IAM1686 – Founder Offers Solution that can Transform Scalable Datas

Armon Petrossian Teaser 00:00

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.

Intro 00:22

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'll 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.

Gresham Harkless 00:49

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. And if you've been listening this year, we're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes. Under certain categories or topics that we think are gonna be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, this month is going to be about not forgetting about the human part of business.

Often we forget about the human part of life. We often forget about the human part of business. So look for self-care, hips, fitness, burnout, purpose, biz, and personal, personal branding, motivation, drive, success, understanding your why.

And of course, how important customer service is, but at the heart of it, it's all about remembering the human part of business. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I am CEO podcast.

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

Armon Petrossian 01:47

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

Gresham Harkless 01:50

Yeah, it's definitely awesome to have you on. And before we jumped 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.

And 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 WhereScape, a leading provider of data automation software.

At WhereScape, 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?

Armon Petrossian 02:19

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

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Gresham Harkless 02:21

Let's make it happen. He was born for this, so to kinda kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, and hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Armon Petrossian 02:30

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 WhereScape and really was exposed to 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, Fortune 1000 companies.

And we were selling a solution that had a pretty broad application, but 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, we left the company and started up Coalesce and here we are.

Gresham Harkless 03:23

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

Armon Petrossian 03:32

Yeah, definitely. So, we're 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 at helping and empowering data engineers, data warehouse developers or data architects to transform data as efficiently, quickly, and in a scalable fashion as possible.

Gresham Harkless 04:18

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 sets you apart and makes you unique?

Armon Petrossian 04:27

Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick to the business instead of just bragging here.

So, I would say that the thing that's most special about our business specifically is largely around the people at the company. People and the culture is 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 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 always focus on as a leader.

Gresham Harkless 05:15

Yeah. And I think that's so important, especially from like a culture 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.

It's so important to make sure that you do have that rock-solid culture in place where people wanna go, they wanna work with, they wanna support.

Armon Petrossian 05:33

Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 05:34

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?

Armon Petrossian 05:47

Yeah. 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 of the employees at Coalesce, the first thing they get, they'll get access to Calm, and I meditate every morning.

Helps keep me sane when you've got so much chaos day to day through life, personal life, business, everything. The other thing is something I did even previous to this role, I only eat one meal a day on pretty much every day of the week.

On weekends, I definitely blur the lines, but that happened when I was traveling so much and my previous role. It's hard to stay in shape and you're going out to these like nice dinners, drinking and it gets ahead of hand really quickly. So I practiced intermittent fasting for quite some time, and what started as skipping breakfast and only doing lunch and dinner shortly became skipping lunch too and just powering through the day with a cup of coffee.

Helps get me, and keeps 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 of, or a couple of glasses of wine while I'm out with people that we work with or customers in the more social lifestyle.

Gresham Harkless 07:04

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. Of course 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, entrepreneur or whatever title you might give you, your part-time job is like a firefighter because you're always putting out things that are happening and trying to fix things.

So I love that meditation and how that part of the culture is embedded, people, every person that's on the team as well too. But I'm so interested by this eating once a day thing, and so what do you feel like, does that give you, you feel like it gives you more energy because you don't have to worry about, oh, is this food gonna be too heavy or too light? So I have to worry about that. It ends up really allowing you to focus a lot more.

Armon Petrossian 07:42

Yeah, definitely. For some reason, I feel, or at least I've 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, and tired. And so it's just become part of my lifestyle at this point where I will procrastinate eating and just stay in the zone and have a much easier time doing so and keeping focused up until, 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM when I go and have big dinner.

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

Gresham Harkless 08:30

Yeah. As somebody who definitely loves pasta and bread 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.

Armon Petrossian 08:42

Yeah. Yeah. Puts you straight in a coma for a nap. Right around lunchtime, so.

Gresham Harkless 08:46

Exactly.

Armon Petrossian 08:47

I try to avoid those these days.

Gresham Harkless 08:50

Yeah, absolutely. Lunchtime becomes naptime and running a 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 a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Armon Petrossian 09:08

Yeah, so if I could hop in a time machine, and tell my younger business self something I would suggest this to everybody as well, who has ambitions to be CEO or an entrepreneur, which is 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 wanna 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 gonna 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. 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 can live a less extravagant lifestyle and just live that college dorm-type lifestyle or find ways and make investments that you can as quickly as you possibly can so that way you can support yourself when you do end up pursuing that dream or that vision as a business. Or you do both, right? Depending on what you need, know yourself, know what you're gonna need to make the 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'd give and then of course, just never give up.

Gresham Harkless 10:39

I love that. And the saying never give up or rest if you must, but just don't quit is something that you always hear a lot, but I love that piece and I love how you 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, create and do all those things, they really are looking at risk and they're trying to minimize the amount of risks that they take. So when you talked about that, 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, resources that we can expend to on the thing that's really helping to solve that problem.

When you're worrying about, ‘Hey, am I gonna be able to pay down this debt? And also I wanna build this creative thing, that splits up your energy and your resources towards those things. So I think such a misconception about minimizing that risk and that's a great step to be able to make that happen.

Armon Petrossian 11:28

Definitely. And it really helps align yourself with what's best for the business too. I think that having that security, having that financial independence 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 is 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, having a successful individual life and personal financial life.

Gresham Harkless 12:05

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 mightest touch, so to speak, and you're able to go on to the next thing and the thing after that, and then thing after that.

Armon Petrossian 12:19

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

Gresham Harkless 12:30

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And so, I wanted, to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is a definition of what it means to be a CEO.

We're hoping to have different quote and quote, CEOs on this show. So Armon, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Armon Petrossian 12:40

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. You're really driving that as much as possible and have as clear of a vision as possible in every aspect.

The other most interesting piece too, that's often forgotten is as a CEO, you 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.

Gresham Harkless 13:27

Nice. I love, each of those aspects, especially, the driving direction. Cause I think as we talked about before, it's not just driving direction just to drive as a driver with that clarity.

And a lot of times you want to get rid of those things that aren't gonna allow you to reach that mission. And we talked about the personal finances, but there are so many other things that can pop up that can distract yourself and distract the team from that mission at hand. So it's so important to do that.

And of course, understanding that what you build in the culture that you have and the beat to which everybody's dancing or marching to is what will determine that success. So if you try to do one without the other, then you're setting yourself up for 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.

Armon Petrossian 14:11

Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 14:13

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Armon, 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, just 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 about all the awesome things you're working on.

Armon Petrossian 14:28

Yeah. 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, people that are coming inbound with a different request or find me on my email, armon@coalesce.io. It's pretty simple. Feel free to reach out. And that's all.

Gresham Harkless 14:45

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, to make it even easier and simpler, we're gonna have the links and information, 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 be a trailblazer and everything that you're doing.

And 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.

Armon Petrossian 15:14

Awesome. Thanks, Gresh.

Outro 15:15

Thank you for listening to the I am CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and 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 Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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