Fivetran

“But my guess is it peters out into some version of the venture firm just saying, we'll take off the board member on Fivetrans, whatever, right?”

“The biggest competitor is internal. So it's basically teams building homegrown systems and having to maintain them and just allocating a lot of their teams on that.”

“So we did about 70 calls, I think, in the first months, and I think it increased, like, 150 over the next few weeks. But we talked to the users of, I don't know, like, Firestrand, Stitch, all the other, like, ETL, like, modern ETL, ELT platform.”

“Both of the companies were actually like beating their revenue targets.”

“I believe that they'll actually be close to 600. I don't have the exact number.”

“And that's why I think this deal felt to me from a distance, like I'm not the infrastructure guy at scale, but it felt to me from a distance like that's a damn smart, obvious combo. You know, that'll be a good, that, that will get critical mass. I mean, you wo…”

“The big like win for us, I gotta say was winning Fivetran. That happened in at the end of 20, 23. And that kind of gave us the power of, hey, if we can support a customer that's doing tens of millions of dollars through marketplace that, you know, I think they…”

“RJ Metrics was Fivetran, Snowflake, DBT, and Looker. All together in one product. We built all four of those products in order to build RJ Metrics.”

“When people started using the term modern data stack, there was a there, like fivetran, dbt, mode, looker, et cetera. These are tools that. Were built around an idea of how data technology should work. And it was a, it was, and is a good idea.”

“And so that means that companies like us and companies like Fivetran that are big parts of that, you know, we're not going anywhere.”

“My read is that people like us, people like Fivetran, while we are critical to their success as platforms, because we drive a ton of consumption. They don't actually really care about the dollars that we make as businesses. Cause they're so tiny relative to th…”

“I feel like right now we should go through the cycle of consolidation. And you know, like I mean, if Fivetrend and dbt merge, they can be alter-ex of a new generation or something like that. And you know, probably some ETL tool to there. But I feel it might ha…”

“Biggest mistakes in investing are not doing the things that make you a lot of money, because the opportunity cost there so far outweighs anything else. So I feel like my biggest mistake in the last couple years was not investing in an entrepreneur named George…”

“So I think actually the value of co-selling with sales teams at other businesses that are in your ecosystem, where a customer would benefit from the compilation of what we call a modern data stack. Is, is really overlooked in sales.”

“At Fivetran we say, why do anything? Why do it now? Why do it with Fivetran? Right. And those are the questions that you need to be answering on every deal. And if you don't have an answer to why do it now, slipping isn't even the right term. It was never goin…”

“You don't need someone who has spent their career scaling sales organizations and building out a ton of process. You need someone who is willing to get out there And kick down doors and ask the hard questions that will allow you to have to take that feedback a…”

“You do want to have multiple sellers going at the same time. Otherwise, you know, let's say it's Lauren and Harry and If it's just Lauren and Lauren is a terrible salesperson, then you didn't really learn anything about your product or your messaging or your c…”

“I've spent a lot of time hiring people with, when they had to come pitch their product, That's not usually that valuable because often the people in the room like on the panel don't, they haven't been in the seat of the buyer. And so no one really knows what t…”

“I often will just do a role play with them that they're not prepared for. So something like, all right, real life situation that I'm facing. We're deep in procurement with this customer. Here's a situation. Okay. You're the sales rep on procurement. Let's go. …”

“Making assumptions about their experience. I hired someone once. Who did this was back when I was doing, we were doing pitches and his pitch was so smooth. And I was like, oh, great. You know, he's very comfortable off the cuff, blah, blah. And I had asked, bu…”

“If it turns out that we don't solve the problem that they're trying to solve, that means we missed on qualification and quality qualifying them out of our pipeline.”

“If that happens, my reaction is what was the identified pain, how painful was it? Did we miss an opportunity to attach to a bigger business problem? Cause a lot of times when you're selling technology, you're like, oh, I found a practitioner who wants this thi…”

“Pricing that's not aligned to value. Black box subscription shelfware, licensing. That, that model is, is moving in the past.”

“A traditional bookings quota and a variable compensation structure, what that does is it drives someone to land a deal and nothing else. When you start to align compensation with the actual adoption of the product and consumption of what you sold as a salesper…”

“I think the best sales teams are people who have had to be in a category creating environment. So people who like the real hustlers that I've seen be successful are people who are selling Products where there isn't already an identified budget and it's, it cre…”

“And is actually as far as I know, one of those, like, companies are over a hundred million in, in, in revenue.”

“You know, it doesn't undercut everything for Fivetran, but it potentially undercuts the big sources, which I imagine are the things that are, like, the real drivers of revenue for them.”

“Once you get into rounds that are this, as big as like this five train round, you know, five hundred million bucks. Part of that investment is defensive where you were essentially declaring yourselves the winner of the space and like excluding other folks from…”

“We have customers who run billing out of their data warehouse.”

“The additional cost of compute and storage to replicate the extra data, to do those steps, those transformation steps inside the warehouse Are so small now, you know, they're less than what it's going to cost you to pay your data engineer for a week to build y…”

“And the really critical thing we did that laid the foundation for our eventual success was that we said that it was our responsibility to make the data match. Which is actually unusual in the field of data integration. Most data integration tools, they see the…”

“And then sometimes they actually change the APIs for us.”

“And we're working on we're working on publishing more about, like, what do you need to do to make an API that's friendly to replication for data warehousing? Whether it's by us or one of our competitors or just the customers building their own data pipelines, …”

“So marketing data is often like the initial use case for Fivetran at a large company.”

“If the data source is really large, it's something that's just yours, so Fivetran's never going to build a connector to it, and it's relatively stable, like it's not constantly changing configuration, then you can build your own data pipeline using the tools p…”

“And this is different than how it's historically been done, but the big advantage of Doing MDM and other similar things in this way is that it's non-destructive. So you still have the original data. If you make a mistake and you realize later, oh, I said these…”