Sigma Computing

“And our key insight was that companies increasingly move a large majority of their data into these large cloud data systems like a Snowflake or a Databricks or Google BigQuery. And those systems traditionally, you could really only access them directly if you …”

“So one of the sort of key insights we've had over time with the company is that if you're putting, you know, your company's data into this Centralized system. It then becomes kind of a natural place for you to build all of your internal applications because th…”

“That was probably January or February of 2014, and I recently found some document we wrote back then, and we sort of outlined all these problems in the industry at the time, and we've wavered a lot on exactly how we're gonna solve all those problems, but the a…”

“We raised in April. But yes, we were able to raise and this is the part where I'd say we're very fortunate in that we had long track records. So we were very well known people to the investors. But the investors gave us an eight million dollar, a series A out …”

“Any of the products in this market are basically useless by themselves. So like, SIGMA is not useful unless you can connect it to a, something like a Snowflake or a Databricks. A Snowflake or a Databricks just by itself is not that useful. You need something t…”

“Looker is a very, very heavy in the other direction. It's very focused on you're going to have a very small number of people that write in this made up programming language, LookML, and essentially those are the only people that love that product. And then eve…”

“And then actually two of the people were just like, yeah, we do this for a year. We, we're gonna, we're out. And so we went from a team of five back to a team of three”

“You have to make things that people aesthetically like, and they feel like, you know, it looks polished enough that they don't focus on that. They focus on the actual product feedback”

“And so, we once again threw away everything we'd done, and in essentially, I think about three weeks between the time we set the meeting, when we actually showed up there, we built a brand new interface, one that looks like a tiny part of our product right now…”

“No one opens up Excel and it's like, here are the next 20 things I'm going to go do. They just play around.”

“And I remember my goal was I wanted people that were ideally within walking distance of the office. Like it's one of the, you know, one of the advantages of being in something like San Francisco is like, I know there's lots of startups right around here. And s…”

“And so the next quarter, and I still see this on our on our company sort of dashboard, the next quarter we closed zero new customers.”

“You also have to sort of mentally, you know, you're at day zero. Like it doesn't matter that you spent three years trying to build stuff. You're at day zero and you have to be like ready to fight from day zero, not ready to fight from over, you know, four year…”

“We have to move on to this new product. Like we, we've made a company decision. We can't support two products. We've got to make this transition.”

“Yeah, we, I think three years in a row tripled the company. So, you know, it was like three, nine, 27, something like that.”

“We're over a hundred now. We're over 1400 customers.”

“I think for me, the first, like, sort of sign of Product Market Fit was, we were signing customers that were paying us, you know, as much or more than all these ones that I had personally, like, spent all these, you know, hours on hand-holding, And I'd never e…”

“All of the private sort of, you know, investment in stuff that was going on in 2022 informed, you know, our public investment into NVIDIA and our public investment in NVIDIA helped inform our private investment into CoreWeave and our, you know, relationship wi…”

“So I joined, you know, almost seven years into the company. They had less, you know, about 800,000 dollars in ARR, 50 customers and about 50 employees.”

“Which is, by the way, a testament to Mike Spicer at Sutter Hill because he is, he has so much conviction in his companies that despite overwhelming evidence that the company is a total failure, he keeps investing in it.”

“Even in face masks, I required everybody to come back to the office and I still require that today. Which is its own conversation, but I'm not a believer in remote work”

“We went from a couple of million dollars in June of 21 to a hundred million dollars three and a half years later”

“We do not do any caching. So everything you do in Sigma is live query on the warehouse.”

“Our customers have up to trillions of records. And our overhead on that transaction is less than one second.”

“But the fun part is like a reference JP Morgan Who uses our product, and when they connected the first time, the guys, I think, is sort of like, I can swear in here. Holy , holy , I just built a six billion row pivot table, right?”

“So we looked at all of our enterprise customers Table utilization over a 60 day period, and .1% of the tables in their warehouses were ever touched.”

“So the idea that I'm supposed to adopt a SQL semantic concept into my natural language is the ultimate hubris of engineering.”

“So I think these products are a joke. I don't think that they're going to succeed and we don't care about them.”