The only people from Astronomer attending the Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on July 16 were CEO Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot. They were swaying in mid-hug when the roving kiss cam, a staple at the band’s performances, zeroed in on them. You have probably seen the clip of what happened next. The two of them scrambled like kids caught raiding a cookie jar. Even Coldplay’s anodyne frontman Chris Martin couldn’t ignore their response. “They’re either having an affair, or they’re just very shy,” he remarked. The CEO and his subordinate are no longer with the company. Astronomer, a billion-dollar startup you’d likely never heard of until last month, will never be the same.
“We found out the way the rest of the world found out,” says Pete DeJoy, who cofounded the company and took over as chief executive when Byron left. He’s speaking to me from Astronomer’s new headquarters in the Flatiron district of New York City. Until our conversation, his main public statement following the concert had been a LinkedIn post thanking his employees for their resilience and conspicuously omitting any mention of why a “surreal” spotlight was suddenly trained on the company. DeJoy, a self-described nerd, can still hardly believe what happened last month. But don’t be fooled. The kiss-cam incident created a rare opportunity to call attention to the company’s accomplishments, and show off a bit of corporate savvy in how to handle the situation. The most entertaining thing that has ever happened at a Coldplay concert turned out to be weirdly rhapsodic for the company it supposedly humiliated. (Though maybe not so much for Byron and Cabot.) But it still makes DeJoy cringe.
That’s why, in our extensive conversation, DeJoy made a point of distancing himself from the events at Gillette Stadium. He managed to twist every question about the presumably sizzling goings-on in the corporate suite into a tribute to the heads-down, stick-to-business ethos of the firm’s 300 workers.
Cosmic Mess
DeJoy insists that within the company, there was no inkling of any hanky-panky in the C-suite. Still, I wonder, could the company have been in any way lax in allowing its frisky executives to shatter the bounds? “Look, we’re reviewing all of our policies,” he tells me. “It’s really important to me that we make sure that we prohibit relationships between employees that create real or perceived conflicts of interest.” So there’s an outside investigation? “I’m just going to say all of our workplace policies are being reviewed no matter what. It’s important to get this one right.” He won’t say whether the “review” entails Astronomer hiring an outside firm to investigate the scandal. Nor did he answer my question about whether Byron got a severance package upon his untimely departure.
I asked him directly: Is DeJoy pissed at his former boss for embarrassing the company? “No, no, I don’t think I can say I am,” he insists. “People make mistakes. We really just want to continue focusing on what matters here, which is our customers and our business.” (See what I mean about messaging?) I ask when he last spoke to Byron. “A long time ago,” he says. “Before the event.” Wait, you haven’t talked to him since the Jumbotron? “That’s correct,” he says. Now that’s cold play.
On the other hand, Astronomer’s outsourced response to the incident will go into the marketing hall of fame. While employees were working overtime to assure customers that the kiss-cam drama wouldn’t impact the company’s services, its executives hired Ryan Reynolds’ cheeky media firm Maximum Effort. The result was a 60-second ad with Gwyneth Paltrow (Martin’s ex), who displayed Oscar-level deadpan when she promised the internet she’d answer their questions about the incident. The joke was that her responses to queries about the concert were bromides about the firm’s geeky business. (Kind of like my interview with DeJoy.) Responding to “OMG! What the actual f!” she said. “Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow.” The absurdity of Paltrow, who is more often associated with organic skin-care products and jade eggs, talking about “data workflow automation” was priceless. It successfully shifted the narrative, at least a bit, to a question that many people were suddenly asking: What the actual f is Astronomer?
DeJoy, who says he never got to meet his famous (albeit temporary) spokesperson, is more than happy to answer the question. The company was started by a small group of techies in Cincinnati in 2017. The original idea involved data tracking. That’s sort of why they named their firm Astronomer. “Astronomers were the first data engineers, because they were making sense of how the world worked by intuiting how the stars were moving in the night sky,” says DeJoy. “That’s very much the job of a data engineer these days, right?” If you say so!
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