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In this week’s edition: Astronomer’s new CEO changes the subject from what the kiss cam caught to (drumroll please) data orchestration. Also, a look back at how open source conquered the suits, and whether tech platforms can unite us as well as they drove us apart. |
The most entertaining thing that has ever happened at a Coldplay concert turned out to be weirdly rhapsodic for the company it supposedly humiliated. But it still makes the new CEO cringe. |
The only people from Astronomer attending the Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on July 16 were CEO Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot. They were swaying in mid-hug when the roving kiss cam, a staple at the band’s performances, zeroed in on them. You have probably seen the clip of what happened next. The two of them scrambled like kids caught raiding a cookie jar. Even Coldplay’s anodyne frontman Chris Martin couldn’t ignore their response. “They’re either having an affair, or they’re just very shy,” he remarked. The CEO and his subordinate are no longer with the company. Astronomer, a billion-dollar startup you’d likely never heard of until last month, will never be the same.
“We found out the way the rest of the world found out,” says Pete DeJoy, who cofounded the company and took over as chief executive when Byron left. He’s speaking to me from Astronomer’s new headquarters in the Flatiron district of New York City. Until our conversation, his main public statement following the concert had been a LinkedIn post thanking his employees for their resilience and conspicuously omitting any mention of why a “surreal” spotlight was suddenly trained on the company. DeJoy, a self-described nerd, can still hardly believe what happened last month. But don’t be fooled. The kiss-cam incident created a rare opportunity to call attention to the company’s accomplishments, and show off a bit of corporate savvy in how to handle the situation. The most entertaining thing that has ever happened at a Coldplay concert turned out to be weirdly rhapsodic for the company it supposedly humiliated. (Though maybe not so much for Byron and Cabot.) But it still makes DeJoy cringe.
That’s why, in our extensive conversation, DeJoy made a point of distancing himself from the events at Gillette Stadium. He managed to twist every question about the presumably sizzling goings-on in the corporate suite into a tribute to the heads-down, stick-to-business ethos of the firm’s 300 workers. |
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DeJoy insists that within the company, there was no inkling of any hanky-panky in the C-suite. Still, I wonder, could the company have been in any way lax in allowing its frisky executives to shatter the bounds? “Look, we’re reviewing all of our policies,” he tells me. “It's really important to me that we make sure that we prohibit relationships between employees that create real or perceived conflicts of interest.” So there’s an outside investigation? “I’m just going to say all of our workplace policies are being reviewed no matter what. It's important to get this one right.” He won’t say whether the “review” entails Astronomer hiring an outside firm to investigate the scandal. Nor did he answer my question about whether Byron got a severance package upon his untimely departure.
I asked him directly: Is DeJoy pissed at his former boss for embarrassing the company? “No, no, I don’t think I can say I am,” he insists. “People make mistakes. We really just want to continue focusing on what matters here, which is our customers and our business.” (See what I mean about messaging?) I ask when he last spoke to Byron. “A long time ago,” he says. “Before the event.” Wait, you haven’t talked to him since the Jumbotron? “That’s correct,” he says. Now that’s cold play.
On the other hand, Astronomer’s outsourced response to the incident will go into the marketing hall of fame. While employees were working overtime to assure customers that the kiss-cam drama wouldn't impact the company’s services, its executives hired Ryan Reynolds’ cheeky media firm Maximum Effort. The result was a 60-second ad with Gwyneth Paltrow (Martin’s ex), who displayed Oscar-level deadpan when she promised the internet she’d answer their questions about the incident. The joke was that her responses to queries about the concert were bromides about the firm’s geeky business. (Kind of like my interview with DeJoy.) Responding to “OMG! What the actual f!” she said. “Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.” The absurdity of Paltrow, who is more often associated with organic skin-care products and jade eggs, talking about “data workflow automation” was priceless. It successfully shifted the narrative, at least a bit, to a question that many people were suddenly asking: What the actual f is Astronomer?
DeJoy, who says he never got to meet his famous (albeit temporary) spokesperson, is more than happy to answer the question. The company was started by a small group of techies in Cincinnati in 2017. The original idea involved data tracking. That’s sort of why they named their firm Astronomer. “Astronomers were the first data engineers, because they were making sense of how the world worked by intuiting how the stars were moving in the night sky,” says DeJoy. “That's very much the job of a data engineer these days, right?” If you say so!
The original plan was scrapped a year later for another opportunity: building a commercial operation around an open source app called Apache Airflow, which was originally invented in 2014 by an Airbnb engineer named Maxime Beauchemin and open-sourced a year later. The app is like an automated to-do list, organizing and directing data to show up at exactly the right time and place. Astronomer saw a business opportunity in supporting the software, much in the way that Red Hat once acted as a for-profit middleman between Linux and corporate customers. The company worked closely with Beauchemin to develop its own products, including a “data orchestration” app called Astro that runs on top of Airflow.
“We went through just about everything that you can go through as a startup, including the collapse of a major bank and scaling the company and raising capital during a global pandemic,” says DeJoy. (The bank he’s referring to is Silicon Valley Bank, which experienced a bank run in 2023, resulting in Astronomer’s assets being temporarily unavailable.)
In 2019, Astronomer’s cofounder and CEO Ry Walker felt that the company needed a more experienced leader. That was Byron. “That decision turned out very well for the company, and me personally—I don’t regret it at all,” Walker said on X post-Coldplay. Byron seems to have done his job well, if you disregard human relations. The company’s 800-plus customers now include Sweetgreen, Adobe, Northern Trust, and T. Rowe Price. DeJoy, a baseball fan, is particularly proud of Astronomer’s work with the Texas Rangers baseball club. “They do a bunch of game analytics with our product, and that contributed to them winning the World Series in 2023,” he claims. |
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Life goes on. DeJoy says that in the age of generative AI, Astronomer’s services are more important than ever before. “Customers need access to really strong, structured data,” he says, shifting into sales mode. “When you ask the model something, it needs to do retrieval against some subset of information. Our product is often the thing delivering that context, so that when models are interfacing with datasets, they are not producing responses that are hallucinated or inaccurate in some way.”
The future of Astronomer seems even brighter than it was before its former CEO became internet famous. According to DeJoy, Astronomer has won new customers due to its recent fame. DeJoy’s future looks shiny too. The board is searching for a new CEO, and while DeJoy won’t confirm that he’s in the running, he doesn’t deny it. In his LinkedIn post, he boasted that his company is now “a household name.” So I ask him: Was that wandering kiss cam at the Coldplay concert the best thing that ever happened to Astronomer?
There’s a pause before he answers. “I definitely don’t want to say that,” he says. “This was a very serious event for us and our employees, and one that we certainly didn’t take lightly.”
That prevarication is at odds with the message he so relentlessly tried to deliver during our conversation—that Astronomer has not only recovered from potential disaster but has renewed momentum and some feel-good fame. He doesn’t even duck the question when I ask him about a future IPO, acknowledging that would be nice, though it’s not the ultimate goal. “The end goal for me is building something that actually can last a very, very long time and leave a legacy,” he says. Maybe that legacy will be much more than a viral moment. But when the history of Astronomer is written, those few seconds at a Coldplay concert may mark how a quietly successful data company reached much loftier heights. Though it’s hard to imagine how fledgling startups might emulate that trick—or want to. |
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Astronomer’s lucrative embrace of Apache Airflow is indicative of the ubiquity and value of open source software. That wasn’t yet the case when I wrote about the nascent movement in Newsweek in 1999—but you could clearly see it coming.
To a surprising extent, people are already using [open-source] and have been for years. Free software, with an explicit invitation to tinker with and improve its openly circulated source code was the rule in the early days of computing, before Bill Gates figured out how to make megabucks from the proprietary alternative—regarding code as the crown jewels, and calling unauthorized users thieves. Then came the Internet, built on open standards and an infrastructure owned by no one. Unasked, people created open-source programs like Sendmail, the dominant means of sending messages on the Net. In addition, the leading software used in Web-site servers is Apache, a free system where development is guided by a board of wizards apparently motivated more by altruism than a need for a warehouse full of Porsches. And last year Netscape created an open-source browser. “When people ask me whether open source is credible,” says publisher and software maker Tim O’Reilly, “I ask, ‘Do you believe in the Internet?’”
Open source’s poster child is Linux (rhymes with cynics). It’s the kernel (the central component) of an operating system, the big enchilada of programming. Its creator was Linus Torvalds, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, who simply wanted something on his home computer that worked like the complicated UNIX system at his school. Still living with his parents, he hacked a version he wanted to show to friends. He posted it on the Internet. In a year, his user base grew from five to a hundred. Eventually, Torvalds became captain of a growing team of unpaid developers that he now estimates at more than a thousand strong. He allows companies like Red Hat and Caldera to sell copies of the software, as long as they don’t restrict users from copying it or tinkering with it.
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Damien asks, “It is possible to develop a digital platform or technology that has the power to unite a divided populace, or does human nature only have the ability to feed current technological paradigms?”
Wow, Damien, that’s a great question. There have been many attempts to build such platforms. One that comes to mind is Narwhal, funded by the Emerson Collective and cofounded by some WIRED veterans. Like just about all those noble efforts, it failed. Probably for the same reason that periodically people launch underperforming journalistic efforts to emphasize good news. Human nature seems to prefer arguments and sensations. Supercharged by the algorithms of discord that social media favors, the divisive stuff always seems to prevail.
But hold on—human nature is not defined by this impulse alone. Just look at what happens in a crisis; people pull together. Technology can aid and nurture that part of humanity too. Even on Meta, there still exist communities where people share common problems and forge positive relationships. It makes it harder, of course, when the companies that make these products do very little to address how technology can amplify the worst aspects of humanity.
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“I am your voice.”
—Donald Trump on the launch of the White House TikTok account. The Trump administration has flouted the law by not enforcing the bill passed by Congress to shut down the service.
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