Splunk

“Observability, the connectivity, the identity, and the discovery of agents. All of these technologies are usable today and out there.”

“Never leave a company you believe in for like, you know, these kinds of reasons, you know, you have to stick it out because things change really fast. And one thing doesn't change is like, you know, the trajectory of the company, like if you are an interest co…”

“SignalFX was acquired for one billion by Splunk. He then started Trastero. He gave me the honor of being the first investor in Trastero after I was the first investor in SignalFX.”

“There are two pieces of software that people always complain about from the IT side, and the op, and the IT ops side, and the data ops side, site ops side, SRE side, but they still pay, but they will absolutely switch if something cheaper comes. One is called …”

“So, in the observability area of the site observability. Similarly, for security observability, I think there is a massive area SIEM. I would say these are backward facing categories which are massive TAM which will be impacted by LLMs and by using Gen AI.”

“There is no Splunk for the electrical grid. There's no Palo Alto networks for the electrical grid yet. Like there's a whole bunch of things that mirror the IT and OT landscape, whether it's around cyber, And monitoring and logging and analytics. You know, ther…”

“The numbers you can play with, the metrics, things like that are really hard to change after the fact. So being clear around how you want to capture value and having it a fair value exchange, meaning the customer agrees that is also the way to capture value an…”

“And so we're running some interesting pilots there that ultimately showed two things. A user adoption was much, much higher because people felt like they can experiment without any real risk and commitment. Number one. And number two is the ASP for the platfor…”

“In enterprise sales or enterprise software, it's not super elastic. That's the bottom line. Splunk may be one of the more elastic enterprise products than others, but you're not going to wake up one more, one day and say, oh, let's buy a bunch of Oracle today.…”

“Every single time it's a trade off, right? Because whatever you change to, it has no linear correlation to the old model. So there are always going to be some winners and losers in this. The winner's going to take their wins. They're not going to give you the …”

“My conclusion is that this is a very real problem for a very small number of companies, and that is why Datadog, Splunk, Honeycomb, et cetera, built their own database technology, which is, in some ways, it's sad because all of the technology is a remix of pie…”

“Gary, you know, crushed it at Proofpoint and a huge value creator, and he said, you know, in a very short window, he went, he said he took stock participation from 87% to 15.”

“The lowest hanging fruit to influence growth is generating more pipeline. The idea that if you are able, if you think about Splunk at this point is a much more mature business, but for many earlier stage startups, if you just do the math on this, if you're abl…”

“The source, the majority of it is coming from the sales organization. Over 65% of it. Marketing is present about 14% and channel is the balance.”

“The worst answer, by the way, is to double down on the activities that are creating bad pipeline. That's usually what people do. They go to create pipeline. They just jam everybody. We need pipeline. SDRs, BDRs, RSMs, get out there and create pipeline, marketi…”

“I think the most under invested area is product generated pipeline. And what I specifically mean by that is once a customer is in your product, even as a trial, but certainly as an existing customer, your product experience has a unique opportunity To put new …”

“And we're just getting to that at Splunk to be blunt. Like we just had our first one last year and I've been driving for it.”

“Back when I joined, we were about a six hundred million dollar company. We're four and a half billion right now in ARR.”

“A big company back seven years ago was spending a couple of million with us. Today, they're spending 20, thirty million a year with us.”

“80% of our new bookings comes from the install base.”

“There's probably 30 security companies using code 42 today, and they're the big names in this space. It's people like CrowdStrike, and Okta, and Ping, and RapidSeb, and Splunk, and Cisco, and so it's, we have really, really good customers.”

“I think sometimes entrepreneurs are worried that if they talk to a big company, if they talk to, you know, a Splunk or a Cisco or Oracle or somebody like that, that they're going to steal their ideas. And in my experience, those companies have trouble executin…”

“We sold it for a 17 X. The public company that acquired us never disclosed the actual money, but the whole team made some pretty good.”

“We don't have an official sales team, and the previous company never had a sales team either, and we had 40,000 customers in the company that got acquired, so I strongly believe in small teams, very efficient, with a huge SaaS presence.”

“We hadn't, we were closing to that. I think we were close to like, I don't know, 1416.”

“We knew that the salaries that we're going to get were huge. We're like seven digits. We're going to be able to be directors in a huge public company.”

“And that is the problem that SignalFX solved, and then of course, Phil Liu and Karthik, who were the founders of SignalFX, built a wonderful business on the back of that, that that Splunk was happy to acquire for over a billion dollars.”

“If we tried to bring in kind of the Oracle, Splunk, elephant hunting motion, it didn't work for the way our users who tended to be developers wanted to engage with our product, and so we really had to build our own model, and it was a lot of experiments.”

“If you look at a company like Splunk, which is a dominant player in the data space, That was a venture-backed company. That was a company that went public that a lot of people had written off due to questions around market size, and the executive team there is…”

“One of the most common complaints that we hear is how expensive people's Splunk bills are. Can't tell you how many times I've heard that.”

“David Hortick from August capital. His first investment was Splunk.”

“The engine underneath Splunk needs a refresh.”

“I mean, some of our customers are taking a combination of, for example, Fluent together with Snowflake and using that as an alternative to other technologies like Splunk.”

“Valuable investments that, that we have made in, you know, the Ebates or Zulily or Splunk were all multi-billion dollar outcomes.”

“Prior to Hortonworks IPO, you could go buy some Splunk, or you could buy Tableau, and there was really nothing else that was big data.”

“So, you know, we have one competitor out there. I'll name them. They're called Splunk. So if you're familiar with Splunk, we're taking them down, and we're taking them down hard, and they know it.”

“So we were late investors in Splunk. Splunk was a great company. At no point during Splunk's pitch did they ever talk to us about big data.”