Rob Woollen
Co-Founder and CTO, Sigma Computing. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerLinkedIn ↗sigmacomputing.com ↗
Rob Woollen co-founded the cloud analytics platform Sigma Computing in 2014, navigating seven years without revenue before scaling the business past $100M in ARR. Prior to Sigma, he was CTO of the Platform at Salesforce and held senior engineering roles at BEA Systems.
1shows
1appearances
26statements
2resolved
1supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
Everything Rob Woollen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Big tech acquisitions inevitably slowed down Looker and Tableau product development
“I think big company acquisitions like that, just, it's really hard to do anything but slow down the team. And frankly, that's what we've seen in both those cases.”
Looker only satisfies LookML developers and ignores everyday business users
“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…”
Woollen: Prototypes must look polished to get meaningful product feedback
“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”
Product-market fit arrives when major deals close without any founder involvement
“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…”
Woollen: Centralized cloud data systems are the natural base for internal apps
“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…”
Salesforce decisions heavily relied on spreadsheet guesses ten years ago
“At least 10 years ago when I was there, the company was still largely run on hypotheses, you know, spreadsheets with some guesses in it. Like they couldn't, the vast majority of people that were making the important decisions couldn't really leverage all of th…”
Prospective founders easily talked out of starting should definitely not start
“People ask me, should they start a company? And my answer very quickly is no. And the And the reason I say that is actually related to your question. I say that because if just talking to me and I tell, you know, you're convinced that like, oh, maybe I shouldn…”
Woollen: Sutter Hill primarily incubates companies rather than investing externally
“They're an interesting firm and that they tend to primarily start companies as opposed to investing in other people's companies.”
BI tools overfocus on technical users; most people shouldn't learn SQL
“The sort of business intelligence applications is they really focus on technical users. So if you could write SQL or Python, you could do whatever you want in them to give them a really powerful interface, but the vast majority of people, they're not going to …”
Woollen: The BI market gets disrupted by new waves every 5 to 10 years
“It seems to go through these waves every, like, five or 10 years where a new crop of companies come in, a lot of the existing ones seem to get acquired, and then sort of fizzle out, and then this new wave takes over”
Woollen: BI tools and cloud warehouses are useless on their own
“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…”
Woollen: Automated analytics fail because software cannot capture tacit human business context
“There's a lot of things like that, where there's just inherently humans know things about sort of their business. It's hard to necessarily capture in a machine.”
Woollen: Exposing code in business tools visually alienates non-programmers
“When we showed it to end users, a lot of times when people see code, they're like,
oh, I'm not a programmer.
This tool is not for me.
It was like a visual turnoff to them.”
Woollen: Non-programmers analyze data through playful experimentation, not linear pipelines
“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.”
Woollen: Founders finding traction after long pivots must mentally reset to Day Zero
“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…”
Sigma entirely discontinued its legacy product because it couldn't support two
“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.”
Sigma Computing has officially crossed $100M ARR and 1,400 customers
“We're over a hundred now. We're over 1400 customers.”
Woollen: Cloud data warehouses traditionally locked data behind SQL and Python
“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 …”
Woollen: Sigma's target problems are identical to its 2014 founding document
“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…”
Sigma raised an $8M Series A in April 2014 without a product
“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 …”
Woollen: Two of Sigma's five team members quit after year one
“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”
Sigma built a spreadsheet-to-SQL prototype in three weeks for a Snowflake meeting
“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…”
Sigma intentionally sourced early pilot users within walking distance of its office
“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…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Rob's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder and CTO, Sigma Computing | 1 | 26 | 50% 1/2 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |