Jeff Hammerbacher: Facebook's data team, then Cloudera

RAISED HERE · FACEBOOK 2006 · CLOUDERA 2008–2021

The strongest produced win in this record: Jeff Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, the son of a father who worked at the General Motors plant and a mother who was a nurse. He studied mathematics at Harvard — where he knew Mark Zuckerberg — took a year off along the way to work jobs that included a bookstore and the GM assembly line, spent a stretch as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street, and in April 2006 joined the young Facebook, where, in the words of his University of California, Berkeley conference biography, he "conceived, built, and led the data team." Berkeley also credits Hammerbacher and D.J. Patil with coining the term "data scientist" for the work that team invented. He left Facebook in 2008, passed through Accel Partners as an entrepreneur in residence, and that year co-founded Cloudera, the Palo Alto company built on the open-source Hadoop platform for processing very large data sets. His title was chief scientist — a founder's role, not the chief executive's; Mike Olson ran the company, a distinction the Founders record states precisely and this section keeps.

Cloudera's arc is the documented size of the win. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on April 28, 2017, pricing at 15 dollars a share and raising about 225 million dollars, as its final prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission records. In January 2019 it merged with its rival Hortonworks, creating the era's dominant big-data platform company. On June 1, 2021, the private-equity firms Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and KKR agreed to take Cloudera private at 16 dollars a share in an all-cash deal valued at about 5.3 billion dollars; the acquisition closed on October 8, 2021. One limit is printed with the win: no source reached for this record quantifies what Hammerbacher's early Facebook shares came to be worth, and none is invented here. What the record documents is the role at Facebook, the founding at Cloudera, and the 5.3-billion-dollar exit of the company he co-founded. His profile, with the rest of the produced-CEO roster, sits in the Founders & CEOs section.

Sources:

1. University of California, Berkeley, DataEDGE conference biography — "conceived, built, and led the data team at Facebook"; the coining of "data scientist" with D.J. Patil; founder and chief scientist of Cloudera. dataedge.ischool.berkeley.edu
2. Jeff Hammerbacher, biographical record — grew up in Fort Wayne; father at the GM plant, mother a nurse; Harvard mathematics; the year off, including the bookstore and the GM assembly line; joined Facebook April 2006, left 2008. en.wikipedia.org
3. Cloudera, Inc., final prospectus (Form 424B4), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed April 28, 2017 — the offering at 15 dollars a share. sec.gov
4. Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and KKR — the June 1, 2021 agreement to acquire Cloudera for about 5.3 billion dollars, and the October 8, 2021 completion release. cdr-inc.com (cdr.com); businesswire.com
5. the Founders & CEOs section of this history — the produced-CEO roster entry and the chief-scientist precision note.