Colin Zima
Co-Founder & CEO, Omni · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveoperator@drinkzima ↗LinkedIn ↗omni.co ↗
Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence platform. He previously served as Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker through its acquisition by Google.
24statements → 11claims → 1claims resolved → 3.83/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 10 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
11 assertions · 2 opinions · 7 insights · 3 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Colin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Colin Zima on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Colin Zima said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Zima: Product management is not a craft, but domain expertise and caring
“I don't think PM is a craft at all, which is probably evident from my previous answers about, you know, the process. Like, I think a PM is literally the intersection of caring a lot and then having some domain expertise.”
Zima: Rigorous feature prioritization frameworks are a waste of time
“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…”
Zima: Looker deprioritized app crashes for two years to build features
“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…”
Zima: Looker Failed to Adapt to Modern Data Ecosystem Shifts
“Looker was not able to adapt to the changes that its sort of founding and popularization had resulted in.”
Zima: Looker's 6% spend on support drove 15-20% lift across metrics
“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 …”
Zima: Side-by-side support training cannot be replicated any other way
“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.”
Zima: Looker and Tableau Acquisitions Left a Strategic Void in BI
“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…”
Zima: Emergent user convergence on flexible software signals special product value
“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…”
Looker scaled support staff linearly with customer count through acquisition
“We were hiring linearly with support with customers all the way through our acquisition. And like support was the fastest growing org inside Looker.”
Zima: Omni supports third-party software in Slack to build trust
“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…”
Zima: Looker's support quality inevitably declined as team reached 80 reps
“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…”
Zima: $25k ACV, 90% margin software startups can afford high-touch support
“I think at like a 25 K ACV, 90% margin software business. So like a classic sort of like high end SMB, low end, mid market sales. Everyone can afford this.”
Zima: Sub-minute support response times drive massive customer dialogue
“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…”
Zima: Product leadership at scale means driving a few unpopular priorities
“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?”
Zima: Embedded reporting grew to 30% to 40% of Looker's business
“And like, lo and behold, four years later, it's 30 or 40% of Looker's business.”
Zima: Looker could have taken bigger risks aligning with dbt or acquiring
“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…”
Zima: Looker calculated it could hit $1B revenue in core product alone
“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.”
Zima: Looker hit its 80th-percentile target for 24 consecutive quarters
“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.”
Zima: High-touch customer support is the 2023 version of account-based marketing
“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.”
Looker required all employees to do customer support up to 100 headcount
“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.”
Zima: Looker seated up to 50 support reps together at one table
“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…”
Zima: Looker closed 30% of deals intra-quarter and 70% from prior quarters
“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.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker) | Oct 12, 2023 | 59m |