Omni loses all five deals from unaffiliated customers who had verbally committed before finding product-market fit in mid-2023.
Omni raises over $250m and effectively starts with $30m, funding product investment before revenue.
Colin Zima builds Omni's go-to-market by messaging nearly all of Looker's 1,000 employees and hiring former Looker sellers.
Looker alumni bet they can rebuild business intelligence
Omni is Colin Zima's bid to build the next Looker, one BI platform covering SQL, spreadsheets, pivot tables, enterprise BI and embedded analytics. Incumbents such as Tableau, Power BI and Looker cannot rebuild themselves for a new generation, so a team of Looker alumni starting with about $30m can take the category. The path ran through nine months to a first user and five lost deals before revenue followed.
Takeaways
The first user took nine months. Omni launched in February 2022 and Colin expected traction within a month. The first user, a product manager from Looker, came nine months later. For three or four months there were one or two daily active users, plus internal use.
Five committed deals were all lost. After about a hundred demos, five unaffiliated customers verbally committed and then all five deals fell through, with feedback that Omni was too young. Two months of bug fixing followed, then four trials that all converted.
Product-market fit arrived in mid-2023. Dashboards landed in January 2023 and real demos started in March. Colin dates the shift to May or June. Customers now use Omni for board-deck financials and for tracking performance against competitors.
Founder outbound beat the BDR team. Omni's BDRs got a three percent response rate, while Colin got ninety percent response and fifty percent connect rates. He messaged about nine hundred of Looker's thousand employees at acquisition and turned six thousand connections into two hundred demos.
A handshake funded the early payroll. Colin talked to First Round the day after leaving Looker and had an agreement about four days later, paying salaries with a loan at first. A $9m seed and a $17m Series A in 2022 gave Omni about $30m to start.
Partnerships split into logos and practitioners. Snowflake, Databricks, Google and Amazon knew the team from Looker but brought no business. One- and two-person data practitioners, paid $5,000 to implement customers, picked Omni off the shelf and recommended it to their clients.
AI skepticism broke when Sonnet shipped. Colin found early ChatGPT unimpressive for data and ignored it for about six months, until Sonnet shipped and the engineering team adopted Claude Code. AI features landed around October 2025 and the team stopped using the traditional UI within a week.
Why incumbents cannot build the next version
Pablo says a next-generation product appears in FP&A every five to ten years.
A hired CEO has little reason to take on the pain of reinventing a company and the sales backlash that comes with it.
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On this episode 2
Show 1
Colin says two or three unaffiliated founders could have built the best product in the world and nobody would have cared.
A buyer can pick the established brand, like Coke, or the young version and be part of the excitement.