Aaron Katz

Co-founder of ClickHouse Inc.

Mentions

Appeared in

Discussed in

Key positions and views

ClickHouse is the superior and leading solution for real-time, customer-facing B2B SaaS analytics, with no strong alternatives.

The era of hyper-inflated valuation multiples for tech companies is over, and the market has settled into a 'new normal'.

A product-led growth (PLG) model is the optimal go-to-market strategy for infrastructure software, favoring it over traditional enterprise sales.

AI-assisted coding is rapidly becoming the standard in software development, predicting it will account for 80% of his company's code commits within six months.

Complete operational and personnel separation from Russia was a non-negotiable ethical and business requirement for founding ClickHouse Inc.

Podcast consensus on Katz

Points of consensus

▶Aaron Katz consistently frames ClickHouse as the market leader for real-time analytics, citing its adoption by prominent tech companies like Microsoft, Anthropic, Vercel, and Uber as key evidence of its dominance in this niche.Apr 2026

▶The founding and growth of ClickHouse Inc. were characterized by aggressive capital acquisition, including a historically large $50 million seed round followed by a $250 million round, fueling rapid expansion plans to double headcount within a year.Apr 2026

▶A foundational principle of ClickHouse Inc. was its complete operational separation from Russia, which necessitated the relocation of the core engineering team from Moscow to Amsterdam as a precondition for the company's formation.Apr 2026

▶Katz's go-to-market strategy for ClickHouse was explicitly modeled on Datadog's product-led growth approach, deliberately avoiding the enterprise sales-led model utilized by competitors like Snowflake.Apr 2026

Points of debate

▶Katz's assertion that ClickHouse is the definitive market leader in real-time analytics and that there is 'no strong alternative' for B2B SaaS applications is a strong competitive claim that would likely be disputed by rivals such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Elastic.Apr 2026

▶There is an internal tension between the company's financial strategy and developer preferences, highlighted by the significant resistance from ClickHouse's own developers when migrating away from the expensive Datadog service.Apr 2026

▶Katz's macroeconomic prediction that the high valuation multiples of previous years will not return establishes a 'new normal', a perspective that may not be universally shared among venture capitalists and founders who anticipate future market upswings.Apr 2026

▶While Katz positions ClickHouse as a competitor to Databricks, he also provides extensive, positive commentary on Databricks' re-accelerating growth and billion-dollar product lines, suggesting a complex relationship of competition mixed with market respect.Apr 2026

Key themes

▶Aggressive Fundraising and GrowthApr 2026

This theme covers the formation of ClickHouse Inc. with a massive $50 million seed round and a subsequent $250 million funding round. This capital fuels an aggressive growth strategy, including a plan to double the company's headcount from 500 to 1,000 within a year.

The scale of fundraising and hiring indicates a 'blitzscaling' strategy designed to capture the market lead in real-time analytics, signaling to investors that the company is prioritizing rapid market penetration over near-term profitability.

▶Strategic Market PositioningApr 2026

Katz carefully defines ClickHouse's competitive landscape, positioning it as the leader in real-time analytics against data warehouse giants like Snowflake and Databricks, and as a challenger in observability against Datadog and Elastic. The company's go-to-market strategy is explicitly modeled after Datadog's product-led growth.

By simultaneously carving out a specialized niche (real-time analytics) and competing in broader, established markets (data warehousing, observability), ClickHouse is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy to maximize its addressable market.

▶Geopolitical and Operational FoundationsApr 2026

A core aspect of the ClickHouse Inc. origin story is the non-negotiable condition of having no operational ties to Russia. This led to the relocation of the entire core engineering team from Moscow to Amsterdam, a foundational decision that shaped the company's structure and culture.

This geopolitical constraint, while operationally challenging, likely served as a strategic de-risking move that was crucial for securing Western venture capital and enterprise customers, turning a potential liability into a statement of corporate governance.

▶Product Expansion and AI IntegrationApr 2026

Katz details ClickHouse's evolution beyond its core database, including the development of a managed Postgres service and the acquisition of LibreChat for integration with AI models. He also highlights the heavy internal adoption of AI for coding, estimating 50% of current code commits are AI-assisted and predicting this will rise to 80%.

ClickHouse is leveraging its core technology to expand into adjacent platform services, while also using AI to accelerate its own development, suggesting a dual strategy of using AI as both a product feature and a core operational accelerator.

Source episodes

Sentiment over time

Not enough data for timeline

Changes over time

Pre-2021

The open-source ClickHouse database, originally developed at Yandex by Alexei Milavidov, gains significant traction and is adopted for observability workloads by major companies like Uber, eBay, and Disney.

August 2021

Aaron Katz co-founds ClickHouse Inc. with Alexei Milavidov and Yuri Izraelevsky, securing a $50 million seed round. A key condition is having no ties to Russia, leading to the relocation of the core engineering team from Moscow to Amsterdam.

Late 2021 / Early 2022

Following the seed round, the company raises an additional $250 million in a round co-led by Coatue and Altimeter to fuel its growth.

Early Company Stages

ClickHouse Inc. incurs significant operational costs, spending over a million dollars annually on Datadog, which at one point surpassed the company's total revenue.

March 2023

During the Silicon Valley Bank run, Katz reports that the company successfully wired out $100 million just 30 minutes before the bank's systems failed, narrowly avoiding having its funds frozen.

Present

Katz states the company has 500 employees, over 3,000 cloud customers, and plans to double its headcount within a year. The company is actively developing a managed Postgres service and integrating AI deeper into its products and development processes.

Suggested prompts

How does ClickHouse's product-led growth strategy, modeled on Datadog, position it against the enterprise-sales models of its primary data warehouse competitors like Snowflake? &nearr;What are the long-term strategic implications of ClickHouse expanding from its core analytics database into adjacent platform services like a managed Postgres offering and an integrated AI chat interface? &nearr;How does Aaron Katz's assertion of a 'new normal' for tech valuations square with ClickHouse's own history of raising massive funding rounds at what were likely high valuations? &nearr;Given the significant internal developer resistance to migrating off Datadog, what does this reveal about the cultural and productivity challenges of building an all-in-one data platform versus using best-of-breed tools? &nearr;

Key concepts

ClickHouse Inc. Founding 1 ep Fundraising and Valuation 1 ep Market Competition 1 ep Customer Adoption 1 ep Company Growth and Scaling 1 ep Product Strategy 1 ep AI Integration 1 ep Go-to-Market Strategy 1 ep Databricks Commentary 1 ep Observability Market 1 ep

Notable quotes

“In August of 2021, with a $50 million seed round, possibly the largest pre-seed round in the history of enterprise software, because I didn't have a pitch deck.”

Aaron Katz · Why Anthropic, Meta, and Tesla All Chose the Same Database | Aaron Katz, ClickHouse

“A condition of forming the company was that I had no ties to Russia. I couldn't have anybody in Russia. So I convinced Alexei and the team to move from Moscow to Amsterdam.”

Aaron Katz · Why Anthropic, Meta, and Tesla All Chose the Same Database | Aaron Katz, ClickHouse

“And so we wired 100 million, it cleared. 30 minutes later, SVB's banking system went down and people could not get their money out.”

Aaron Katz · Why Anthropic, Meta, and Tesla All Chose the Same Database | Aaron Katz, ClickHouse

“we're 500 employees today, we're going to end this year closer to 1,000. So we're going to double the size of the company in 12 months.”

Aaron Katz · Why Anthropic, Meta, and Tesla All Chose the Same Database | Aaron Katz, ClickHouse

Report last updated: Apr 21, 2026

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