Dremio co-founder Jacques Nadeau has left the company

Dremio co-founder Jacques Nadeau has announced that he has left next generation data lake engine maker Dremio. The company announced its Series D funding round on January 6. Silicon Valley analysts dubbed the company as the first new Unicorn of 2021.

Neither Dremio nor Nadeau have issued a reason for Nadeau’s departure. Here is the note that the much-loved co-creator of Apache Arrow, Project Nessie and Dremio posted on Linkedin. Beyond that, you’ll find our interview with Nadeau last year.

Nadeau’s Linkedin post:

It’s bittersweet to share that I’ve moved on from Dremio. More than anything, I will miss the people. A great company cannot exist without great people and the people who’ve made up Dremio both past and present have been some of the most amazing that I’ve had a chance to work with. Three cheers to our Narwhal and the Gnarlies that made him matter!

5 minutes with Dremio co-founder Jacques Nadeau

Entrepreneurs set out to build companies for all sorts of reasons — to save the world, make money, be their own boss…, you name it. Jacques Nadeau co-founded Dremio for a very different reason. He wanted to solve a problem that he had watched data workers wrestle with over-and-over so that no one would ever have to struggle with it again.

Five years ago he and his business partner, Tomar Shiran, set out to shatter a 30-year-old paradigm that holds virtually every company back — end users need to rely on IT and wait (hours, days, weeks) for them to provide the data they need to solve their most pressing problems.

“I saw this frustration years earlier (1997). People who wanted to look at their data struggled,” says Nadeau.

But that’s not true anymore. At least if you use Dremio, according to Nadeau.

“Dremio makes data self-service for analysts and data scientists in the same way that AWS makes infrastructure self-service for developers,” is the company’s promise.

Making this possible wasn’t easy, but Dremio might not have happened if it was. “I like to solve hard problems,” says Nadeau. And in this case the solution took a few years and many talks with potential customers to…