Omni

“It probably took us like nine months until we had our first user in the product.”

“And we had five unaffiliated customers that were talking to us that we really thought were going to buy the product. They'd all like verbally committed to us. So for people that are doing sort of like normal outbound sales cycle, we had the tech win. And we th…”

“So, now we're like, maybe 45 K. At that point, we were just trying to get 15 K.”

“And in 20, 26, it's become, you know, like 90% AI.”

“The idea was always a product that could compete with Tableau and Power BI and Looker and your SQL runner and sort of do everything all in one place. And that was the product that we sort of pitched and were selling from day one. It was like, get rid of all of…”

“If you have enough of those moments and those things are unique to your product, it can't just be like, that screen is beautiful. It needs to be like, wow, that's a workflow I haven't thought about. That is interesting. You can see those bits and those can be …”

“Like we had actually tried to build something similar to Omni, Inside Looker, classic kind of innovator's dilemma. It's hard to rebuild your own product type stuff.”

“AI needs to do new things when it answers questions, so you can't constrain it. But as it does those new things, you want to be able to make sense of them, and you want to put foundation underneath it that's solid so that metrics are consistent, so that permis…”

“I talked to first round the day after I left looker. And so we raised money or we didn't even raise the money. We had a handshake agreement to raise the money like four days after we left the company.”

“The seed, I think, was in May of 22, and it was nine million, and then the A was in August of 22, or something like that, and it was another seventeen million, I think.”

“Like we had 10 engineers with no customers, but We were very focused on the economics from a very, very early point, like mapping things out. We didn't just spend money. We didn't get an office for a year.”

“I want to say it was like 14 Lookers and five people that had worked with Chris at Stitch.”

“Pinged every single person that I knew that had used Looker in the past, that was a data person, like literally anyone that would take a conversation, I would try to show the product.”

“The tricky thing is you need to build enough of the existing space to replace it, even if that is none of your differentiation.”

“Like, there were features that took us nine months at Looker that we built in a week at Omni.”

“Before it would be like, I need to make a dashboard that has a SQL tile over here and a governed metric over here. I know that sounds like the simplest thing ever, shockingly hard to do in every single BI tool that existed.”

“When Sonnet came out in October, our engineering team started adopting Claude Code at that point, and it was so obvious that the world had sort of changed in an instant in terms of the way that people were writing code, that it became obvious that it was going…”

“We did an implementation internally where we're like, okay, let's set things up. So it actually works well. And literally like that same week we stopped using the UI.”

“Everyone hopes that there's just some magical channel that they haven't thought of that when they turn it on, like will inflect the business. What we found that is like the least satisfying, but sort of most obvious conclusion that you could possibly imagine i…”

“So we push out all of our services externally. Like we would go pay a partner five K to implement one of our customers. And in turn, they learned about our product and would recommend it.”

“I probably, when I started Omni had, I don't know, seven or 8000 connections on LinkedIn, maybe, maybe 6000 or something like that. And a lot of these were people that had purchased BI from Looker at some point in the past that I talked to in person.”

“We had a thousand employees when we got acquired. I probably sent a LinkedIn message to 900 of them.”

“So like when our BDR team was doing this, they were getting like a three percent response rate. So they'd get three responses out of a hundred LinkedIn connects. I might get a 50% connect rate. And on a message, depending on the group, like to the ex looker gr…”

“Every good person that you hire that you used to work with, Makes the place more attractive to the people that you used to work with. So if you worked at a big company with a thousand people and you hire the 10 best people, you're going to hire the next 10 bes…”

“But like, I think the average tenure of our first 10 employees was like eight years. So it was a lot of people that were there on the first, you know, 30 people.”

“We're doing this new thing that's about to ship where, you know, not only can you describe the app you want to build and then iterate on it with, you know, kind of our conversational agent Omni, but and it builds it with like the existing air table platform ca…”

“The three co-founders of DBT all worked at RJ Metrics. The founders of Stitch, myself and Jake, which became the early competitor to Fivetran and played in that space. Omni, which is a hot new ticket in the BI space, their founding CTO, Chris Merrick, was our …”

“If someone wants me to help them write SQL, or like, I don't know, debug something in Excel, like I'll go do something I do support for other people's products in Slack, because I just think it shows like a positive association with how much we care about thei…”

“You will be surprised at the difference in the conversation when you respond in one second versus one minute versus 10 minutes. Because when someone asks a question and you respond in 1:02, it immediately turns into a conversation. And It is very likely that y…”

“Looker and Tableau got acquired within a week of each other. And so again, now this gigantic market that is BI that has existed for the last 40 years has a pretty large sort of strategic hole in terms of there's not a new generational company that exists in BI…”

“I mean, I think one interesting aspect is our company as is 28. And I think 20 of us spent time at Looker and five of us spent time at our co-founders company.”

“I believe in a high touch support model because I've convinced myself that it is the 2023 version of account based marketing. So we're, that's going to exist forever.”

“And Parker spends near zero time angel investing and doesn't really angel invest. And he was like, he said that and he was like, but I did angel invest in this company. And you have to meet Colin from Omni.”

“A lot of our team 19 out of the 20 folks are from Looker and Stitch.”

“We have 20 folks on the dot. It's 16 in product and engineering, so very heavy on the build side. And that was intentional because we were fortunate to be able to raise a good amount of capital actually from two former Looker board members at a pair of VC firm…”

“We have less than 10 paying customers, but we have about 50 people using the product.”

“In some ways it's kind of easy to give away a product, but you're not necessarily learning whether you're getting valued the right way by your customer. And so one of the things that we wanted to test almost uncomfortably early is when we can actually start ch…”

“We're a sort of pivot list company. Like we know exactly what we are building and the execution at the edges is very open to interpretation. Like I want to learn about my workflows and understand that people are using them the way that I really want them to, b…”

“Like I'm not cool enough and quippy enough for Twitter. And our stuff hasn't done as well there. And on LinkedIn, it's done quite well with this sort of, you know, half of half a screen text that, you know, tells a story or a point of view and is a little bit …”

“We want to have a sales driven model. So we want to be at, you know, 25,000 dollars a year, ACVs, at least for now.”

“There's one really interesting, happy path that a user can go down and get a lot of value. And that was sort of the moment that I said, I can start giving this to people.”

“By steady state, we want to get to five deals a month and probably the 20 to 25 meetings it takes to get those five deals.”

“Literally every ticket pushes to my phone. And when I say ticket, it's like, we open up a Slack room with every customer. Every message in any customer Slack channel pushes to my phone. So I will jump on the phone at midnight and start helping someone debug an…”

“I was just giving away 379 leads. We have 400 comments in a day and each one of those 400, they get the leads. And then the second thing in the comment is a link to Omni.”

“There's a company called Alongside that's doing like cross network giant index funds. I'm personally just a big index fund person. Like I don't think I'm, I have, I don't have the patience to pick a winner. Like I'm not a day trader, but the idea that you can …”

“And the median timeline that Omni came to was about 15 months.”