A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:07 · Pablo Srugo
[00:08:07] S2: This is where, you know, it really does matter where you start in the sense that you started with, like you said, industry. You knew a product that you knew and you used, you knew what best in class was, and obviously it's going to be biased, and all these things. But at the end of the day, your opinion on this is genuinely better than best in class, carries a lot of weight and can pull you through a lot of, let's say, not positive feedback from the market. But whether it's like no reaction or negative reaction after seeing it, and you know that they tell you things, and you can kind of measure what they say, and the feedback they give you against what you know reality is, and kind of make that all happen. And I always think, as a first time founder, you're often struggling to figure out what should you build, what idea, and oftentimes what you end up doing is you build for a market you know nothing about and you're trying to learn as fast as possible and it can't work. It genuinely can't work. There are examples where it works, but you do face this problem, which is if you don't hit it in the first one or two versions. Then you can end up in V10 and you just don't know why you're there, how you got there, and whether what you're hearing is genuine or kind of just people trying to be nice to you.
00:09:09 · Colin Zima
[00:09:09] S0: I think that's exactly right. I think the other thing I would add is we were doing a lot of demos the whole time. Like a lot, a lot of demos. I literally had a spreadsheet with a hundred names in it of people that I had demoed and while they weren't all buying the product. And, look, a lot of them were volunteering, like, you're too young, I'm not going to buy your product. You can still see when people light up and when they find things interesting. 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 enough to go build on. You have to find those moments of differentiation because if you're in a competitive space and you're not significantly differentiated, and you're not better at selling or whatever, like differentiation into the market. You're gonna have trouble with pricing power and actually selling your product. We couldn't just build a tool that charts. Charting's not that hard. You've got to find these moments where I could do a two minute demo to a Fortune 500 CIO, and they could be like, wow, that thing is actually interesting. That doesn't mean they're going to give me money, and it doesn't mean that we've found success yet, but it does mean that they saw a grain of a problem that we have solved in a unique way that you can then wrap the rest of the company around. And I felt like, in using the product, we were starting to see that and experience that.
00:10:29 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:10:29] S2: So let's go back to the beginning now that we found that moment where the inflection point started. You're a VP, you're at Looker for almost eight years, you're a VP product there. You touched on it a little bit, but let's go deeper on it. How do you make the decision to leave and start Omni? [00:10:43] S0: Mine was almost forced in some sense in that, I had started a company before. Actually with one of my co founders here. I hated it the first time. I started a company, I sort of jokingly say that our product was like Jamie and Colin start a company. Which no one needs, and we flailed around for a little bit. We ended up selling the company. I told people I would never do it again for ten years. [00:10:43] S2: What did you hate so much about it? [00:10:43] S0: I just felt like we didn't have an important idea that we needed solving. We wanted to start a company, we didn't want to solve a problem. [00:11:08] S2: Sure. [00:11:09] S0: And the world doesn't need me to start a company. The world needs me to either solve their problem and give me money or they don't need me. [00:11:16] S2: Most of the stories don't end well. Fortunately, you actually end up getting acquired.
00:11:16 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:11:16] S2: Most of the stories don't end well. Fortunately, you actually end up getting acquired. [00:11:20] S0: I mean, acquired, yeah, we sold ourselves, essentially. But Looker got acquired by Google, and it was a great acquisition. It was like $2.7 billion or whatever it was. I had to stick around for two years as part of that and the product was not getting cared for, the customer base was not getting cared for. And kind of over those two years by sitting there. I sort of had enough time to build up the courage to say, hey, I think we have to go do this. I think there's space. We have enough ideas. It's time to go do this and I think if I wasn't sitting around there for a couple of years. I probably wouldn't have tried to go build something different. 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, but it felt like there was enough of an idea that we could have space to go try to do it if we could find a team to do it with. [00:12:13] S2: It's funny, these spaces, I think of Zoom coming out of Webex, and I think of, in FP&A it happens all the time. Where there's the next gen, every five-ten years there's the next gen. And a lot of times it's people who came from the old thing, they're like, this is all that's wrong with it, let's build the better version. The same BI is a classic example of that. I almost wonder, from the outside, how does that work? Why does that work? So, you know, do you think these guys would figure it out and do it?
00:12:40 · Colin Zima
[00:12:40] S0: I think it's hard to reinvent yourself. The innovator's dilemma is a real problem. Take Looker for example. We did a lot of things really well. We did a lot of things not well. We were really good at enterprise BI. We were really inflexible and it's really hard to take 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 space for other people on the other side. And that's why you get this whipsaw back and forth in these different markets. Like Zoom Webex is a great example. They probably needed to delete their whole tech stack and start over again. Because the platforms had changed, because the market had changed in a significant enough way. It's really hard to do that, because you can't just wipe your customer base out. They all have these little features at the edge that they're using and it's really hard to be like, no, give it a little time and this whole thing will be better. And in some sense, deleting the whole tech stack, you have to go do that. And then it gives you space to rechallenge those assumptions, build things better. And I think that's what gives it space. Also, just teams get tired. I think people forget about the people side of this, which is like if you have a team that does something for ten years. You kind of do need to reshape it a little bit and inject different energy, and things like that.
00:13:55 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:13:55] S2: Reinventing is a lot of work. Not only is it hard and all these things playing against you, but you have to really want to go through that. All the pain, all the inevitable backlash, when your sales go down because you're not focused on going to market. If you're a hired CEO, it's like, why would you do that? You got to be a real killer to want to do that stuff. [00:14:10] S0: Exactly and if the business is going, like Looker was still growing a hundred percent a year when we got acquired. The business wasn't going poorly. If it wanted to do that five years from now, maybe it probably needed to do some different things or things like that. But in some sense just being told you have to restart gives you a sense of like, okay, I need to delete everything and start over. What's actually important, let's go do this again. But the context on the market matters so enormously. Like, we were able to get carried early by being the Looker guys that started the next BI tool and even if we hadn't built something good yet. People were curious and would go take a look at us. [00:14:45] S2: Right.