Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson steps through various business models in open source companies, including the service/support model, dual licensing, and Cloudera's current approach to growing revenue through relationships.

"If you are regularly sleeping through the night as the founder of a tech company, you're doing it wrong," says Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy office of Cloudera. Olson believes the big, hard questions around product, customer satisfaction and engineering capacity should always on a tech founder's mind.

According to Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson, the quality of the people in the organization is really all that matters. Olson talks about who he looks to work with and his lack of interest in being the 'A' player on a 'B' team.

Competition not only breeds a rich ecosystem, says Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson, it also requires your company to constantly "up its game" to thrive. Olson also describes why competing against major market players brings out professionalism and discipline in early-stage companies.

Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy office of Cloudera, shares multiple definitions of "big data." While the accepted industry definitions think of big data in terms of volume, velocity, and variety, Olson describes big data as being, "any amount of data that doesn't fit where you want it."

Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson quickly steps through how data management techniques have changed since the late 1990's, and how these changes have opened wide, new opportunities for the future.

In response to a question from Ping Li of Accel Partners, Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson explains why having a defensible intellectual property strategy is a key for long-term growth and sustainability. Without this, says Olson, smaller companies eventually stall out, create their own competition through pricing pressures, or eventually set themselves up for acquisition.

Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson offers real-world examples of how big data will play a role in solving business and societal challenges, from battling credit fraud to working to improve clean water access and more effective medical care.