As a founder of Elasticsearch and the CEO of Elastic, Shay has been fascinated with search ever since trying to build a recipe app for his wife in 2004, a journey that led to him writing the first few lines of code of Elasticsearch in 2009 and later founding Elastic in 2012. He believes in finding beauty, and that excelling takes a combination of perspective and grit. As someone who got into computers by counting the number of job postings in the newspaper, he loves building things — a product, a community, or a company — and the process of acquiring the knowledge to do so.