Hortonworks gave away its software and still went public three years after it started. Its product was Hadoop, a free, open-source system for spreading huge data sets across cheap servers. Engineers at Yahoo had done much of the work to build it. In 2011 a group of them left to form a company around it, named after an elephant from a Dr. Seuss book. When it went public in December 2014, every large company was told it needed a big data plan.

Spun Out of Yahoo

Hortonworks launched in 2011 with Yahoo as a backer. Its founders included Yahoo's Hadoop leaders, Eric Baldeschwieler and Arun Murthy, and Rob Bearden, who became chief executive. The company kept all of its code open source. It earned money by selling support subscriptions to banks, retailers, and phone companies that ran Hadoop. Its rival Cloudera sold some paid software of its own on top.

Sixteen Dollars, Then a Merger

Hortonworks priced its IPO at $16 a share on December 12, 2014, and listed on Nasdaq as HDP. The stock jumped on its first day. Revenue grew fast, but losses stayed high, and the cloud began to replace the data centers where Hadoop ran. In January 2019 Hortonworks completed an all-stock merger with Cloudera. In 2021 two private equity firms took the combined company private.

Cover: Courtesan on White Elephant, Suzuki Harunobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an elephant (Horton, and Hadoop's logo).