As blist develops and we get closer to launching the service, it’s been fun and rewarding to demo the application to people who have deep opinions and pedigrees in the space in which we plan to operate. Over the last few weeks I’ve been fortunate to conduct two specific demos of this sort. I’ll admit I had some anxiety initially. It’s akin to talking about black holes with Stephen Hawking.

The first demo was with the co-founder and CEO of not one, but two significant database companies. He’s truly a pioneer in the space. He was skeptical of taking a meeting with us initially as he thought he had seen it all and heard it all already. With the help of a persuasive friend of blist, he ultimately accepted our meeting request. In three short weeks he’s gone from doubter to a big believer and a strong advocate. He’s excited about the innovations we showed him and is equally enthusiastic about where we plan to take blist. He shared with me that he’s impressed that we’re thinking and investing at both ends of the database spectrum. At one end, we’re investing in building a database as a service that scales to Internet scale. At the other end, we’re investing and making great advances in usability so that mainstream users can organize data without dependence on a DBA.

His vote of confidence matters to me.

The second demo was to James Hamilton, my boss while I was at Microsoft. James was a core architect of both Microsoft’s SQL Server and IBM’s DB2. He’s the co-author of a number of whitepapers on database theory and internals. He’s one of the smartest technologists I’ve ever known. I gave him a demo of blist and he was impressed with how much we’ve accomplished since starting development earlier this year. James and I share a passion for big scale ops – running really large web services at Internet scale. Most of our conversations over the last two-and-a-half years have been in this area, so I think James was surprised by the significant innovations we’ve made on the user interface. He’s very enthusiastic about blist.

His vote of confidence matters to me.

We’re excited about what we’re building at blist. At the end of the day our success will not be measured by what two industry veterans think, but instead by whether people adopt and embrace blist in large numbers. For now, though, I’m content with two votes of confidence from two people who collectively have more than 50 years of peerless domain experience. And while I generally think most people in this database world are too set in their thinking, these two in particular moved on from the database world because there wasn’t enough new thinking.

Their votes of confidence matter to me.