Omni

“We had a thousand employees when we got acquired. I probably sent a LinkedIn message to 900 of them.”

“Like we had actually tried to build something similar to Omni, Inside Looker, classic kind of innovator's dilemma. It's hard to rebuild your own product type stuff.”

“So we push out all of our services externally. Like we would go pay a partner five K to implement one of our customers. And in turn, they learned about our product and would recommend it.”

“So like when our BDR team was doing this, they were getting like a three percent response rate. So they'd get three responses out of a hundred LinkedIn connects. I might get a 50% connect rate. And on a message, depending on the group, like to the ex looker gr…”

“I probably, when I started Omni had, I don't know, seven or 8000 connections on LinkedIn, maybe, maybe 6000 or something like that. And a lot of these were people that had purchased BI from Looker at some point in the past that I talked to in person.”

“But like, I think the average tenure of our first 10 employees was like eight years. So it was a lot of people that were there on the first, you know, 30 people.”

“Like we had 10 engineers with no customers, but We were very focused on the economics from a very, very early point, like mapping things out. We didn't just spend money. We didn't get an office for a year.”

“I want to say it was like 14 Lookers and five people that had worked with Chris at Stitch.”

“AI needs to do new things when it answers questions, so you can't constrain it. But as it does those new things, you want to be able to make sense of them, and you want to put foundation underneath it that's solid so that metrics are consistent, so that permis…”

“We did an implementation internally where we're like, okay, let's set things up. So it actually works well. And literally like that same week we stopped using the UI.”

“And we had five unaffiliated customers that were talking to us that we really thought were going to buy the product. They'd all like verbally committed to us. So for people that are doing sort of like normal outbound sales cycle, we had the tech win. And we th…”

“When Sonnet came out in October, our engineering team started adopting Claude Code at that point, and it was so obvious that the world had sort of changed in an instant in terms of the way that people were writing code, that it became obvious that it was going…”

“The seed, I think, was in May of 22, and it was nine million, and then the A was in August of 22, or something like that, and it was another seventeen million, I think.”

“Every good person that you hire that you used to work with, Makes the place more attractive to the people that you used to work with. So if you worked at a big company with a thousand people and you hire the 10 best people, you're going to hire the next 10 bes…”

“Pinged every single person that I knew that had used Looker in the past, that was a data person, like literally anyone that would take a conversation, I would try to show the product.”

“So, now we're like, maybe 45 K. At that point, we were just trying to get 15 K.”

“And in 20, 26, it's become, you know, like 90% AI.”

“If you have enough of those moments and those things are unique to your product, it can't just be like, that screen is beautiful. It needs to be like, wow, that's a workflow I haven't thought about. That is interesting. You can see those bits and those can be …”

“Everyone hopes that there's just some magical channel that they haven't thought of that when they turn it on, like will inflect the business. What we found that is like the least satisfying, but sort of most obvious conclusion that you could possibly imagine i…”

“It probably took us like nine months until we had our first user in the product.”

“I talked to first round the day after I left looker. And so we raised money or we didn't even raise the money. We had a handshake agreement to raise the money like four days after we left the company.”

“The idea was always a product that could compete with Tableau and Power BI and Looker and your SQL runner and sort of do everything all in one place. And that was the product that we sort of pitched and were selling from day one. It was like, get rid of all of…”

“The tricky thing is you need to build enough of the existing space to replace it, even if that is none of your differentiation.”

“Like, there were features that took us nine months at Looker that we built in a week at Omni.”

“Before it would be like, I need to make a dashboard that has a SQL tile over here and a governed metric over here. I know that sounds like the simplest thing ever, shockingly hard to do in every single BI tool that existed.”