Oliver Schabenberger is Chief Innovation Officer at SingleStore. He is a former academian and seasoned technology executive with more than 20 years global experience in data management, advanced analytics and AI. Oliver formerly served as COO and CTO of SAS, where he lead the design, development and go to-market-effort of massively scaleable analytic tools and solutions and helped organisations become more data driven. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, has co-authored three books, and earned Ph.D and M.S. degrees from Virginia Tech.

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Interview transcript

Hadley: [00:00:00 ] Welcome to the show. Oliver. It's an absolute honor to have you on. 

[00:00:04 ] Oliver: [00:00:04 ] Thank you, Hadley. I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to be on a curious life. And I'm curious what we're going to talk about in this podcast. 

[00:00:13 ] Hadley: [00:00:13 ] Well, as you know, like Peter pan shadow, we're going to go off and find the essence of Oliver today.

[00:00:20 ] Oliver: [00:00:20 ] I'm curious, curious what that essence is.

[00:00:23 ]Hadley: [00:00:23 ] Let's do it. So, you know, this is a show where we look for a window into the lives of our guests. What makes you tick and, and essentially to understand the essence of you and to understand that the trait of curiosity has impacted your life in Korea. So how we do that is we imagine that we sitting around a campfire sharing stories about our life and tag.

[00:00:44 ] You all right. So where we'll start is where you were born, whether you had siblings, you know, what were your parents like? What was your early life like? And we'll take that all the way through to today and onto tomorrow. But before we do that, the question that I ask all my guests is what does curiosity mean?

[00:01:00 ] Well, I think curiosity is something in eight and all humans to different degrees. To me, it's a quality that relates to exploration, uh, inquisition and learning, you know, the drive to find out about something it's really the pursuit of knowledge. I sometimes call it lifelong learning. Um, but to me, it's about the strive to continuously improve and get.

[00:01:26 ] Better at something. Awesome. 

[00:01:28 ] And do you, do you think that's innate in children and suppressed as you get older or just inmate and the individual? I think it's 

[00:01:36 ] Oliver: [00:01:36 ] innate in the individual. Um, but I think you can suppress it and, and you could, could block us around it. And I think we should encourage the opposite.

[00:01:46 ] Um, for example, when we, when we look at the qualities we like to see in individuals, we work for, we went from defining skills to emotional quotient, and today it's also something called the adaptability quotient. And that's really the, your ability to ask what if questions instead of what is right. And so what would happen if, what would happen if your top five customers leave you tomorrow?

[00:02:14 ] How would you deal with this? The ability to explore something. Overexploiting something and there is an immediate sense of, okay, what do I have available as technology right now? What have we built in the past? Let's start with that and build on top of that. That's exploitation, right? That's building on what you already know versus, okay.

[00:02:35 ] Let's step back. Let's get, give our curiosity some room to roam and imagine what it would be. And sometimes you start from marketing, you start from scratch and you can actually get you to, to where you need to go faster because you're not encumbered and you're not weighted down 

[00:02:54 ] Hadley: [00:02:54 ] by preconceptions, I guess.

[00:02:56 ] Oliver: [00:02:56 ] Yeah. And the things you've built in the past, you know, the assumption that everything I've done before needs to be reflected in what I do now, 

[00:03:01 ] Hadley: [00:03:01 ] that's true. Would you say curiosity is a kind of essential trait for innovation to thrive? 

[00:03:07 ] Oliver: [00:03:07 ] Part of it? Innovation is actually my definition of it is to transform curiosity and creativity.

[00:03:14 ] Into value. And there's a lot in those few words to unpack creativity is really that's what creates the spark. You know, the ideation, my curiosity drives me to explore something and then, uh, creativity, uh, um, uh, generates a novel idea, but creativity by itself, something novel to me, it's not innovation.

[00:03:38 ] Innovation has to be tied to a value, something I want to pursue in an organization. It could be monetary value could be valuation of a company. It could be the purpose. The reason why I'm doing that to me, if it's very simple. If I asked myself with everything I do every day, I get better and I get better as an individual, then we get better as an organization.

[00:04:03 ] If we get better as a, as a society, do I 

[00:04:06 ] Hadley: [00:04:06 ] know more today than I did yesterday? Yeah. 

[00:04:09 ] Oliver: [00:04:09 ] Correct. The powerful thing is that you don't compare yourself to others. You compare yourself to yourself. I love that. Am I a better speaker today than I was two months ago? Am I a better leader? Am I playing an instrument better than I did?

[00:04:24 ] Six months ago? That to me matters, that is the continuous improvement. I would may pick up woodworking and I will never be a master carpenter, but I can hopefully build furniture in six months better than I do today. And that to me is incredibly satisfying that journey. 

[00:04:43 ] Hadley: [00:04:43 ] But, um, but I think comparing yourself against yourself yesterday is a fantastic way of going about growth.

[00:04:51 ] Personal. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:04:53 ] Oliver: [00:04:53 ] That is to me, the manifestation of a growth mindset. 

[00:04:57 ] Hadley: [00:04:57 ] Go back to something you said earlier, would you say then that curiosity is, is really finding the question and creativity is how you would go about answering those questions? 

[00:05:08 ] Oliver: [00:05:08 ] Curiosity is what makes me pursue a question. Um, once we did dig into something creates more knowledge by doing so, and creativity is how I take that new knowledge and turn it into something interesting and novel.

[00:05:25 ] So curiosity is, I might be curious about finding out about electric cars. Oh, I want to broaden my horizon. What's there to know what do I need to know about electric cars? A specific curiosity would be, I want to know exactly what the, how the batteries work on an electric car going deep, right? And so you can be curious without a problem to solve.

[00:05:47 ] Curiosity does not need a problem, but it helps off. It's often triggered that, okay, I need to accomplish something. I have a problem to solve something needs to be approved. And because of that, we start that exploration and we start pursuing knowledge and learning about something. And then there has to be some somewhere else.

[00:06:05 ] So sort of a creative spark, an idea solution to the problem at the end. But I think curiosity by itself without a problem is incredibly useful. 

[00:06:15 ] Hadley: [00:06:15 ] I'm curious about something and going deeper within something kind of puts you into a frame of mind doing to, uh, a framework that sparks an idea of, Hey, now that I know this, now that my knowledge is more complete in an area, I might tie it to something else that I've learned before.

[00:06:31 ] And Hey, now I can bring these two things together and it's innovation, right? 

[00:06:36 ] Oliver: [00:06:36 ] I found that innovation teams are, um, very productive if they have the right blend of this general curiosity and specific curiosity, um, about going after a specific problem, but then allowing themselves of their curiosity to roll and let the curiosity be curious.

[00:06:56 ] Um, so I work really well with engineers that, um, know exactly. What's going on in the engine and how to improve the engine and go deep and sometimes just step back. And maybe it's part, because I don't have formal training in a lot of the things that I'm doing, then I asked different questions. I said, what if, what if we could hook up this system with that system that says they have never been combined, but what would happen if 

[00:07:23 ] Hadley: [00:07:23 ] sometimes people are restricted by not wanting to expose themselves when actually most of the time everybody around you is asking the same question, you know?

[00:07:34 ] And, and I've found that that having the confidence to simply ask means that very quickly, you, you accumulate knowledge that might not be as deep as each composite part, but the value is in understanding the whole. So the question is, do you think that a lack of self-confidence sometimes can stop people from asking questions?

[00:07:57 ] Oliver: [00:07:57 ] Um, yeah. So I don't know if it's lack of self-confidence or if it's, um, Not being vulnerable enough. There's a certain vulnerability that's required to think big because he might, this might not work. And, uh, this, this may have no legs at all. You know, as project or combining these technologies, it's just not meaningful.

[00:08:18 ] It shouldn't be done or can't be done. Um, but again, we sometimes founding ourselves, but by the things we know how to build this,