About

Brian Zhan is a highly accomplished Product Manager with over 4 years of experience in the technology industry. He is currently working as a Scout at Sequoia Capital, where he is responsible for identifying and evaluating investment opportunities in the technology sector. Prior to this, Brian worked as a Product Manager at Starburst, where he played a key role in building the company's batch analytics product from scratch. During his time at Starburst, Brian interviewed users to build the business proposal and roadmap, hired an engineering team, and led the go-to-market strategy. He also built an active open source community of over 200 companies using Starburst's open source product Trino for batch analytics. Brian's efforts were recognized by many influential data forums like dbt Coalesce, DataIQ Talks, and Data Fabric Summit. Before joining Starburst, Brian worked as a Product Manager at Facebook, where he was a top performer and was promoted twice within three years. He was responsible for leading the annual "Voice of Customer" survey for Facebook customers, monthly product sessions with data engineering directors, and yearly vision sessions to determine investment areas and define long term vision for data at Facebook. Brian also created and led the initiative of getting Presto compute engine adopted as the standard analytics database engine across Facebook, which is now used by over 40k engineers. He also launched Spark compute engine within FB, which is now used by over 8k engineers. Brian holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University. He is highly skilled in Spark, Research Scientist, Salesforce, Data Engineering, and Big Data. Brian's relevant experience, coupled with his exceptional leadership skills and ability to build strong relationships, make him an asset to any organization.