Coldplay kiss cam scandal sends Astronomer CEO to resign —and the internet into a frenzy
This week, a bad kiss cam moment from a Coldplay performance went viral on social media. This brought attention to a small IT company that not many people had heard of.
'On the plus side, we've all heard of Astronomer now, right?' A head of digital marketing in San Francisco named Liz Leslie wrote on LinkedIn.
People were searching Google for "What is an astronomer?" a lot after the company's CEO, Andy Byron, was seen making out with Chief People Officer Kristin Cabot on the jumbotron at Gillette Stadium outside of Boston.
Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, said from the stage, "Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy." The astronomer revealed that Byron is married.
The little-known IT company became well-known by the end of the week.
Astronomer said in a statement on Friday that its board had started a formal review into the matter and that they would have more information to share soon. "We expect our leaders to set the standard for behavior and responsibility," it said.
Later, the company said that Byron had been put on leave and that Pete DeJoy, co-founder and chief product officer, was taking over as CEO.
That being said, what does an astronomer do? For businesses that want to use AI, it offers an important but often overlooked part: the infrastructure that lets them connect their data to the apps where they need to use it. It said it had worked with Apple, Ford, and Uber.
PitchBook says that Astronomer was started in 2018 and had received $375.13 million from investors as of May. More than 300 people work for the New York-based business. Bain Capital Ventures, Insight Partners, and Salesforce Ventures are some of the investors.
Companies that don't have a good handle on their own data may not be able to benefit much from AI. This means that better solutions are needed in this area. The trend is shown by Salesforce's $8 billion purchase of Informatica and Snowflake's $250 million purchase of Crunchy Data.
The astronomer said that one of its benefits is that it works with Apache Airflow, an open-source tool that many businesses use to manage their data pipelines.
What will happen with Coldplay? Will it help or hurt the company's chances in data orchestration? We will have to wait and see.
'While the visibility puts a spotlight on who Astronomer is, this is not usually the kind of publicity that brings in new customers,' said Peter Davenport, senior strategic consultant at brand, marketing, and communications specialist Definition. "In fact, it could hurt the trust and authority that have been built up over many years, especially in fields where trustworthiness and reputation are very important."
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