About

I am currently CEO and Co-Founder at Clearfeed. I spent the early part of my career working in storage/file/database systems at various firms (Oracle/Netapp/Yahoo and finally Facebook) and unnamed startup ventures. At Facebook, I spent a lot of time on Hadoop and Hive and then later co-founded Qubole where I wore the CTO hat for many years and ran Engineering, Operations and later Product as well. YourStory ran a hagiography on me a few years back that captures more details of my time on Earth so far!

Aside from my regular job, I often advise young startups on strategy and fund-raising. DMs on this topic are welcome from fellow entrepreneurs. You can find me on LinkedIn, @jsensarma (Twitter), Quora or message me directly at jsensarma on gmail. I love looking at the world through a lens. You can check out some snaps on the Photography tab or follow me on 500px where I tend to post occasionally.

Selected Writings

Most of my writing these days is on Twitter – follow me @jsensarma. Some of the better threads:

• On Corporate Decay – also written as a blog here: Ball Bearing Theory of Corporate Decay.
• On a mental model of society – Geniuses, Normies and Grifters.
• How Money is created and its implications.
• On Emigration and Wealth.
• On Free Trade and Protectionism.
• On Buses – one of my favorite topics (unfortunately).
• The Architecture of Corruption in Bangalore

Some of the blogs on this site became more popular than I anticipated:

• How the JEE made me : Reminiscences on getting into IIT. A good handful of people joined Qubole after reading this and I continue to run into people who came to know of me via this post.
• The post above led me to meet Rajiv Dandotiya – whose life story I then helped to capture. This story went viral and is widely copied on the web.
• A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s Dynamo DB – this and this started some flame wars on the net. Probably not the wisest thing to do – but I was young!

My early Quora posts also continue to attract some traffic:

• Why doesn’t India produce a Google/Facebook etc.: The answer desperately needs an update – things have changed a lot now – but it did capture the state of the world back in 2012
• Story of how we built Hive at Facebook: how a project to solve usability issues around Hadoop ended up being one of the most popular Data Warehouses in the world.

Of late, I have been posting articles on LinkedIn Pulse:

• Be Paranoid, Be Water: thoughts on surviving in a competitive landscape. Captures some of my core management philosophies (but there’s a ton more to write on this topic)
• The Business of Open-Source: How the attempt to create monopolies via Open-Source is causing friction in Tech-land and creating a trap for customers.

Politics is a hard topic to avoid. Some scattered writings:

• India – waiting for the godman of it’s destiny: posted on Facebook Notes (a product that FB seems to want to kill). After all these years – it still rings true and eerily prophetic for its time.
• A couple of answers on Quora cracking how much effort the Modi Govt. put (or didn’t!) into Solar infrastructure and Bogibeel bridge