Jad Naous is the CEO and Founder of Grepr. Prior to starting Grepr, Jad was the Chief Product Officer at Imply, the company behind the widely used real-time analytical database Apache Druid. Over the three years he was at Imply, Jad grew the engineering team from 12 engineers to a team of 90 across product, engineering, design, infosec, and IT. He played a pivotal role in shifting the company from a support and services business for the open-source towards a product-led company. With the release of the Polaris, the Database-as-a-Service offering, Jad helped reshape the company into a SaaS business, with Polaris becoming the fastest growing product in the company’s portfolio, processing Terabytes of mission-critical data a day for Imply’s customers.

Prior to Imply, Jad was an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most recognized Venture Capital firms in the world. There, Jad focused on infrastructure and data investments, developing a thesis around the importance of Operational Analytics and the rise of analytics and intelligence as a core building block for agile companies. Jad worked on diligence for tens of deals during that time, giving him a wide perspective on the startup strategies that work and those that don’t.

Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Jad was an architect at AppDynamics, the company that invented distributed tracing and made Application Performance Monitoring a cornerstone of observability. Jad started three of the six products the company still sells today and led numerous projects around migration to microservices, scalable data processing, and AI. Jad’s experience at AppDynamics was foundational in his decision to tackle observability once more.

Jad holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.