E182: The Rise of ClickHouse

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Oct 8, 2025

Yury Izrailevsky, co-founder of ClickHouse and former engineering leader at Google and Netflix, discusses the rapid rise of ClickHouse, an open-source OLAP database. He shares its origins at Yandex and highlights its unique columnar storage that optimizes performance and cost. Yury explains the shift to a managed cloud product and ClickHouse’s appeal in handling AI workloads. He also touches on building a remote-first culture and the company's successful integration strategy, making ClickHouse a favorite for companies like Tesla and Canva.

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INSIGHT

Designed To Be Easy To Adopt

ClickHouse prioritized ease-of-use from day one: a single binary, fast install, and broad integrations.
The project ships monthly releases, enabling rapid innovation and staying competitive.

ADVICE

Make Cloud First With Open Parity

Build a fully-managed cloud product and separate compute from storage to enable elasticity and lower TCO.
Keep open-source parity so customers can run the same queries outside your cloud to avoid lock-in concerns.

ADVICE

Ship Fast And Harden CI/CD

Ship an MVP cloud product quickly to collect customer feedback and iterate.
Build testing and CI/CD practices early to handle rapid open-source release cadence in your managed product.

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In the episode, we sat down with ClickHouse Co-Founder Yury Izrailevsky to unpack how one of the fastest open-source databases in the world became the analytics engine of choice for 2,000 customers including Harvey, Canva, HP, and Supabase. From its Yandex origins to powering AI observability, Yury shares how ClickHouse balances open-source roots, cloud innovation, and a remote-first culture moving at breakneck speed.

ClickHouse's Series C valued the company at $6.35B earlier this year, and just yesterday they announced an extension to that round, just months after it was raised.

In this episode, we dig into:

Origins & Founding Story
- ClickHouse began as an internal project at Yandex to power a Google Analytics–style platform, focused on performance and scale.
- Open-sourced in 2016 - rapid global adoption laid the foundation for ClickHouse the company.
- Yury first discovered ClickHouse while at Google; impressed by its speed, he later co-founded the company in 2021 alongside Aaron Katz (ex-Elastic) and the original creator Alexey Milovidov.
Why ClickHouse Stands Out
- Column-oriented, open source OLAP database designed for massive-scale analytical processing.
- Excels in performance, efficiency, and cost - ideal for large data volumes and real-time analytics (and now AI workloads).
- Architectural choices:
  - Columnar storage = better compression and faster execution.
  - Separation of compute and storage enables elasticity, scalability, and resilience in the cloud.
Open Source vs. Cloud
- Open-source version offers freedom and flexibility.
- Cloud product delivers much lower total cost of ownership and fully managed experience.
- Architectural parity between the two ensuring no vendor lock-in for customers.
- Customers can run the same queries on both; most stay with cloud due to simplicity and cost efficiency.
Use Cases & Ecosystem
- 4 main use cases:
  1. Real-time analytics
  2. Data Warehousing
  3. Observability
  4. AI / ML Workloads
Company Building & Culture
- Fully remote from day one.
- Prioritized experienced, self-sufficient engineers over early-career hires.
- Built and launched GA version in less than a year - insane pace of innovation.
Innovation & Community
- Monthly release cadence.
- Hundreds of integrations and connectors.
- Strong open-source and commercial community
Advice for Founders
- Focus on what matters most
- Hire mature, independent thinkers.
- Move fast but maintain quality; ClickHouse Cloud achieved production-grade quality in record time.