Sigma: The Gutsy Rebuild That Took This SaaS from Zero to $100M – with Rob Woollen [448]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Rob, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Rob: Thank you.

[00:00:02] Omer: Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:05] Rob: There's a quote, I think it's attributed to Alan K, who was a early computer scientist, and he said something like, make the simple things simple and the hard things possible. And I've, that's been a guiding light to me in interface design and really product design.

[00:00:20] Omer: Love it. So tell us about Sigma Computing. What does the product do? Who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:28] Rob: Sure. So Sigma is data analysis software, and the sort of key insight we had to found the company was that the underlying kind of cloud infrastructure had advanced pretty dramatically.

[00:00:40] Rob: So if you were, a SQL programmer or a Python programmer. You got these cloud data systems where you could query billions of rows of data, you could effectively have almost infinite storage. And the problem we saw was that. If you weren't a SQL or Python programmer, you were largely still stuck with the same old BI tools or the same old sort of Excel spreadsheet.

[00:01:02] Rob: And we wanted to effectively enable anyone to leverage all this great enhancements. So we initially built something that looked largely like a spreadsheet you could write. Formulas, things like that. But everything you did in that interface, it translated it to SQL and ran against these large cloud infrastructure.

[00:01:20] Rob: So you got the power of the cloud systems, but an interface that anyone could understood and we later extended that to. You can now bring those types of interfaces into any. Applications. So like anyone building a SaaS application can embed Sigma within it and leverage that for all of their reporting and analytics, all the way to people building their own applications.

[00:01:41] Rob: They can do that now in our product as well.

[00:01:43] Omer: Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business where you, in terms of revenue, customers size of team.

[00:01:49] Rob: Yeah. We crossed over a hundred million in revenue this year, so we've been congratulations. Thank you. We, I've, I always joke to people that we're a tale of two companies because we founded the company 11 years ago and spent.

[00:02:02] Rob: Roughly seven years of little to no revenue and then have gone from zero to a hundred million in the last three and a half years. So that's been a fun growth path. And then as far as employees and customers we're somewhere north of 600 employees. I one of the, one of the growth things I like is that you lose count of exactly how many employees you have and, then from customers, I think somewhere north of 1400.

[00:02:25] Omer: And then I think you've raised like 580 million, something like that.

[00:02:31] Rob: Something like that. We've done we just did a series D last just about a year ago, and then did a series C in 2021.

[00:02:38] Omer: Cool. A lot of people listening to this are gonna be like, oh, those numbers are just over my head.

[00:02:42] Omer: I'm still struggling trying to get to the first million in ARR and I think that's what I really love about your story is that. On the Facebook, people may not be able to relate, but when they hear the tale of two companies and the first seven years of almost zero revenue, until you had to overcome these challenges and just stay in the game long enough to be able to get to this point where things started to click, you got traction and then the business grew very fast.

[00:03:08] Omer: So I think a super interesting story I wanna start with like where the idea came from, and you explained that a little bit, but maybe just tell us like a little bit about your background and what led to. You getting to the point where you felt confident enough that yeah, we're gonna go and tackle the BI market?

[00:03:28] Rob: Yeah, in some ways we're a little bit unusual in our sort of founding story. So my personal background, I've spent now 25, almost 30 years in enterprise software prior to this whole adventure. I spent seven years at salesforce.com and was one of their CTOs and I led product management on their platform products and one of the things that, that sort of struck me when I was at Salesforce was obviously they have all sorts of cloud data, right? They have everyone's, cloud sales data and obviously they're incredibly successful company. But I would watch how this company ran and you would see even though they had all the cloud data in the world, it was generally still run on like spreadsheets and guesses on what we should do.

[00:04:14] Rob: And it struck me that the people that were knowledgeable about like how to plan operations, how to plan, how many salespeople we should hire, how to plan all this sort of, financial side. They were Excel people and they were disconnected from sort of the enterprise and cloud data. And so the sort of fundamental epiphany we had, the fundamental idea was we had seen this big advancement in the infrastructure, just how could we make it so all these people that actually had the domain knowledge could actually directly leverage it.

[00:04:42] Rob: And that's what. We set out to build now 11 years ago, and we've pivoted many times on how actually to solve it, but we interestingly, have never pivoted on the problem we were trying to solve or the sort of aspiration of what we wanted to do.

[00:04:56] Omer: Yeah. You said something to me earlier where you said, we've stayed focused on the problem we wanted to solve throughout this time, but the first.

[00:05:06] Omer: Seven years was al almost just about figuring out what was the right product to build.

[00:05:11] Rob: Yeah. I, I've often told people I can give you the, explain people the problem and they're like, yes, I, that makes sense to me. I can see why it's a big important problem. And then you say we're gonna build the right interface to solve it.

[00:05:23] Rob: And I think there's, as entrepreneurs you have to have the super amount of confidence, right? So I remember we were very confident we left the VC firm and we were like, we're going to, sure, within six months we'll have figured out the right interface to this. And we went off and built, our first set of ideas.

[00:05:39] Rob: And as you can imagine from the seven year journey, our first set of ideas were not the right solution and it took just many iterations of trying things and trying to get feedback and trying to interpret that feedback and then trying to figure out what is the right actual thing to go build and that, that journey is painful and was very much what we spent a lot of that first set of years doing.

[00:06:02] Omer: Yeah. Now you guys were a bit unique in terms of you were able to raise money right out of the gate, weren't you?

[00:06:07] Rob: Yeah, we're we're very fortunate. We had had long history in enterprise software, had a longstanding relationship with. Venture capital firms, Sutter Hill Ventures, and my co-founder and I were both entrepreneurs and residents there.

[00:06:18] Rob: So we had effectively developed the idea with the VC firm. So we had a big advantage out of the gate of yes, we left with a series A funding of $8 million with. Honestly a big problem to go solve, but not yet a proven solution to it. And we largely just made the promise of we won't spend much money until we really know what we're doing.

[00:06:40] Omer: And then, and at that point, were you like crystal clear about the problem? Had you already spent time talking to potential customers or was that something that you felt like, okay, we still needed to do more of in order to. Make sure we were crystal clear about the problem before we started building a solution.

[00:06:59] Rob: The problem we were always very clear on. It's funny, I found recently a document from early 2014 where we like elucidated, here are the 10 things we think are wrong. And it was like, I would say nine of them I would still write today. And there was maybe one that I was like, oh, we're off on that.

[00:07:13] Rob: So I think we were uniquely good at identifying something that was a big problem and everyone we talked to resonated with, yes, this is a big problem. We were, I think, an odd situation in that. How do you figure out actually solving it ended up being much harder. And to this day, with continues to be something I feel like we're still, still trying to fully solve this problem.

[00:07:34] Omer: And what was the competitive landscape like at that point? 2014 I'm assuming there was a, it must've been a fairly crowded market even at that point.

[00:07:43] Rob: Oh, definitely. It business intelligence is one of these interesting markets where, on one hand it's a massive market. It's, depending your estimate, 25, 40 billion, it's somewhere where it's massive and supports many public companies. On the other hand, it tends to go through these generations where, you had a generation of products like Cognos and SAP's business objects that all were in the two thousands and then went through an acquisition phase where IBM bought Cognos and SAP bought business objects, knew people like Tableau and click and some of these players come onto the scene.

[00:08:16] Rob: Later on you had people like Looker and then there was a phase in 2021, I believe, where a bunch of these acquisitions happened. Salesforce bought Tableau and Google bought Looker. And so it's an interesting market in that it's a very large market. There's not a single vendor who just completely dominates it.

[00:08:32] Rob: And it continues to evolve almost with generations. What we saw early on was that these products had really focused on what we call sort of the data person, the person who's gonna manage like a data warehouse, and that was who they sold the product to and who they built the product for.

[00:08:50] Rob: And they largely ignored everyone else. And that's really what we was our kind of differentiation as far as like our strategy is we wanted to build a product that was really embracing a larger audience.

[00:09:01] Omer: Okay, so you've got 8 million in the bank, you've got a pretty clear idea of the problem you're gonna go and solve.

[00:09:11] Omer: I want to talk about what that first version of the product looked like and maybe why it wasn't the right product. But just help me understand, like how did you go about doing that in terms of building a team? Was it just, the two of you? The founders, did you start hiring pretty quickly?

[00:09:33] Rob: We hired three people right outta the gate, so we had a team of five. Interestingly the first employee we hired is still with us to this day. So he's been with us through every transition of every part of this adventure. The way I would and all five of us were technical, so we were all people that were gonna build build product and we, we initially tried to build I think two or three prototypes. So even though a team of five, we actually were building a couple things in parallel and we had some high level ideas. One of the big ones was that we tried our hypothesis was that we could build something where the intelligence of our system could actually figure out based on your data, here's the analysis you should be doing effectively.

[00:10:20] Rob: Here are the questions you should be asking about your data, and we're gonna present that to you. And this ended up being a colossal failure would be my description of it and the missing bit and our hypothesis was it sounded great to everyone. Everyone was like, yes, if you could do this, it would be amazing.

[00:10:38] Rob: Whenever we would show it to people, I and this is one of the things I find is very hard. You have to interpret what feedback people are giving you. People would squint at it and they'd be like, yeah, that part's interesting. This part is not interesting at all. And the, it took us a long time to digest an important lesson, which was we had assumed that we could just.

[00:10:59] Rob: A machine could just figure out all of the important things that say a marketing analyst or a financial analyst should know. And instead, it is very hard to actually know what's in their head, what do they already know about, what do they not know about what's actually interesting to them? And we had discounted them as being the driver of this whole thing.

[00:11:17] Rob: So we had to pivot our mindset to say, what if we instead build a product where they were in control as opposed to us servicing things to people. I think, people rarely look at your prototype and say, oh, this is terrible and not what I would want at all. They give you more subtle feedback and you have to try to, pull on those threads and interpret things.

[00:11:33] Omer: So when you set out, you said, we're gonna go and build the right product. It'll take us about six months to do that, and anybody even if someone had told you back then no, this is much harder. Even back then, if someone had told you this is much harder, it's gonna take seven years, you would've like probably not believed them.

[00:11:54] Omer: Can you like maybe give another couple of examples of the types of iterations of the product you went through and like why each time it still wasn't right, because. Seven years is a long time.

[00:12:11] Rob: Indeed, it is. We spent six months on our first kind of idea and it became clear that. We couldn't just automatically figure everything out.

[00:12:21] Rob: And so we kept saying what if the human told us this? What if the human gave us a little more information? And at some point it became, I think we got disillusioned with our idea. It was like the human is really telling us a lot at this point. Like at this point, the, the human told us everything and like our system doesn't seem that amazing anymore.

[00:12:37] Rob: So at that point we largely started over and, this is a point where we actually lost two of the founding engineers. I think they had, we were almost nine to 10 months in. And I feel like they just, they felt like we were just swirling around and they didn't get the feeling of oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, this is gonna make it.

[00:12:57] Rob: And so they moved on and we then went down to a team of three for about a year and a half. Wow. Yeah. And it's, on one hand, it's obviously a little bit demoralizing 'cause you've gone from a larger team to a smaller team. Three of you definitely is small enough that like you, you spent every second with the same people.

[00:13:17] Rob: You, go to lunch every day with the same people. I remember there was one day where the other two forgot to tell me that they had something going on and weren't coming into work that day. And so I came into work. I just realized I'm the only person at this office by myself. They're funny things now, but at the time you're like it's a little depressing to just show up there and be in an empty office

[00:13:33] Omer: And the signs like, it's like you you've raised a bunch of money.

[00:13:37] Omer: You're into this into a year and a half, two years you've lost people because they don't believe in this thing anymore. Someone looking at this externally wouldn't be thinking, oh yeah, this is the sign of a business that's gonna do a hundred million plus and whatever. So what kept you going at that point?

[00:13:56] Rob: I feel as a founder, you have to be entirely irrational. If someone shows you the statistics and they're like, look, there, there's very little chance you could start a company and actually be successful. Here's all the headwinds against you. Here's all the big companies out there, business intelligence.

[00:14:09] Rob: There's so many existing companies, like there's so many reasons not to start a company and there's so many people that I think are negative on any idea, right? You show 'em anything and they will, figure out reasons to poke holes in it. So I feel like entrepreneurs, like it's, I often tell people my number one advice to people is don't start a company.

[00:14:27] Rob: And the reason I say that to people is that if I can knock you off starting a company with just that, you should definitely not start a company because it's again, I don't even know how to answer your question. It's just like I still believed we were absolutely gonna build a huge company that we were on this important problem.

[00:14:42] Rob: And there was definitely periods where I was down and we were, I think, lucky that I felt like there was points where my co-founder was down. There was points where I was down, but they happened to not be at the same time. And so just having a few other people would help pick you up.

[00:14:54] Rob: But in general, it was just. We were just irrational.

[00:14:58] Omer: Yeah I think in many ways it's almost there's some I irrational, but also it's funny. That you are in the data business, but in many ways, you were driven by your gut, by your intuition, and less about what the numbers were telling you about the business and the reality.

[00:15:16] Rob: Yeah. You can hear it it's passion, right? I feel like this problem is so important to solve, and I feel empathy for these people that are like, I just wanna be able to like, run with do this work. And I don't want I'm not a sequel programmer and that's not what I should become. And so I feel like yes, it's.

[00:15:31] Rob: Like you need passion. You need to really like, be super interested in the problem you're solving. And honestly, that's why it's interesting to still work on 10 plus years later is that I still have ideas every day of what if we could do X instead and make this better? And I think you need that to go on that long of a road.

[00:15:45] Omer: So let's talk about how eventually you got to that first million in ARR. What had you figured out about the product by then and. How did you start finding the right customers?

[00:16:02] Rob: We went through several others. You could probably guess from the seven years, several other iterations of ideas on how to solve this problem and about, I think it was the spring of 2017.

[00:16:13] Rob: So at this point we're, three or four years into this whole adventure and our investors had invested in Snowflake the data cloud and data warehousing company. They were doing very well even by this point. And they suggested to us, why don't you go down there and show them your latest prototype and, meet with their founders and CEO and see if there's some sort of partnership you could set up here.

[00:16:35] Rob: And at the time our product had nothing to do with Snowflake. We did our own sort of work and did our own basically entire stack. I remember my co-founder was like, we're gonna go down there and meet with them and try to convince them that they should, bring us to their customers, but then copy the data outta Snowflake and put it all on our product.

[00:16:53] Rob: It doesn't seem like a particularly successful pitch. And and I think that about 30 days between when we, set the meeting, when their CEO and founders could actually meet, we again started completely over. Rebuilt an interface. This time, we integrated, we built focused on the interface part, but actually generated SQL and focused on we're gonna leverage data that's in Snowflake and run on top of it.

[00:17:17] Rob: And, the, even just over lunch, the reaction we got was so very different. I remember their CEO was like, yes. I want this, I like, I personally want to go use this. When can I start using this? Versus before I would say we, we generally got polite feedback to our ideas, but never like the passion of yes, this solves a clear problem for me and I want it right now.

[00:17:38] Rob: Like, how do I help you guys get this to me? And so that kicked off for us, an early partnership with snowflake, and also just gave us like a first set of users to, to give us feedback and kick the tires on the product.

[00:17:49] Omer: What do you think you got right about the product at that point?

[00:17:53] Omer: Obviously the fact that it integrated with Snowflake was a plus and at least table stakes. But what was it about the product after all of those iterations that you'd gone through that you feel like you, you nailed something, right?

[00:18:06] Rob: I. I remember from this lunch, Snowflake, CEO at the time, Bob Lia said something like, he is I'm the CEOI can get, someone to build whatever dashboard I want.

[00:18:15] Rob: And they had a problem, they had a classic BI product to build dashboards. Our insight was not, people don't have dashboards. The problem that, that he spoke to was like, look. I don't know what I want until I actually can play with the data myself and see it. You see something and you're like, oh, this is interesting.

[00:18:31] Rob: Now I wanna actually monitor it and go deeper on this. And so for him, like what we unlocked in that meeting was like he could actually do all this stuff himself and then give make sure he was actually like making good use of his team's time when he asked them to go build, some dashboard or build some set of reports.

[00:18:51] Rob: I felt like early on it was very focused on a particular user, but we would just like change, almost change their life, right? They would go from they would very dramatically change how they work and that was our first strategy was to find people like this where we could just very dramatically change how they worked.

[00:19:09] Omer: When did you say you that meet? You had that meeting?

[00:19:11] Rob: It was in the spring. I think it was in April of 2017. So we were. Three and a half years roughly since we had started the company.

[00:19:19] Omer: Okay. So then that's only like halfway of the seven years of zero revenue. So I'm guessing they didn't sign some big contract and write a huge check for you at that point

[00:19:29] Rob: Now And in fact, we were actually very focused at that point on not on the revenue side, but on a can we get passionate users?

[00:19:37] Rob: We had an additional challenge here, which is a positive side of our product is we connect to the company's most important data. The negative side of that is there's a huge then security bar. Even just out of the gate, you have to pass. So I remember even with even with CEO support at Snowflake, it took roughly six months for us to get all the security certifications we needed for them to be able to hook up to their real data.

[00:20:02] Rob: And sometimes there's just barriers to entry to markets like that. That was one we faced. Another one we faced over the next couple years was because business intelligence is such an established market and there's a bunch of these, established products, I. We'd often find people that would look at our product and be super interested in it, and then they would at the end of the meeting say, Hey, but you guys can do, and they would list off like 25 things and we'd be like, no, we don't.

[00:20:28] Rob: We don't have any of those features yet. They're all things we were gonna build. We don't have any of those yet. And so I spent, I feel we definitely on the product side had went through a bunch of iteration and trying to figure out like just how many of these things do we have to build out such we can get over that critical path of getting people to the point where they can go from that looks promising to I want to actually sign a real check and use this product.

[00:20:49] Omer: And that took time. Te tell me about that sales person you hired and how excitement turned into. Not so much excitement.

[00:20:57] Rob: Yeah, I mean we, we started first on just trying to get people, I would say, to give us feedback. So we weren't even like necessarily trying to close deals. And then after about a year and a half into it, I think it was in 2019, we started actually trying to have real, like actual, goals of quotas and things like that. And I remember we had gone to a, we had won an award at a Strava con conferences, like the best new product. We had a, one of our first salespeople and at the end of the quarter she closed deals three days in a row.

[00:21:29] Rob: And I was like, this is, we just won this award. We're getting this recognition, we have this clear traction. Everything's gonna be up into the right. And it's one of my things I like to occasionally show people on our even just company dashboards to this date, the next quarter. If you look at our sales, it went to literally zero.

[00:21:47] Rob: We spent, three months after we quote unquote, I felt like we were getting the product market fit. And we just struck out on every conversation that quarter. And, it's I think an important reminder that. It's still there's no light bulb that goes off and it's oh, you magically have now achieved product market fit.

[00:22:03] Rob: It's hard sometimes to recognize it and figure out when exactly is it time to scale. And, we had several points where it looked promising, but just it wasn't quite there yet.

[00:22:11] Omer: So what do you think was wrong at that point? Was it a sales strategy? Was it a product, was it a bunch of things that led to a quarter of zero sales?

[00:22:22] Rob: There's probably several different things. One is we certainly had some sales execution problems to get to zero, but I think those are probably the minor parts of it. I think for us, the macro things were, we were targeting, our product only works if you have something like Snowflake or Databricks or Google's BigQuery.

[00:22:39] Rob: You have to be in one of these cloud data systems. And so those products themselves were, that market was growing rapidly, but was still growing when we were in our early days. So even if we had built the product that we have now in 2014, we would've been selling into a tiny market at that point. So I think.

[00:22:58] Rob: One of the sort of, aspects of our growth curve is just the market we're dependent on was also just going through its own maturity lifecycle and having some, realization of that as well. The other side, as we talked about before is I do think there's just a broad set of product features and getting the interface right that it took.

[00:23:17] Rob: And it took a lot of iteration on that. And we continue to iterate even after having that initial batch of customers.

[00:23:24] Omer: One, one of the things that you did well, I think from what I understand is finding these champions in organizations like as you mentioned, like the people who are like really passionate about solving this problem and using your product.

[00:23:42] Omer: How did how did you go about building these types of relationships?

[00:23:46] Rob: Yeah, so our first strategy was the, what we were looking for is we wanted people ideally within walking distance of our office. That was a goal. It's one of the advantages of being in San Francisco where there's a lot of other, tech startups.

[00:23:57] Rob: But we wanted, basically. A bunch of very high touch users who would be tolerant, of an early stage product, but that they, saw the sort of promise of it and really enjoyed actively giving lots of feedback. And so we cultivated, probably 10 of these types of relationships.

[00:24:16] Rob: People that, we knew very well and we would go to their office and we would sit next to them and they really enjoyed, I think, getting to, give this level of feedback. I. And some of them, I remember we had one person who changed careers because they got so into data that they focused on.

[00:24:29] Rob: They decided actually they wanted to go do that, based on their experience of using our early product. So there's a bunch of things like that, that were very gratifying. I think the double-edged sword that I took away from it was on the positive side. We had a bunch of people that were great for like customer references.

[00:24:43] Rob: They like, when we did our early launch videos, they appeared in those videos. They were incredibly helpful for us as far as like helping shape the early product on the negative side, we were super dependent on these 10 people, and that's not a large number, right? People change careers, they change jobs, they go on, leaves and all of a sudden you have two people on paternity leave or something, you've lost like 20% of your champions is like a huge problem.

[00:25:08] Rob: And I felt like on one hand we were over probably overly focused on just the small set of people and that. Held us back a little bit. It certainly hurt us if those people left the company. We had almost restart the relationship with those companies. That was probably the lesson from that was, while it was, parts of it were really powerful.

[00:25:26] Rob: We probably went over in that regard.

[00:25:28] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. It's I think it's a great idea to build those champions in, in, in different companies, but they, if you have a huge dependency on them, you have some pretty significant points of failure if people do decide to move on. And so let's talk about, okay, so this, the end of this like first chapter and this, the first company, and getting to the end of these seven years, what eventually happened?

[00:25:56] Omer: That got you from almost zero revenue to that first million.

[00:26:00] Rob: I think we started to get enough traction with partners, with customers that people went from oh, this is something that, one person will play with to. We were starting to actually be like how their company would do data analysis.

[00:26:17] Rob: We were starting to be like a critical part of kind of their real flow. And so you went from being able to sell like, Hey, would you just toss us $500? 'cause someone's playing with it. To can we actually do a real deal here of, even 15,000 or something like that. Something that was actually a, at least a decent entry point into, to a real company and.

[00:26:36] Rob: We also as a company then started making some strategic positions, strategic goals on our kind of next steps. And that's when we made a transition from, I had been the CEO, the first roughly six and a half years of the company. And we made the decision at that point. Let's bring in someone who's, a much more experienced leader and can help scale the company.

[00:26:56] Rob: And so that's when we hired, who remains our current CEO, Mike Palmer.

[00:27:00] Omer: You've gone through this journey of seven years. You eventually get to the point where it almost sounds like what you did was. Just go out there and ask for feedback, find those passionate people, get them using the product, then test if they were willing to pay a few hundred bucks for the product.

[00:27:22] Omer: And then just keep iterating and getting that feedback until you got to the point where you felt like. There's real value being delivered here. Now is the time for us to be able to go and try to negotiate an a, a real deal. And by that time I'm guessing obviously any kind of sales there's this challenges to any kind of sale, but I'm getting guessing.

[00:27:46] Omer: You got to a point where you had those relationships. You've demonstrated the value enough that. Finally the, all the hard work or just the persistence of staying in the game for seven years started to pay off.

[00:28:03] Rob: Yeah, I think that's a good summary. And I think the, I remember one of the signs for me was early on I touched every deal.

[00:28:12] Rob: I knew every, every conversation we were having with a prospect and where each deal was. I think the first time we closed a deal that was like, of an equivalent size where I had no idea it was happening. I had no contact with these people. That was like my first inkling of, ah, maybe we're at product market fit here.

[00:28:28] Rob: I don't, I don't need to be handholding every one of these things. ‘Cause in the early days you do all sorts of unscalable things, right? I remember at one point we had a customer who was about to sign and they were like, how do I know that I can get 24 7 support? And our answer was basically, we gave them a sheet, my cell phone number, my co-founder's cell phone number.

[00:28:46] Rob: Like we had to give those types of assurances to people. And the, very early days of just we will be here for you. And then gain that transition to like. How do you make something repeatable? It needs to be like, it can't be, it can't be that right. Can't be, I'll call Rob. And that type of transition to me was really where I started to see the spark.

[00:29:03] Omer: When we were talking earlier, you, you said to me, okay we spent the seven years trying to essentially figure out what was the right product to build. We then got to the first million in a RR. And then we said we're gonna rebuild the product. Like, why, what happened?

[00:29:20] Rob: Yeah. I think this is one of the more interesting decisions for us because, when you're at zero revenue, it's not fun to pivot people.

[00:29:27] Rob: Even it's very hard to tell a team, we're gonna throw away everything that we've worked on. And it's sometimes hard to convince people, and you often lose people when you do that. But even harder when you're, you're, you have some little first inkling of success, I think for us. When we looked at how those early users used the product, we still felt like it wasn't quite right.

[00:29:47] Rob: And it's hard to give you a better like CRISPR answer than that because I think at some level as founders, you have to have this vision of here's the experience we want our customers to have. Here's what we want out of our product. And this one was very much founder led. I think, my co-founder started the effort and then I joined it.

[00:30:04] Rob: And. We had to convince the company what we were building was the right thing, that we had to shift a decent amount of our engineering resources onto it. And then we had to convince, really the rest of the early go-to-market organization, you should stop selling this, the sort of previous interface and really focus on this new thing.

[00:30:22] Rob: And we were lucky enough that we had some people in the go-to-market organization who saw very early on the promise of this and believed, and they became our internal advocates. And then we had one of our largest deals then that we initially sold. We convinced everyone to use the new interface and we closed that deal.

[00:30:41] Rob: I think from then it became alright, now we're all on board, but it's it's a really hard decision to, to convince the company. Obviously, if he were wrong, it would've been a very painful story to tell in hindsight.

[00:30:52] Omer: So was this another. Intuitive gut decision from the founders where you don't have like data that you can point to and say, here's why this isn't the right thing and we need to go and rebuild it.

[00:31:09] Omer: But you. Intuitively knew that. But then how do you articulate that to the rest of the team? What to go and build?

[00:31:17] Rob: The short answer is yes. I think a lot of product decisions, for better or worse, come down to some like idea intuition, passion, some feeling you're trying to evoke in your users, and you can see different.

[00:31:30] Rob: You can see different data points that help support you. Like for instance, we were very focused on we want to get a broader set of users using our product, not just technical data people. And so we could see in data, like we're not as successful yet as we wanted on that. Like we look at the roles of our users.

[00:31:47] Rob: We can see there's still mostly traditional data analyst roles, we wanna see a broader set of roles so you can see data that will help support, hey, maybe we should do something different. But it's still, there's still something, I think, almost a responsibility of a founder to be willing to make some big bets and to make some almost passionate bets.

[00:32:08] Rob: And I think. They're almost uniquely sometimes qualified to do this because that is essentially what founding a company is, right? It is. I have some hypothesis I'm gonna bet. Even just my own opportunity cost on making this happen. And I think those are often even as companies scale and grow, those are often still who needs to be involved in some of these major like turning points.

[00:32:31] Rob: 'cause it's, I know they've lived this cycle and so sometimes maybe it's easier for them.

[00:32:36] Omer: You get to the first million and then as you Tom told us earlier. The company went from like effectively zero to a hundred million in just a matter of a few years, and. Partnerships were one of the biggest drivers for you, like the snowflake relationship.

[00:32:57] Omer: Can you just tell me about like how did you get that working? Because the Snowflake conversation initially happened many years earlier, didn't lead to, anything move the needle. What was different this time that. You've got that sort of hockey stick growth curve.

[00:33:11] Rob: Yeah, I think there's a number of things that, that sort of happened in, in kind of the markets and moved obviously in our favor.

[00:33:18] Rob: And there's a number of things in our product that changed. But but overall from a strategy perspective, I think one of the interesting things about this market. Is each of the products by themselves are not actually useful, right? Like a data warehouse that has no data in it is not interesting.

[00:33:32] Rob: You need something that moves data into it. So there's a natural partnership between companies that move data and data warehouse companies and then being able to actually use the data, leverage it, build analysis. That's why there's a natural partnership between companies like ours and people like a Snowflake or a Databricks or Amazon Redshift.

[00:33:50] Rob: And so on one hand, all these companies are used to partner selling and used to working together with customers. And so that's a, we, that's a positive, entry ramp for us. That this is not a new thing to any of these companies. But we had to I would call it, earn our stripes with them on actually getting a bunch of growth on our own, such that we were then much more attractive partner to them.

[00:34:13] Rob: I think. Everyone starts off envisioning a partner thing, almost one sided. Like it would be great if this big company brought me into every one of their deals. Of course it would be great, but if you're on the big company side, you're like, I don't like, why would I wanna do this? And so I think that's probably the biggest takeaway on partnership is figuring out like how do you actually think about it?

[00:34:32] Rob: Like a partnership. What is the important thing for them? And what we had demonstrated to a bunch of these companies was, I. We had actually achieved this goal of, we have people in almost every department using our product. And so we could take these infrastructure products from just being siloed into hey, that, fundamentally they only really have passionate users that are very technical to, we can make it so company-wide.

[00:34:55] Rob: You have people using your products and are knowledgeable at your products and that became a lever for us. To get a lot more, I would say, strength in the partnership and get things going. And then, yes, obviously once the flywheel goes and you have a partner who themselves is growing very aggressively, those are great symbiotic things to get going.

[00:35:13] Omer: So now that you look back and we talked about what kept you going, what drove you? In that first seven years, you must have had a lot of skeptics, a lot of doubters. How did it feel when you actually got to the point where your relentlessness, your intuition, your drive, actually finally proved you right after all those years?

[00:35:40] Rob: It's a funny thing 'cause I feel like every step of the company, there's some, you take. You're very appreciative of some level of success. Even get you sign your first customer. Like we've, we framed the first check we have still in our office. And I feel like the first time I saw anyone just mention Sigma, I.

[00:35:58] Rob: That wasn't an employee the first time I saw someone, have a job description where they included like sigma's a required skill. There's all these sort of milestones that I think you can almost come up with and they're good points to almost reinforce yourself.

[00:36:11] Rob: And reinforce the team on, we're making progress. And I think those have each been gratifying for me. Obviously the, the employees we've brought on, the relationships we've built with them, seeing, those types of people grow, those have all been very gratifying.

[00:36:25] Rob: I don't, I don't personally think that much about people that doubted us along the way because, honestly, most people, you should doubt most startups. Yeah. It's a logical thing. It's not a personal thing. Yeah.

[00:36:36] Omer: All right, great. On that note, let's let's wrap up. Let's go into the lightning round.

[00:36:40] Omer: I've got seven quick fire questions for you. I. You ready? I'm ready. Okay. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:36:47] Rob: I think I would call it around alignment for me and for an entrepreneur, I think it's often like alignment with your investors and alignment with your employees.

[00:36:55] Rob: Like what is, what type of company are we trying to build? How large of a company? In our case, part of our crazy story is we were committed from the start to building a public company. And so any idea that was not going to, become an a big public independent company was not gonna be the right idea.

[00:37:10] Rob: But everyone needs to be on the same page with that. And so I think that sort of focusing on alignment was a big thing for me.

[00:37:15] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:37:18] Rob: I'm a bit of a contrarian here. I don't read. Any books that are associated with anything associated with work. Books for me are an, like my escape.

[00:37:26] Rob: I get obsessed about these different topics and then I read about these topics for a while and then I switch to something else. So I was, obsessed about World War II and especially the Eastern Front for a while, and read 20 books about this. Wow. It got like super depressing 'cause this is not, fun thing to learn about. And so then I found I got really into Agatha Christie. I said I was gonna read every Agatha Christie book, which she writes incredible mysteries. And then there's a bunch that are terrible. And so I had to figure out which ones were actually good.

[00:37:53] Rob: But I guess my overarching advice is not on a single book, but to find things like this that can be escapes because. Building a company is so stressful. You need some outlets. And for me, books are an outlet.

[00:38:03] Omer: I think that's great advice. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:38:09] Rob: It's I'll go back to this sort of irrational exuberance, right? You have to so passionately believe in your idea that it doesn't matter how many people are gonna poke holes in it, you're gonna give it your all to try to make it happen. And it's, still, I think the one thing everyone needs.

[00:38:25] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:38:29] Rob: I purposely park about 15 to 20 minutes away from our office. And even, it doesn't matter what the weather is, I do this and it's it's because I feel like this disconnect between coming to the office and leaving the office in both ways.

[00:38:45] Rob: Something about just walking. Gives me somehow it just unlocks creativity in my mind. I thi I think about things somehow. My mind just works in the background and I feel like a lot of ideas that I wouldn't necessarily have sitting in the office or even sitting at home come out on these, on this just in a way forced walk.

[00:39:02] Rob: I do every day.

[00:39:02] Omer: I've heard that from a lot of founders. It's amazing how. Some of the simplest things can have the most profound impact on, you as a founder. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:39:15] Rob: I dunno that I have a specific idea, but I would like to do something very different as far as the type of technology I build.

[00:39:21] Rob: So I've always built like Sigma these sort of general platforms, right? We, Sigma has customers in almost every industry, almost every job function. And I'd love to try something that was like super specific can we take someone who works specifically in industry X and has job y.

[00:39:38] Rob: Does Z every day, and could we make that like dramatically better, like dramatically faster, dramatically easier, but something that was just like laser focused. And for me it's more just, I've never done anything like that. I've always been like, oh, how could we generalize, this to any X and any Y and any z and so that for me, I think would be, I don't know, I have a specific one in mind, but there's something about that focus that interests me.

[00:40:00] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?.

[00:40:03] Rob: I think that, I'm in some ways this weird person in that I got my first computer about 40 years ago, and I think I knew at that point just from tinkering around, this is what I wanna do the rest of my life. And I feel like so many people even my own kids go through this, journey of trying to figure out like, what do they want to do?

[00:40:21] Rob: And I was, I'm this anomaly that I somehow knew I was lucky enough. It was a very, it was very, you could, it was something that was a very good thing to actually go do. And I've been doing that just ever since.

[00:40:31] Omer: What was the computer?

[00:40:32] Rob: It was a Apple IIe.

[00:40:34] Omer: Nice. Cool. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:40:40] Rob: Very much. There's the usual ones of very much my family and my boys and my wife and puppy. But I'll just. My other sort of personal interests. They're, they also haven't changed much in the last 40 years. I love soccer, so I follow the English Premier League and I'm also a big Star Wars fan, so every one of the shows that comes out doesn't matter if they're good or not.

[00:40:59] Rob: I have to watch every episode. Awesome.

[00:41:01] Omer: Thanks Rob. I really appreciate you taking the time, this really fun conversation a great story. And thank you for unpacking that for us. Hopefully it'll give other founders listening some. Some inspiration if they're going through some tough moments to, to keep going if they truly believe in their idea.

[00:41:19] Omer: And I love some of the things that you shared with us. Maybe the, some of the things that you did may not, the tactics may not work today, but I think you shared a bunch of really useful principles. That hopefully will help people who are listening. If people want to check out Sigma Computing, they can go to sigma computing.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:41:40] Rob: I'm just rob[at]sigmacomputing.com, so feel free to drop me a note or find me on LinkedIn.

[00:41:45] Omer: Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:41:49] Rob: All right. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:41:51] Omer: My pleasure. Cheers.