Looker

“Whereas like I had to go to the support team over and over again for probably a period of two years and say the app crashing is not a priority right now because I want to do more feature work and we can suffer through this and I know it's bad, but I don't thin…”

“We sort of just pick like the 80th percentile of a great business. And we said, that's our goal. And then we drew that line out for 24 quarters and hit it, which is, you know, no, no startup founder is going to be like, I am not happy with that.”

“So one of Looker's cultural values was called the kitchen table. And it was this idea that the support team literally used to physically sit next to each other. And this was up to, you know, like it'd be a 50 person long table and everyone be sitting next to e…”

“And I feel like being able to really crisply state a small handful of unpopular priorities Almost is, I think, a good description of product leadership at scale. It's sort of like, where am I reallocating resources from steady state?”

“Is I think in, in the history of first round across 450 businesses, it's the only company that didn't miss a number all the way through sort of massive exit or sort of somewhat directionally, that's the case.”

“I just, I really think it's hard to come up with a great, like scoring framework for how to pick out the next 10 features, because I found that every single time that we tried to apply some sort of rigorous, like scoring framework to difficulty and reach and Y…”

“Like, we closed 30% of our business intracorder. Which means that they were leads generated inter quarter. The 70% was generated pre quarter. And like, I think 40% of it came from the previous quarter and 30% of it came from the three quarters previous.”

“We were hiring linearly with support with customers all the way through our acquisition. And like support was the fastest growing org inside Looker.”

“So we had everyone in the company doing customer support all the way up to, you know, like a hundred employees. And it wasn't every single day, all employees, but everyone got a taste of support.”

“And so it was this like active learning by doing next to each other that I don't think could be replicated in any other way.”

“And like, lo and behold, four years later, it's 30 or 40% of Looker's business.”

“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.”

“The original product was literally a model that you had to build in the command line. It just was technically elegant for the exact problem that it was solving. And it really aligned well with the user that we were selling it to.”

“When you're training your 70th through 80th support reps with like support reps that you've hired in the last two years, it's really, really hard to maintain a bar where just everyone knows everything about everything. So the universal answer is like, yes, cer…”

“Looker was not able to adapt to the changes that its sort of founding and popularization had resulted in.”

“I think that is when you know that you're doing something really special in terms of like company building is when you hand them something that can be used in a lot of different ways. And a lot of people are sort of circling around the same types of ways to us…”

“Like we calculated how much revenue we could get in our area of the product. And it's kind of nice when you set up a company and you're like, we can get to a billion dollars in revenue doing exactly what we do today, just more of it.”

“And I think that we actually made some of those mistakes, even like, I think that we could have taken some big risks to align more closely with DBT or to acquire possibly, or to like move into different areas of the stack that we didn't do. Because we were com…”

“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…”

“Even post Google, I wrote up a case study that said Google should retain Looker support because this six percent that we spend on support as a percentage of revenue is worth 15 or 20% in terms of, you know, like growth, retention, every kind of metric that we …”

“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.”

“Looker, who used to be our biggest competitor over at RJ, started becoming our biggest refer of business at Stitch because the Looker sales reps knew if they were going to close a deal, Their client wanted to see all the dashboards they cared about in the demo…”

“We were supposed to be what Looker became. The thing that RJ was never, and I don't think would have ever been able to anticipate was The cloud, the rise of the cloud for data specifically.”