The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
Zima: After Google acquisition, Looker's product and customers were neglected
“I had to stick around for two years as part of that, and I could just feel the company, like, and the product was not getting cared for, the customer base was not getting cared for”
Zima: Omni BDRs got 3% response rates while founder outreach reached 90%
“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…”
Legacy BI Tools Are Like Photoshop: Too Complex for Untrained Users
“The way data analytics has been done, or if you look at the tools, you mentioned a bunch of tools. The way I look at it is they are sort of analogous to Photoshop, you know, like Photoshop is something that graphic designers use to create their Whatever cool a…”
Zima: Looker's Inflexibility Left Market Room for Next-Gen BI Competitors
“Like we were really good at enterprise BI. We were really inflexible. And it's really hard to take like your core foundational thesis. We are great enterprise BI and data modeling and compromise it at the margin to do these other things well. And so it leaves …”
Zima: Hiring former colleagues creates a compounding talent magnet for startups
“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…”
Zima: Omni Was Pitched From Day One to Replace All Other BI Tools
“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…”
Zima: Omni built in a week features that took Looker nine months
“Like, there were features that took us nine months at Looker that we built in a week at Omni.”
Zima: Looker's semantic layer architecture was extremely rigid
“Looker was built on the data model. So this idea of build a semantic layer, it does everything. It was extremely rigid.”
Zima: messaged roughly 900 of Looker's 1,000 former employees to seed Omni
“We had a thousand employees when we got acquired. I probably sent a LinkedIn message to 900 of them.”
Zima: Team tried building an Omni-like product inside Looker first
“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.”
Zima: Omni's first 10 hires averaged eight years at Looker
“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.”
Zima: Omni's first 20 employees were nearly all Looker and Stitch alumni
“I want to say it was like 14 Lookers and five people that had worked with Chris at Stitch.”
Zima demoed Omni to every Looker user and data contact he knew
“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.”
Zima: Looker was growing 100% annually when acquired
“Looker was still growing a hundred percent a year when we got acquired, you know, like the business wasn't going poorly.”
Zima: Omni secured handshake funding deal four days after leaving Looker
“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.”
Zima: Omni started with 6,000 to 8,000 LinkedIn connections from Looker days
“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.”