Former SAS No. 2 leads SingleStore’s growing tech presence in downtown Raleigh
For many people, the pandemic, and the uncertainty it caused, led to a moment of reflection.
When you are limited in what you can do, it can cause you to dwell on what you want to do.
That includes Oliver Schabenberger, who served as both chief technology officer and chief operating officer at Cary analytics giant, SAS Institute.
Schabenberger was long considered the heir apparent to Jim Goodnight, the 78-year-old billionaire who founded the company. But in the middle of the pandemic, he decided to leave the path to the top of SAS for a company just a fraction of its size.
“The pandemic has its way of making you think about your priorities and your goals,” Schabenberger, 56, told The News & Observer over Zoom.
“It was time for a change, and, you know, given where I am in my career and in my life, I have a certain runway left in my professional life,” he added. “I’m going for the fun factor (and) working on incredible technology.”
He was far from the only person making a change in the past few months. The number of people voluntarily leaving their jobs hit a record of 4 million people in April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The technology that caught Schabenberger’s eye was the database management software of SingleStore, a San Francisco-based company that has raised $238 million from investors — and, after luring Schabenberger, has a growing presence in Raleigh.
Last week, SingleStore, formerly known as MemSQL, opened its new office in the Warehouse District, which is now the occasional home to its 15 employees, all of whom have the option to work remotely.
Schabenberger, whose new title is chief innovation officer, said the company has plans to hire around 50 employees in the area.
The Raleigh office will serve as the company’s innovation hub, employing software engineers who are searching for new products and ideas for SingleStore to adopt.
Making the most of data
SingleStore’s software helps companies maintain databases that run quickly. Most artificial intelligence or machine learning programs require access to huge amounts of data to make decisions or insights. But if the programs can’t access the data quickly, applications can become unusable.
One of the company’s biggest partners is SAS, which is how Schabenberger became familiar with the company.
Before joining SingleStore, Schabenberger had been with SAS for 19 years, joining the company in 2002 after teaching at Virginia Tech.
Over time, he continued to rise within SAS, eventually landing his dual c-suite role of CTO and COO. In 2019, Goodnight, who has led SAS since it started in 1976, told Bloomberg that he was grooming Schabenberger to lead the company, while revealing no plans of retiring.
But, as Schabenberger climbed the ranks at SAS, it took him farther away from his original love.
“I really love coding. I love programming. I love building technology,” he said. “Over time, my responsibilities at SAS changed. ... If I think back when I was happiest, after I ended up coding myself, was working with innovative teams (and) small technology teams.
“I never joined SAS with the goal to become a c-suite executive,” he added. “I want to do work with technology and that’s what I get to do again.”
Start-up culture
SingleStore is in a much different phase than SAS. The company only has 230 employees, compared to SAS’s nearly 13,000. SingleStore still has a “startup culture” and a lot of potential for growth, Schabenberger said.
“This is a scale-up company,” he said.
SingleStore will join an increasingly competitive landscape for engineering talent in the Triangle, especially as Google and Apple begin to slowly fill out their future offices here.
But it has always been competitive for engineering talent, Schabenberger said. The arrival of Apple and Google, he said, will necessitate the migration of more talent to the area — or a willingness to consider remote workers. Every conversation with potential workers, he noted, starts with what kind of flexibility the company offers.
Google said it will eventually have 1,000 workers in Durham while Apple plans to establish a campus in RTP where it will create at least 3,000 jobs.
“I believe that there’s going to be talent influx into this area from other regions,” he said. “I don’t know how, otherwise, Google and Apple staff the numbers that they put on the board.”
“For us, finding 50 is most achievable,” he added. “We had an open house last week, and it was busy.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/nRALewsinnovate
This story was originally published June 29, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
