WeAreDelphix: Meet Alexandros Mathopoulos

What do you do at Delphix and what inspired you to join the company?

I first learned about Delphix in the only database class offered at my university, where my professor at the time was giving a presentation on the most innovative technology companies in Silicon Valley. At the time, I was a junior studying business, and I kept a document of hundreds of companies I was interested in as I began my search for a summer internship.

While my interest was in gaining experience with the product management team, there was no opening so I decided to take an internship with marketing. I spent nearly a year working on amplifying our marketing activities through social media, paid advertising, and blogging.

Fast forward, after a few long conversations with Jason Grauel, our incredible product leader (and the best manager anybody could ask for), I landed a full-time position with the PM team.

You can ask me anything about…?

Enterprise data privacy and security trends. Having been at Delphix for almost 4 years now, I’ve spent and continue to focus a lot of time thinking about the data privacy and security market. From my perspective, there are two major aspects to consider in terms of how organizations manage and use data. The first is the critical role data plays in software development and testing. The companies who are innovating the fastest and building the best solutions for their users are not only using data for typical testing but also leveraging it in new ways, such as machine learning and deep learning.

The other aspect has to do with the growing importance of data privacy among users, businesses, and government. Data privacy is no longer an option, it’s an obligation. We’ve witnessed this through the ongoing news headlines of large data breaches, including Equifax and most recently Capital One, as well as new privacy laws taking shape worldwide, such as the CCPA and GDPR.

As a result, enterprise leaders continue to wrestle with how to drive the balance between security and innovation today, and that’s where a DataOps solution, like Delphix, comes in to help companies leverage data in a smart way to achieve both.

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on at Delphix?

Forming the Product Leadership Teams at Delphix. A little over a year, we were reflecting on how to make better and more informed decisions about what to build, when we build, and how to take our product to market. The most important observation we made was that the best decisions were brought to life when a key decision-maker did his or her due diligence of getting the opinions and the right data points from a variety of expert sources. Sounds obvious, right?

It’s much harder said than done, especially in the fast-changing environment of a startup. As a result, we decided to build a structure that forces decisions to be made in this way, engendering the Product Leadership Teams. These teams are essentially made up of a Product Manager and three to four subject matter experts from various teams across the organization, including support, sales, marketing, and engineering. Together, they’re responsible for driving the strategy, plans and priority around a particular product. It has been a year since we established these teams, and there’s been a ton of growth!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

This might sound cliche, but the best advice I’ve ever received comes from a very old interview from Steve Jobs: “Everything that you look around you as life was made up by people no smarter than you..and you can change it/influence it.”

This simple observation that Jobs made has been at the core of how I go about my day-to-day life since I was a teenager. No matter what the world looks like today, you have the power to influence and shape the world around you with hard work.

What song instantly puts you in a good mood?

“Twist and Shout” by The Beatles.

What drives you every day?

There are two things that drive me every single day. The first is my passion for solving really hard problems, which I believe could, in turn, have a positive impact on the world, my friends, and my family. I find it particularly exciting to solve challenges in the software industry, which is why I’m in the business I’m in.

The second thing has to do with making the most of every opportunity I’m given. I was born to immigrant parents who came to the U.S. to provide me and my brother a better education and the best opportunities we could ever have. My parents sacrificed so much to come here, leaving their families in Cyprus to start a business and raise me and my brother to be the best that we can be. That’s why I spend every day making sure I do the best that I can in every situation and circumstance I’m in.