years
after selling Netezza, he got sick and needed a kidney
transplant.

In 2014 he launched an online campaign to look for a
donor. Ultimately, his internet search didn’t work, but,
he was matched with a donor the old fashioned way, he tells
Business Insider. Today, he’s a big supporter of kidney
research at Boston’s Brigham Hospital.

“It was a wonderful thing that it happened,” he told Business
Insider. “And I was lucky and am almost fully recovered from
kidney issues. I hope in the future the same thing happens to
hundreds of thousands of people, and I would like to help them in
any way I can.” 

Saxena is an angel investor in Boston and already on a number of
boards, But with his health back he was willing to add another
one to the roster and join AtScale.

Not ‘Blue Flame’

Often when a founder leaves the CEO job, even for another role at
the company, it signals trouble at the company or in the board
room. But Mariani said that hiring a new CEO was his idea.

“I actually had to fight my board to allow me to do this. They
thought, hey, everything is going great, why do you want to go
and take this kind of a risk, and bring in a new leader?” he
said. 

It was a good problem to have, considering how tricky it was for
Mariani to raise the venture capital to start up AtScale in the
first place. 

In his late 40’s, Mariani went out to raise his first
round from venture capitalists, he was continually rejected. This
was despite his engineering background, running projects
at Yahoo and Klout.

AtScale is cloud software that solves a really hard
problem. It connects data from wherever it sits, be an Oracle
database or an Excel spreadsheet, so companies can run big-data
style analysis. Lots of companies do that, but AtScale does it
without moving the data. The tech was so impressive that a who’s
who of angels backed it, which Mariani thought would help in the
fundraising process.

A friend of his in the VC industry explained: Potential
investors were saying he wasn’t “blue flame” enough,” Mariani had

previously told Business Insider —
 a
reference to his age. “Blue flame” refers to burning hot; as in
the kind of Mark Zuckerberg-style young wunderkinds without
families to support or other responsibilities that investors love
to back. 

Striking out with classic investors, Mariani took
another tactic. He went to the investment arm of one of his early
customers, Comcast. They bit and with one big name investor in
his camp, others followed. He has since raised $45 million in
several rounds.

But, “blue flame” age or not, he was inexperienced in running a
company and wanted someone who could help him.

Mariani lobbied Lynch to take the CEO job for months, but Lynch
didn’t want to move his family from Boston to the San Francisco
Bay Area, where AtScale is based. Ultimately, Lynch took the job
without moving his family. He is currently commuting, taking
flights from San Francisco home to Boston every weekend. 

And today, Mariani couldn’t be happier. “Along with Chris, came
Chris’s entourage. The people, his contact that he worked with
over the years, including Jit.”

With his classic bravado, Lynch adds, “If you look at my track
record you can see that I can do anything I want in this
business. And what I want is to build AtScale into a
billion-dollar business.”