There are many challenges in building a new company. Possibly the greatest is recruiting a talented, energetic, and world-class team. Smart people are in high demand in Silicon Valley and, let’s face it, we’re in another boom in the tech world. I know this because it takes 45 minutes to go 10 miles on the 101 and because smart people are harder to find than they ever have been. We’ve got a few silver bullets though, and we just added another one. We had wrapped our Series A, and were done thinking about financing for now. But when Mike Speiser …

I’m very excited to share that Platfora has closed a Series A of $5.7 million, with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as the lead investor. We’ve had a superb experience working with the whole team at a16z, and we are thrilled that Scott Weiss is joining our board.We also received a strategic investment from In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And we are fortunate to have a number of prominent angels and seed investors participating in the round. Read more from Scott here about …

The Hope. That Hadoop is the silver bullet that is going to save us from a relentless explosion of data. Data volumes are increasing 100x over the next 5 years, and Hadoop is THE answer to scalably storing and harnessing that data. Forget about relational databases — Hadoop has it all. The Reality. That one scratch below the surface and you realize that this whole thing is at a much earlier stage than most people appreciate. We’re still living the first baby steps — vendors battling to provide the best low-level Hadoop plumbing. Once you get the cluster up and …