Our Company

ORIGIN STORY

The idea for MotherDuck came after Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck co-founder and chief duck-herder, saw DuckDB in action and thought, “Wow, this is amazing! someone should really build a serverless version.” At Google, Jordan had helped take one query engine, Dremel, and turn it into BigQuery, a serverless cloud service. So the next thing to occur to him was, “Hmm, if someone is going to do it, why not me?” At the very least, it seemed like it would make a fun side project.

Everyone asks about the name. Lloyd Tabb, the founder of Looker, has the distinction of naming MotherDuck. “Trust me, it is a good name,” he said. “And the domain name is available.” On both counts, he was right. Lloyd has the distinction of convincing Jordan that this was more than a side project, and he made two crucial introductions. The first was to Tomasz Tunguz, who would lead the seed investment in MotherDuck. The other was to Duck DB’s creators, Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt.

Hannes and Mark, who founded DuckDB Labs to focus on the core technology and build the world’s best analytics database, were looking for partners who would build a commercial cloud offering. When Jordan approached them about working together, it just clicked; Jordan had found a database that was perfect for the service he wanted to build backed by extraordinary engineers, and Hannes and Mark had found someone experienced at building successful database products in the cloud. They decided to work together, and DuckDB labs would become a co-founder of the new endeavor.

The next step was to build out the starting team. First to join was Tino Tereshko, also a veteran of Google BigQuery. Others soon followed until they had a full 11, which included extraordinary engineers and leaders from 11 different companies. Some had worked together before, some were just interested in DuckDB, all were looking for a new challenge.

The team met for the first time in Seattle the week of June 20, 2022, to figure out what to build and how. The code name for the product they came up with was “EasyQuery,” with the singular focus on making it easy to understand your data. One year later, the first part of this vision is finally ready, to help make querying just a little bit easier.