IAM1391 – Founder Offers Solution that can Transform Scalable Datas

As Co-Founder and CEO, Armon created Coalesce, the only data transformation tool built for scale. Prior, Armon was part of the founding team at WhereScape, a leading provider of data automation software. At WhereScape, Armon served as national sales manager for almost a decade.

• CEO Story: Armon and his co-founder were exposed to the world’s largest complex data from big corporations. Seeing the market that really needed a specific piece of transforming data.
• Business Service: Offering a solution for a cloud database platform that is scalable and transforming it so that it can be consumable by people in the business getting insight out of that data.
• Secret Sauce: People and the culture.
• CEO Hack: App mention; Calm meditation app. Eating one meal a day.
• CEO Nugget: Figure out how to achieve financial independence as quickly as possible.
• CEO Defined: Responsible for driving the direction of the business. And having clarity with your team, business, and family on what direction you are going. Chief culture officer – drives and maintains the company culture.

Website: coalesce.io

LinkedIn: coalesceio, armonpetrossian

Twitter: coalesceIO, armonpetrossian

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Transcription

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00:21 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today, Armon Petrossian of Coalesce. Armon, super excited to have you on the show.

00:59 – Armon Petrossian

So glad to be here. Gresh, thanks for having me.

01:02 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it's definitely awesome to have you on. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Armon so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's working on. As co-founder and CEO, Armon created Coalesce, the only data transformation tool built for scale. Prior to that, Armon was part of the founding team at Wearscape, a leading provider of data automation software. And at Wearscape, Armon served as a national sales manager for almost a decade. Armon, super excited to have you on the show again. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:31 – Armon Petrossian

I'm so ready. Let's do it.

01:33 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen. He was born for this. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little more on how you got started. What I call your CEO story.

01:42 – Armon Petrossian

Yeah, definitely. Happy to share. So how I got to this point in my career in life, I think largely was from my background at my previous company, where we were at Wearscape and really was exposed to like while we were there, my co-founder and I, we both were there together. We were exposed to some of the world's largest, most complex data warehouses at pretty often Fortune 500, and Fortune 1000 companies.

And we were selling a solution that had a pretty broad application. However, we always found that organizations struggled with the specific piece of transforming data. And so as we were there and as we continued to see this problem over and over again, it became quite obvious that the market really needed something to address this specific need. And so, you know, we left the company and started up, call us. And here we are.

02:41 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to ask you now what I call kind of how you serve the clients that you work with. Take us through a little bit more on how you're doing that, how you're making an impact from there.

02:50 – Armon Petrossian

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, we're a vendor, a software vendor, so we basically have built a solution that makes what we would say is the largest bottleneck in analytics today as efficient and scalable as possible. And what that bottleneck is is taking data in its raw format when it's been landed in a cloud database platform and actually transforming it to the point where it's consumable by people in the business, trying to drive insight out of that data. That whole process is largely called transforming data. And we aim to help and empower data engineers, data warehouse developers, or data architects to transform data as efficiently, quickly, and in a scalable fashion as possible.

03:37- Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So what would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? And this could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

03:47 – Armon Petrossian

Okay, I'm going to stick to the business, you know, instead of just bragging here. So I would say the thing that's most special about our business specifically is largely around the people at the company. People in the culture are the most unique differentiator I would say we have. And that kind of blends into the unique expertise and experiences we've had where we've seen problems in the analytics space that pretty much nobody else has ever encountered at the amount of times and repetition that we have in our history and in our DNA.

At the same time, having a strong company culture is something that allows us to not only recruit and bring on world-class talent but actually retain them and keep them at this company. And so those would be the two things that I always focus on as a leader.

04:38- Gresham Harkless

Yeah, and I think that's so important, especially from a cultural standpoint. But I think obviously you touched on this a little bit and just the type of work that you do to be able to attract clients, and not clients and probably customers as well too, but also team members, is so important to make sure that you do have that rock-solid culture in place where people want to go, they want to work with, they want to support.

04:58 – Armon Petrossian

Exactly.

04:59 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

05:12 – Armon Petrossian

Okay. So there would be two things that come to mind immediately. The first one is I do love the Calm meditation app. So all the employees at Coalesce, the first thing they get, they'll get access to calm. And I meditate every morning. Kind of helps keep me sane. We've got so much chaos day to day through life, personal life, business, everything. The other thing that is something I did even previous to this role is I only eat one meal a day on pretty much every day of the week, weekends. I definitely blur the lines, but that happened when I was traveling so much, and in my previous role, it's hard to kind of stay in shape and you're going outside, it's like nice dinners, drinking and it gets out of hand really quickly.

So kind of practiced intermittent fasting for quite some time. What started as skipping breakfast and only doing lunch and dinner shortly became skipping lunch too. And just kind of powering through the day with a cup of coffee and kind of helps get me to keep me in my zone. I don't get too heavy or lethargic throughout the day when I'm working and at the same time, I can still enjoy the foods that I like in the evenings and have a good time and not feel so guilty about having a couple of drinks or a couple of glasses of wine while I'm out with people that we work with or customers in the more social lifestyle.

06:34 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. Of course, you know, meditation is such a big thing and I think anytime I always say, like a lot of times when you're a leader or founder or CEO, you know, entrepreneur, business or whatever title you might give you. Also, your part-time job is like a firefighter because you're always putting out things that are happening and trying to fix things and you know, things like that.

So I love that meditation. How that again is part of the culture is that it's embedded in every person, every person that's on the team as well. But I'm so interested in this eating once-a-day thing. What do you feel like? Does that give you feel like it gives you more energy because you don't have to worry about, oh, is this food going to be too heavy or too light? So I have to worry about that. Does it end up really allowing you to focus a lot more?

07:14 – Armon Petrossian

Yeah, definitely. For some reason I feel, or at least I felt as I practice intermittent fasting more and more that I actually have more energy throughout the day and after A meal, especially a big meal. I get really heavy, lethargic, tired. And so it's just become part of my lifestyle at this point where I will procrastinate eating and just kind of stay in the zone and have a much easier time doing so, keeping focused up until, you know, 5 pm or 6 pm when I go and have a big dinner.

And you know, I'm a big fan of different types of food, love pasta, burgers, you know, everything you can think of. And if you, if you're eating that type of food all the time while you're on the road, you're not, you know, you're not able to get your three or four workouts in every day. It gets, gets pretty tough. It gets pretty tough on the body's health as well. So yeah, it's just become kind of my, my lifestyle hack, I would say.

08:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. As somebody who definitely loves, you know, pasta and breads and carbs and all those things and you try to do a lot of that stuff in the middle of the day, your day doesn't go quite as well. So I definitely can understand that.

08:22 – Armon Petrossian

Yeah, yeah. Puts you straight into a coma for a nap right around lunchtime.

08:26 – Gresham Harkless

Exactly.

08:27 – Armon Petrossian

I try to avoid those, try to avoid those these days.

08:31 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Lunchtime becomes nap time and you know, Brandon and company, you don't have as much time for that. So I love it. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

08:51 – Armon Petrossian

Yeah. So if I could hop in a time machine, and tell my younger business self something, I would suggest, and I would suggest this to everybody as well, who has ambitions to be a CEO or an entrepreneur, which is to figure out how to achieve financial independence as quickly as possible. It is such a big factor in being an entrepreneur because it's perceived as such a big risk where you go and start your own business and you have to be responsible for the finances of that company.

The last thing you want to be thinking about is about the finances for yourself as well. And so doing that as quickly and as soon as possible, if that's your ambition, is going to be the best possible thing you can do to put yourself in the position to be successful and also be a lot less stressed out when you're running that business one day. And so that was something that I personally did and I'm so glad I did.

And there are two ways you can go about it, really. You know, you can live a less extravagant lifestyle and just kind of, you know, kind of live that college dorm type lifestyle or you know, find ways and make investments that you can as quickly as you possibly can. So that way you can, you can support yourself when you do end up pursuing that dream or that vision as a business or you do both, right, Just depends on what you need, you know, know yourself, know what you're going to need to make the right fish, right decisions and have the most stability in your lifestyle prior to pursuing that. And things will be so much easier and something that is a very hard thing. So that'd be one piece of advice I would give. And then of course, just never give up.

10:30 – Gresham Harkless

I love that. And you know, the saying never give up or rest if you must, but just don't quit is something that, you know, you kind of always hear a lot. But I love that piece and I love how you kind of started it out because I think when you look at business, a lot of people don't realize that. I think the really great and special entrepreneurs that really are able to succeed and to create and do all those things, they really are looking at risk and they're trying to kind of minimize the amount of risk that they take.

So when you talked about that, you know, making sure your personal debt, finances, those things are in place, what that allows you to do is really to spend more time, more energy, all those things that we have finite, you know, resources that we can expend to on the thing that's really helping to solve that problem. When you're worried about, hey, am I going to be able to, you know, pay down this debt? And also I want to build this creative thing that splits up your energy and your resources towards those things. So I think that's such a misconception about minimizing that risk. And that's a great step to be able to make that happen.

11:25 – Armon Petrossian

Definitely. And it really helps align yourself with what's best for the business too. And I think that having that security, having that financial independence, it allows you to make better decisions as well. Whether that's pursuing the right path for the business for a long-term vision or not getting acquired early because you don't necessarily need the capital, you've got your lifestyle set and you feel comfortable where you're at. It just becomes such a big element of having a successful business in the first place is having a successful individual life and personal financial life.

12:03 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, Absolutely. And often when you find out that success begets success. So when you have that, as you said, individually, you have that financial success, you start to have that Midas touch, so to speak, and you're able to kind of go on to the next thing and the thing after that, and the thing after that.

12:18 – Armon Petrossian

Right.

12:19 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah.

12:19 – Armon Petrossian

And you mature as an individual through that process. You get more comfortable with everything, and it's really just going to lend to being a great leader for an organization and managing the business properly as well.

12:31 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And so I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote, unquote, CEOs on the show. So, Armand, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:42 – Armon Petrossian

You know, the title itself means very little, to be honest. At the end of the day, as a CEO, you're really responsible for driving the direction of the business and having clarity amongst you and your team, that family around what direction you're going in, as much clarity as possible, what the mission is, what the deliverables are, what your customer needs, those items.

You're really driving that as much as possible and having as clear of a vision as possible in every aspect. The other most interesting piece, too, that things often forgotten is as a CEO, you are basically the Chief Culture Officer too, you're responsible for driving the company culture and maintaining it as you grow. And so those two things would be the pieces that come to mind as to what it means to me.

13:32 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love each of those aspects, especially the driving direction, because I think as we talked about before, it's not just driving direction. Just to drive is a driver with that clarity. And a lot of times you want to get rid of those things that aren't going to allow you to reach that mission. We talked about personal finances, but there are so many other things that can pop up that can distract you and distract the team from that mission at hand.

So it's so important to do that. And of course, you know, understanding that what you build in the culture that you have and the, I guess the beat to where everybody's kind of dancing or marching to is what will determine that success. So if you try to do one without the other, then you're kind of setting yourself up for or, you know, failure. But if you're able to combine both of those, you have a really strong mission with a really strong culture, then you can do some phenomenal things.

14:19 – Armon Petrossian

Absolutely.

14:21 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Armand, truly appreciate that, and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people get ahold of you and find out all the awesome things you're working on.

14:36 – Armon Petrossian

Yeah, you know, you can always reach me, find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest way if you shoot me a connection invite. I try to be good about responding to people, especially, you know, people who are coming in inbound with different requests. Or find me in my email armoncoalesce.io it's pretty simple. Feel free to reach out and that's all.

15:00 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, to make it even easier and simpler, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes too, so that everybody can follow up with you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on, but truly appreciate you for the work that you do and being able to kind of, you know, be a trailblazer in everything that you're doing.

And you, you know, I think so many times we forget about like how important the I is in the organization, how the more we're in line we can help support our organization and really tackle some serious issues and problems and everything from there. So thank you so much for doing that and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:30 – Armon Petrossian

Awesome. Thanks, Gresh.

15:31 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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