“If you speak with the CIO of the company, you speak with the business, the typically business user, they use Excel, but their dream is to get rid of Excel, right?... Finance people want to stay with Excel because it's more just a tool. This is part of their, even a skills, right? Finance person, one of the things that they're proud of, I'm an Excel master”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Didi Gurfinkel
Insight
Gurfinkel: Founders should remove all sales friction during pivots to test PMF
“Moving these barriers was, I think, a very smart decision, and retrospectively, I would do it even before. That every pivot that I'm doing, everything in order to find and to optimize the time To find the mistakes, and to realize that you are in the wrong dire…”
Didi GurfinkelFeb 26, 2026▶ 25:08He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
Insight
Gurfinkel: CFOs with 15 years in Excel won't adopt web-based FP&A
“You are a CFO of a 200 employees company. You use Excel for 15 years to run your finance. You will never leave Excel. So all these web-based FP&A solution, FP&A web-based financial system, you will never Even think to move from Excel to the web.”
Didi GurfinkelFeb 26, 2026▶ 7:02He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Datarails beat competitors in every deal due to connectivity
“And when we came with such a compelling and impressive technology with this capability that we beat them in every deal. In every deal, we beat them because they couldn't even get close to what we offer with this connectivity with Excel and database.”
Didi GurfinkelFeb 26, 2026▶ 19:15He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: 100% outbound sales scaled Datarails from $0 to $20M ARR
“And this outbound motion took us from zero to a million in the first year, second year from million to five, and the third, we got to almost twenty million in outbound. At some point in the third year, we started to develop also the inbound, but the outbound, …”
Didi GurfinkelFeb 26, 2026▶ 32:40He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Investors called Data Rails the black sheep of their portfolio
“They used to tell me that we are the black sheep of their portfolios. You know, they have like this annual events, you come with a nice and you go and you know that you are the black sheep of their portfolio. You don't show any revenue. You don't show any succ…”
Didi GurfinkelFeb 26, 2026▶ 13:37He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
What-if
Gurfinkel: DataRails would not have built deep spreadsheet tech without early failures
“I think that the depth of the technology, the platform that we developed, We would never invested so much in a robust platform that connects a spreadsheet to database. And you can look at our competitor that they have some Excel integration, this and that, but…”
Didi GurfinkelFeb 26, 2026▶ 17:34He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 250 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.