Build The Future: Joining Aiven as a New Leader

Dima Kan was still setting up his new work laptop when the message arrived. He was only a few days into onboarding when Aiven's CEO reached out to him directly on Slack. There was a high-stakes deal in play, an account where search was the sticking point. If Dima could do something about it, good. Otherwise, he could carry on onboarding.
Not wanting to disappoint the CEO, he agreed to take a look. He learned the account over the following days, got himself in front of the client, and by the end of that same week, he had won them over.

"I just thought, well, that was super quick," he says. "But this is exactly what I was looking for when I joined Aiven. Coming back to the startup roots, where you can just move."

How did Dima join Aiven?

If the speed was new, the problem wasn't. Dima, a product director now leading Aiven's search function in the Product Delivery team, has spent the better part of his career on a single discipline.

"I've worked at TomTom, I've worked at AlphaSense. So yeah, I've seen search, in all its shapes. It's rare that something comes up that I haven't run into before in one form or another."

Dima nearly didn't come for search at all. When a recruiter from Aiven first reached out, the role on the table was Head of AI. The company was on the lookout for someone to help it jump onto its AI journey. The more they explored it together, the more Dima doubted he was the right fit, and he told them as much. Aiven came back anyway, this time with a role built around what he does best.

"They really wanted to continue the discussion," he says. So they did.
It was not so much the name that attracted him but rather the feel. After time inside larger, more established organisations, Dima wanted to come back to startup roots.

"I appreciate that, I kind of like that," he says of the flat, reach-out-to-anyone culture. "In a bigger, more established company, things move slower. I missed that rapid pace, and I got it back in the first week."

The sense of fit arrived almost as quickly. Part of his onboarding was meeting the lead of every function and joining a management training cohort alongside leaders based everywhere from New Zealand to the US to Europe.

"Everyone I spoke to was welcoming me and offering support," he says. "What matters is how well you work with people, how good they are at raising the bar. I felt welcome instantly." It read, to him, as confirmation that the culture matched what he had carried through his career.

How did Dima approach the change?

One thing did catch his attention, though. The story Dima kept hearing, from manager after manager, was that Aiven is a company in constant change. He arrived with no prejudice and no expectations, but then, within a couple of months, he watched it play out. Most of the leaders who had interviewed him left.

"Okay, so now I am witnessing it," he says. "On the one hand, it did worry me a little. What's going on, why is this happening? On the other hand, I had a task in front of me, and I needed to build a relationship with my own team. So that's what I focused on."

Dima explains more about how he approached his team in this interview:

What about being hands on himself?

Back to making an impact, some of the changes Dima brought himself. Early on he noticed deals getting stuck because too many people were in the room and not enough of them were on the same page. So he introduced what he calls engineer-to-engineer mode, pairing an engineer from Aiven with one from the client.

"Because at the end of the day, we build products for developers," he says.
The question of who is suited to a company like Aiven is not really about talent, as far as Dima has figured out. The issue is one of temperament, and gradually he has realised that people generally fall into two categories. There are people who value stability and predictability, and people who go looking for challenge and want to be part of the change.

"When you come to Aiven, you should have the mentality of the latter," he says. It is a company that has passed significant milestones and is, in many of the ways that matter, still trying to stay a startup.

There is one last thing he has learned about himself, and it surprises him more than anyone. Dima has always thought of himself as a hardcore engineer, a product person, maybe a scientist. Not a marketing person, as he puts it.

Yet the evidence keeps piling up. In his spare time he hosts a podcast, interviewing the people who build vector databases and search engines, and it has pulled in a real following entirely on its own. At a 40,000-person event in Las Vegas, a stranger stopped him just to say he was a devoted listener.

"More and more people tell me that I'm good at marketing," he says, slightly bemused by it. The hardcore engineer, it turns out, is also a micro-celebrity in the podcast space.