EP 86: Christian Chabot (Co-Founder, Tableau) on Operating Lessons From Scaling Tableau to $15.7B

31:06If you'd gone to any one of them and said, is WebEx one of your enterprise software platforms? They would have immediately said, nope, that's a side tool people use for meetings. But yet I could go to their finance departments and see, you spend$2 million a year. You have a$300 ,000 support contract. your employees list this tool as being strategically important to their day you know crucially important to their monthly work product you know it is a piece of software you install it had an it had a local install you know why aren't you calling that enterprise software if it's not enterprise software what is it and that then that that was the duty what webex was becoming one of the biggest enterprise software companies in the in the states and no one even knew it Because they could just go to people, inspired people who wanted to try it or use it in some small team.

32:00They would run it on a credit card or expense it very quickly. And it's called land and expand. You know, this is where this phrase, land and expand account management would come. Only later did WebEx come in with professional salespeople and account managers who would start to nurture those accounts up in adoption and success. So if I were to still let down, I mean, WebEx dogfooding its own piece of software and the ability to sell video software remotely. And then I guess just the Internet and people being more used to making transactions over the web and credit cards and all that. Were those the two kind of enablers of the willingness to buy that way?

32:38Yeah, as I see the history, yes. I'm sure they are too we're building on a prior generation, but they're important. And then, of course, I do have to give Salesforce credit. So, you know, the Salesforce lore story that apparently Benioff likes to tell is there was a day he had a dream. And if only enterprise-grade CRM tools, this is year one, Salesforce, you know, when they only did CRM, customer relationship management. He had a dream, you know, if only enterprise-grade, highly scalable, critically important CRM tools could be as easy to buy and use. as amazon.com and so that company you know march forward with this sensibility that enterprise software shouldn't be this heavy complicated thing requiring consulting services and sales people shaking your hand in the lobbies and four-month pilots and professional services team and technical support can't can't i just click the go button and start yeah can't i just run a credit card and pilot in a group.

33:43And of course, they just took over CRM with this new kind of product, but also this new kind of customer adoption and selling model. And so needless to say, companies like us, this cohort of companies who helped really bring that into a worldwide revolution in our industry, we're all inspired by those companies. I've heard you say the hardest part of decision-making in business is making a decision without a lot of resources. How does an abundance of capital, it's an interesting question in this market environment, how does an abundance of capital pervert operational rigor of business? We can go back to one of your very first questions.

34:21What are the things you saw during those? I'm going to keep asking questions until you rip on venture capital appropriately. Just keep coming back to it. And admittedly, I was probably not seeing the industry at its best couple of years. But one of the things I saw were small teams of people with some disruptive ideas and some big ambitions. You know, entrepreneurs who had formed a company and were immediately, virtually immediately in the chronological timeline, given an enormous quantity of capital because of the dot com run up. And so you'd have these companies and they're like, you know, seven or 70 or even 170 people and they have$80 million in the bank.

35:11Well, what happens to the culture of that company when you grow up in a garden like that? The culture of decision-making gets perverted because any problem can be solved with it by throwing enough money at it, right? And so rather than people thinking creatively, doing less with more, having to prioritize in the brutal way that actually creates healthy startups, grapes and vines, the tough soil creates the great grapes. All that just gets flushed out. It's just flushed down the toilet because you can just start throwing money at everything. And so within the company, you're starting to soil the way decisions get made.

35:52And you're starting to soil the culture of the company with regard to how we think about problems. And so that's one. And I can keep going with other problems. But that's a taste of it. Too much money too early, I think, is, you know, never say never. It seems like it can be a corrupting force. Yeah, I think about the businesses that raised large sums of money before they found product market fit. and I can kind of only come up with work day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they had done it once before. Yeah, and anything can work some of the time. I'm sure that does work sometimes. Totally. But that's saying it doesn't.

36:26It's just like, wow, I kind of wonder statistically. As you say, I don't think that's the winning strategy more often than not. There's something to appreciating the journey and the grind of being an entrepreneur. I think you uniquely appreciated kind of the – it wasn't a means to an end. It wasn't a means to buying a big beach house or a plane or something. Right, yeah, yeah. I think you uniquely appreciated the journey. I've heard you reference the fact that Vincent van Gogh would never actually sign his works. And you had an interesting quote that failure and defeat are a necessary part of achievement and self-fulfillment.

36:58Can you speak a little bit about the beauty and grind of entrepreneurship or enjoying the journey of building a company and not just the ends of the outcome or something like that? Yeah, I guess, you know, as you as you put your eye on some ambitious goals and then start to accomplish them or almost accomplish them, you know, you kind of get over that peak. And then immediately when you get to the top of that peak that you thought was going to be so amazing, you see the next horizon. You know, you see the next set of peaks. And what I came to learn over this technology journey, and I speak only from our journey, but I would think this would be in common, is the great satisfaction that comes with realizing, wait a second, we will never be finished with this work of art.

37:52And of course, you know, 20 years later, I can't wait to see what new features and what new customer capabilities Tableau launches in the next six months, because the data environment is changing once again. AI is coming into the fore. New geographic areas are leaning into data. And so you have a wellspring of creative design and opportunity that will never end. And in our context, we helped people see and understand data. That was our mission. And we believe that helping people do that is a generally positive force in the world. And so in that creative journey of finding new horizons and building the next thing.

38:33We're helping them, you know, doing our small part to improve the world generally. And that's the, that's the great satisfaction. Is there a point in the journey you look back with most nostalgia on? I think the thing I am most nostalgic for is that there was a team of people who ended up coming together and solidifying who ran the the company. It was myself and Chris Dolti and Pat Hanrahan. We ultimately found an amazing sales leader named Kelly Wright. We ultimately found an amazing marketing leader named Elisa Fink. We ultimately, actually early on, there was a great inventor and engineering manager named Andrew Beers.

39:14Thanks to our venture investors, we found a general counsel named Kenan Condor. thanks to our venture investors, we found an HR leader named Brett Thompson. I'm sure there's someone missing. An operations leader named Brian Smith. I'll stop. But there's about, you know, if you look at the pyramid of a company, the company's really run by somewhere between, I think, most tech companies and they're sort of, you know, at this sort of billion and less stage. You know, that's kind of my domain. Yeah, there's somewhere between five and 20 people who kind of run the company. Like all, you know, all the big decisions, like someone in there, it has to be involved you know what i mean and so for the group of about 10 or 8 or 10 that i just named we came into a situation where we had the right people in the right roles we had incredible group chemistry a great sense of teamwork and mission and that team of us was together in this journey for somewhere like 8 to 10 years without a single person turning over and so that that thrill of working in a team of extremely talented people with very low drama and very high ambition toward a goal that we thought was very important i mean that's that's one of life's greatest journeys so i was able to dig up the growth numbers from tableau and there were some blog posts way back when so 2004 800k in revenue 2005 2.1 2006 3.7 2007 7.8 2008 13.9 2009 20.1 so clearly a very growing fast startup not the triple triple double double that we hear today yeah in that journey obviously you didn't raise outside capital until what 2006 that sounds let me think about that i'd have to think about that yeah obviously a few years in we raise we We do end up raising a little bit of money.

41:15And then about four or five years after that, we raised a little bit more. And that was sort of the end. So you obviously did this profitably along the way. But did it feel like you had the tiger by the tail as those numbers were going up? Or was it a slog each step along the way? No, not at all. In fact, this is probably the area I am most often called in on for advice to entrepreneurs right now. Because it's something I can speak to. Yeah. And I think people view me as, you know, I can just reassure people on a few things for whatever it's worth. Here's maybe a way to put it. When you think about the technology industry, you know, you've got this venture capital, you've got these IPOs, you've got all these startups coming out, you know, and all the headline grabbing technology companies, they're usually B2C companies.

42:05They are these once in a hundred years rocket ships. In fact, it's hard to pick up the paper even today and hear about any company other than Facebook, Google, Google, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, you know, it just, and now they're big. So that's maybe the reason we hear about them now, but you know, these, these rocket ship things, YouTube, Groupon, and they, they just, they go from zero in revenue and customer adoption to a hundred million in revenue and customer adoption in months, six months, 18 months, 21 months. And so I think the venture industry, the newspaper media circuit, young people, students dreaming about going into technology, you get biased and you start to think, oh, that's how new technology companies are created.

42:56And the fact is those companies with those trajectories are a tiny percentage of all successful tech companies. I'm not even going to say of all tech companies, even of all the successful ones, it turns out to be a very small percentage. And in our arena, which is business software, so now we're over on the B2B side, it's virtually unheard of. And so it's commonly the case well i should actually answer your question which is during their those years of sort of etching out our next 30 or 50 growth we were working so hard there was just blood sweat and tears going in every year we certainly had this feeling that something here is working but in in those years you're describing, no one thought, wow, we're hot, we're inflecting.

43:48Yeah. We have a tiger by the tail. That was not really the sentiment, but we were perfectly happy. We were building a very good business and we had our, we had our eye on long-term principles, you know, and things we were chasing and things we were not willing to sacrifice on. And by pursuing those, um, along with some patients, we ended up creating a really big an important company, I think, you know, at least for our industry. And, and I look back at the, you know, the fret, all the fretting about whether we're growing fast enough. And I think there was probably just a lot of wasted time, you know?

44:21So I, so I would look to any of your companies, Logan, or any, any, any in the portfolio, if you want to ever call me. Yeah. If you have someone in that situation, you know, I would just generally look at things. I'm looking for something basic, which is, is it working? There's a big difference between, is it working and is it not working? That's important. But if it's working, meaning customer adoption is up and to the right by a somewhat impressive percent, I don't know, 20%, 40%, 50%, that's amazing. Who here would say it's failing? That's great. The product is revving. If the team chemistry is good, if the capital burn is reasonable, it's working.

45:07Can we all just relax and just be patient for five years to see what happens? And I'm biased by our story. There are other stories that could contradict that account, but I think it's an important one to keep in mind as you're building a company and software. Hey guys, Rashad here. I'm the producer of The Logan Bartlett Show, and I wanted to make a quick ask. We're trying to get to 10 ,000 subscribers by the end of the year, and we're pretty close. But if you're enjoying this, please consider subscribing. Now back to the show. So ultimately, you did decide to raise capital. What led to that decision?

45:44Okay, so a few years passed, and we're bootstrapping, and it starts to go very well. And we had, you know, meaning both with our door-to-door knocking of trying to find these analyst heroes, just like Salesforce or WebEx was doing, trying to find those passionate early adopters who might take a risk on a new technology to improve their life. We were starting to get hundreds of those. This is starting to feel like, oh, maybe we're not getting, maybe these aren't one-off victories anymore. Maybe there's like really something here in this market. So that feeling underneath, something here is working and good, started to really take root in us.

46:23And equally importantly, we signed a distribution deal, not a customer deal, but a distribution deal with a big company in our industry. Hyperion? Hyperion, which was a home run for us. We didn't have to give up any intellectual property. We didn't have to give up any ability to sell to any other company or partner. But we did get to have a license tied distribution deal. And it was like an eight figure deal or something it was yeah and so just for people's benefits the business intelligence industry you can sell to the end customer right or you can oen the software and someone else can license it from you pay a lot of money and they paid you for the visualization and all that yeah for you know for them they just took it in as like oh yeah well it's like our original dream of like oh well this must be some interesting new tool to just add to the toolkit of an analyst that's just so useful but there must be a way and so they they took a bit there was a year sales cycle on that you know it was more the heavy the heavy selling but but not to an end customer not city group but to an intermediary where we can get some leverage and that part of our strategy i look back and i think gosh i'm glad we took that bet because um you know i could equally see that not working but it did work out we found the right people at the right time and it turned into an eight-figure deal for the company.

47:44And so now you've got a company. I'm a few years in, we're all skeptical of taking professional money and selling control. We do have big ambitions. And like all entrepreneurs, we're thinking, well, there's some clock is ticking here on competitive threat. You know, they're at some point, if we're right about our thesis, there are going to be competitors and they're probably going to be fierce. And so we realize raising some capital to be a little more more ambitious probably would be a good idea and we were able to do it while following the principle the principle we had about professional money and that principle was simple we will entertain taking in an external financial partner on our journey when it is clear we can do so while maintaining control of the company for its lifetime it's a principle it's not a spreadsheet with cost benefit.

48:41That's consequential decision making. Most business decision making is consequentialism. Pros, cons, swats. But there's a different mode of decision making that's based on principle. And on that one, that was our principle. And so do you know how much time, this is other advice to entrepreneurs considering bootstrapping, do you know how much time in our first two years as a fledgling venture, we spent courting or presenting to venture capitalists? I would guess zero. Zero. Because that's the other thing you do when you choose not to bootstrap. You end up spending, you know, that's a very time consuming process, you know, better than anyone, you know.

49:22And so we were just able to be really efficient in small part because we weren't doing activities like that. And so to answer your question, now you can see where this is all going. Two, two and a half years in, we arrive at a moment where we can adhere to our principle and get the benefit of capital that allows us to go after our ambitions faster. How'd you go about picking NEA to work with? Boy, is that a good question. I don't remember where the original introductions came, but we got into conversations with, I think, about five firms pretty early. probably word of mouth relationships. I don't remember anymore, but there were about four or five firms.

50:05And we started this process with each, which, you know, as I said, turns out to be a little time consuming. But we learned pretty fast, as you can imagine, that if you are able to fundraise on your terms, it goes pretty fast. And so it did not take professional investors long to see a company with spirited founders, already cashflow positive, with some early passionate customers and an eight-figure contract with a distributor. No debt, no baggage, no founder inviting. And by the way,$20 billion market. How long would it take you to think, maybe we should give a term sheet? Yeah, call me if that's what your company looks like.

50:50Okay, so it was pretty fast. And then you ended up working with Scott Sandell and they led the A and the B and the A did. Yeah, and an important part of the bootstrapping story, and then you should try to get Scott's version, but we did go through it, and the final stage in fundraising is the final presentation to the partnership. And the next day or two days later, we got a call, and Scott and Forrest Basket, who was also involved, said, great work. It's sort of a classic venture moment. Sure. Great work. The partners are super excited. We'd like to put a lot of money in. And they either gave us a term sheet for$20 million or said they would give us a term sheet for$20 million.

51:32I forgot which. And we just immediately said, that's too much capital. And so of the 15 or 20 they offered in writing, we said, we'll take five. And then, you know, for the entrepreneurs listening, professional venture investors have a very savvy response to that moment. They do this for a living. you're doing it once they do this all the time they've seen this movie before and they say an investment that small would be very difficult for our fund and there's a bunch of other dramatic speech that's inserted and my advice to you out there is generally thinking i generally speaking i think that's just untrue yeah great great investors want to get involved and they know there's going to be subsequent fundraising opportunities you know and and scott scott's Scott is Scott's an amazing investor, by the way, for all my early skepticism.

52:23It took a Scott Sandell to turn me around and say, wait, this is a class act. This is someone who is at another level. And of course, I think when I gave that response, he immediately starts laughing. It says, OK, fine. We're in anyway. Yeah. So you probably lowered your nominal valuation there, I would guess. I mean, yeah, we probably did. Although it's funny, we never even got there because I knew by principle we're not taking that much. And also I was realistic. I know he's not going to double the value. So there'd be some adjustment there. So that worked out great. So they were in with five and then had an easy seat at the table.

52:58In fact, Scott got exact. Now I think how savvy this person is, Scott and Forrest. So because we were bootstrapping and cash flow positive, we never actually even used the five they gave us. Now, that doesn't mean it wasn't valuable because you can't run a business on the edge of a knife. You can't be at like 50K in your bank account while you're telling Citigroup you're going to be around a long time. So although it's true, we actually, oh, no, no, we used a little bit of the money, but we never used the five. I think we used 1.5 of it. And then we just started earning it back again. But point being, so it took like four or five more years before we even thought of raising any more capital or bringing another investor in.

53:40And when we did, I think within a day of us mentioning the idea, Scott said something along the lines of, if you're interested, we'll just take the whole thing. You can save all that fundraising time. You can work with someone you trust and so on. And if I remember the chronology right, that's what we did. I don't think another investor even came in at that time. And so, Scott, to the VC strategy part of this conversation, that commitment to just come in at a lower amount than they were visualizing worked out great for them. So one of the things you referenced there in the desire to raise capital was a desire to go quickly.

54:18And eventually, if you recognize this market opportunity, someone else potentially would. But another thing I've heard you say is not to worry about your startup competitors, that you guys were always focused on Microsoft or Google or whoever it was and not necessarily XYZ competitor that was also venture backed. How did you think about that and the competitive set? oh boy i'm just one person's story but i'll tell you um we had so much more time allotted to us without a legitimate competitive threat than you would ever imagine coming out of business school or picturing some industry that's so notoriously cut through it you can't even think about it and from other conversations i've had i've come to learn this is more common in business software than you would think.

55:09And so keep in mind for your listeners here, my whole experience and expertise and story, it's in the business software industry. I completely understand that over in B2C world or in marketplace world, if you're building a marketplace, that there appears to very much be this first one to scale, one winner. I get it. And so this advice isn't isn't applicable to that situation. But I will say I've studied a lot of business software companies, including ones in, in, in, in flight now. And, you know, probably if you're going into a sector of business technology, um, like we were, there are a bunch of big billion dollar dominant players, each who have somewhere between five and 15 % of the market.

55:57And so in our case, It was, you know, when we set out, when we set out, there was a billion, billion dollar brand named Business Objects, billion dollar business named Cognos, billion dollar business named Hyperion, billion dollar business named SaaS Enterprise, billion dollar business named Oracle Discoverer slash OBI, billion dollar business called Microsoft Reporting Services, billion dollar business called Crystal, which later this all consolidated. But at the time, these were all big. I think I counted them. There were 12 multi-billion dollar brands who owned the market. And a few years in, we start to realize maybe we could be more than a data analyst tool.

56:41Maybe we could disrupt that whole thing. And now to answer your question, you might think, well, 18 months in, you guys are going to try that. You can almost imagine giving someone in that situation some advice. Guys, if you're going to go for that, you need$50 million right now because 18 months into your success, those guys are going to realize you're onto a better way. They're going to scramble their most elite engineers to create a competitive product. They're going to put it out with brand savvy and acumen, and they're going to become a huge problem for you competitively before you even cracked 1 % of the market.

57:21You would think, based on maybe business school study. Sure. that's what's gonna happen do you know how many years it took them to get their heads out of there and even realize we were on to a better way i think it was five years before they even realized we were a problem and it was another five years before they were actually able to put together a legitimate product you know and by that time it was too late it's too late they missed 10 years Microsoft, you know, and that included titans like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon, biggest companies in the world. And so I, you know, I tend to be the person at the table saying, it's possible we have more time than to scramble your picturing in your head.

58:12Can we just focus on building the best product out there, having great customer service, building a handcrafted brand, you know, and winning customers one at a time. Is there any way we can just focus on that and not just get stuck in our own heads about what's going to happen competitively? You know, so anyway, but you know, again, I'm biased by the way our journey. Sure. We talked about this a little bit, but a number of people that you hired in the early days scaled all the way with you along the journey. Your first CFO, Tom Walker, took the company Pumplik. We talked about Kelly Wright, who I think she ultimately retired as CRO after joining early on.

58:51Can you talk about how you were able to get these people to scale with you as the company grew in the journey? Oh, my gosh. I just realized in my original list I missed Tom Walker, didn't I? Oh, my Lord. Yeah, he was one of the earliest and one of the most crucial and the longest lived, by the way. So, yeah. Boy, Logan, that is a difficult question to answer. My best answer is that... You know, it didn't happen accidentally. you know there were some people who were better off taking other roles in other companies as we were growing up because they couldn't scale to that next level they weren't the right fit anymore yeah and so there were some changes it was not as simple as magic wand ta-da but once we settled into that team i would say you know i would say each of us myself included came into our own because not one of us had done it before.

59:46So there's another VC skepticism thing I learned from our vintage. These days, I think VCs are much more sophisticated about this. But in our vintage, there was sort of this traditional philosophy about if we're going to back someone with big money, they better have done it before. They better have a team of seasoned professionals who've been through the wars. And maybe all I can tell you is that we built a multi-billion dollar company from scratch and not one of us had done it before not one and so rather than rather than suggest i had some magic managerial moment that helped coach these people up if i had one that would be amazing um i think a better description is that we had a great team energy each of us realized actually we sort of bonded around the fact that we were this new new team each trying to um you know achieve something together that was important.

1:00:43And we reinforced each other and encouraged each other and helped each other through hard times. That's honestly more what it felt like. The folks that survived with the company or whatever, endured all the way through, were there any commonalities of the characteristics that you would draw on the types of people that were able to scale into those next roles along the way? Oh, yeah. I mean, the first one, I mean, that would take a long answer and more reflection than we have now but i guess one that comes to mind is um within it within a company you have your mission at the top you have the company one rung down you have your team one rung down from that and you have you one rung down from that and so may i suggest when we go into meetings or talk about subjects, we talk about things in that order.

1:01:39So if there is a team member coming in and it's all about me, me, me, I, I, I, if for no other reason, we're going to back burner that agenda item because it's not in order. And people love to be part of workplaces that have that worked out, that they have the hierarchy very clear in their heads. We are about the mission. We are about the company. We are about us. We are about team. You know, we didn't invent this. This is widespread and great workplaces in all sorts of industries. And all of those people had that to an exemplary level that just reinforced everyone else to have even more of it.

1:02:18You know, so that's, um, and some of the, and some of the cases that didn't work out very clearly did not have that, you know, you purposely made the decision not to hire from other business intelligence companies or people in your space? What was the rationale behind that? And when can domain expertise be a negative thing in building a company? Oh, wow. That's a deep question. Yeah. I mean, early on, we were, you know, we're finding our way in everything. You know, and initially, you know, so let's say you're listening to this and you have a small company and you're finally at the time when, oh, maybe we could add like a professional salesperson and whatever you call them, customer adoption, sales, evangelism, business development, whatever you call it, the people who are going to go out and try to encourage education and adoption and sale okay again my domain is business software so those are that that that tends to apply and um you know you might think okay like if you're in our situation you might think well sheesh i guess we're going to take over the bi industry now or at least be a positive contributor to it let's go get some sales reps from the big powerful billion dollar brands i just rattled off they know what they're doing.

1:03:26Sure. They have a Rolodex of customers they can go call on. They have no customers. They sort of know the lingo of the industry and all that stuff. And we tried that. And there's examples of everything. Once in a while, that can work. But mostly, it was a disaster. They were so schooled in the old way of talking to customers, in the old ways the technology worked, in the old ways of company culture, that they never really deeply understood there was a whole new way of thinking about the industry. Whereas if we hired people who had worked for other disruptor companies, right, in other business software segments, you know, generally they would just immediately fold into the dough, just go running because they've done it before.

1:04:13So for instance, when we were able to hire people from Salesforce, who themselves can remember when Salesforce started, they were just like us. I rattled off our brands we were against. They had the same thing. Siebel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and they're all just racked up, you know, and they came in with this disruptive product and disruptive way of driving customer adoption. and a salesperson would come in and within 24 hours completely understand what we're trying to do. And now they just had to learn the domain of the industry, you know? And so there are examples of us hiring great early people for both.

1:04:50I don't want to overplay it, but we started to develop this philosophy that, you know what, you know, since there are limited recruiting hours in the day, why don't we go ahead and just target people who have experience in these other disruptor software companies. And then that worked out fantastic. Yeah. On the topic of sales. So we touched on earlier how you guys really pioneered in part the departmental level sale. How'd you go about getting this flywheel going? Was it inside sales initially that really got it going and finding that business analyst that would champion you internally? Or how'd you go about building the flywheel?

1:05:26Yeah. So this is where a lot of the dimensions of a company come together. So you've got a few things coming on. One, we can see that there's a sea change coming in the way business software gets sold and adopted because of the names I mentioned and common sensibilities. You're watching the world change with the internet. Secondly, we're trying to bootstrap. We're trying to be a capital efficient enterprise. We can't afford 12 field sales reps all planted in like NFL cities, each making$350 ,000 a year, and every three of whom needs a manager costing $410 ,000. You're like, this is not it. We didn't even map that one out.

1:06:07We can't afford it. You know? And so you've got that influence. And then you've got one more influence, Logan, which is in our industry, it turns out the people most interested in being an early adopter of a technology like we had, you know, these inspired people here and there, they were, we discovered this took about 18 months to really figure out. They were scattered like grain seed. You know, it would have been people trying to do the classic bowling pin market, you know, bowling pin market thing would have been very frustrated with us because, um, they weren't in one group. They weren't in one.

1:06:42They were just scattered like grain seed. They just generally tended to be kind of a a quantitatively leaning person within their group but their group name and industry name and division name could be anything under the sun so if you were to deploy an expensive field sale customer adoption force like where would you put them you know so you've got these three influences here and they conspire to say let's build a really tight high performance inside sales engine that tries to land these initial customer seeds in a way that's very helpful to the customer, very efficient to the customer, and also capital efficient for us.

1:07:24And this is at a time in our vintage where inside sales meant something different than it meant now. So the statement I'm making is a little stronger than it sounds. At that time, it was more common that inside salespeople didn't actually sell. Like in the year 2000, if you said, I'm an inside salesperson, people who knew the industry, you weren't actually selling. You were almost always in support of the person who was selling. There was usually someone in the field or at a partner location who actually owned the customer relationship, and you were their junior support person. And again, a WebEx and a Salesforce and a Tableau and a Box and a Splunk and a bunch of us we started to flip that and say actually no there's there's nothing second class about an inside salesperson you can have a quota that's almost as big you can have autonomy that's that's you know nearly as big you can have um um you know the thrill of having a direct customer relationship and getting into direct demonstration and technical problem solving you know issues with customers, the people in that career really like to work on.

1:08:33And it worked. So we had to grow that. You saw our revenue growth. So we never had to decide to go hire like 100 at once. Well, we did, but that came later. But in this period, we were able to feel our way there and add people as we felt we could make them productive in this new customer adoption model. You were always a company that spent a lot on R &D. And even going back and reading the S1 or the stuff around the IPO, something that you guys really prided yourself on. How did you think about the trade-off of a dollar of revenue comes in the door and how to balance that between sales and customer support, but then also research and development?

1:09:11Oh, that's a good question. Well, in our case, once we flipped, you know, sort of expanded our strategy to saying we can make a world-class data analysis tool, which we did continue to do. But once we had that big step in ambition a few years in to say, actually, let's go try to revolutionize this$20 billion business intelligence industry. Once we made that change, the amount of work we had to do on the product side to make that a reality as opposed to something you wave your hands up and say you do was overwhelming. And so to us, it was almost kind of easy. Like as long as we have cash available, let's pour it into invention and building this magical future for customers that we see that's probably 10 years out, you know, and it turned out it was many years out before it really came into the fore.

1:10:10And then the second constraint, because you're asking a sad question, you're asking, you're all you're all say asking, yeah, but why that versus some other trade off to you? what trade-off were you making and i would say during the period you're talking about like you know 1 million to say 50 million in revenue during that period um the feel was that we were awareness constrained and so just putting in new sales people and giving them 600 000 annual quotas and saying by the way half of your compensation is at risk because it's a performance-based job when really there wasn't the company awareness there to justify it.

1:10:50Keep in mind, we're working all from the inside. You find your way in these constraints. Every company doesn't. For us, that just didn't feel good. It didn't feel respectful to the salespeople being hired. And so it wasn't quite as stressful for us to say, oh, okay, rather than five more inside salespeople who work these five zip codes where we have no leads, you know why don't we just go ahead and make the product better you know so both of those things are going on interesting i've heard you say that successful software companies come in three acts zero to a hundred a hundred to a billion and then a billion plus right what what shifts the most between act one and act two zero to a hundred then a hundred to a billion well let me let me let me get get my visualization straight in my own head so we had a year where our sales goal was about a hundred thousand dollars i think it was that that i think that second year bootstrapping and so the founder you know i was doing all the selling basically you know and the other guys um so we had this hundred thousand dollar sales goal and then we we reached it and then a few years later we have a million dollar sales goal that's a 10x you know some years later we have a 10 million dollar annual sales goal that's a 10x years later we have a hundred million dollar annual sales goal.

1:12:07That's a 10X. A few years later, we have a billion dollar annual sales goal. So you've got, I don't know, four or five 10Xs there, right? And so I feel that, you know, things change pretty profoundly in each of those 10Xs, you know? So that's such a broad canvas question. I'd almost have to turn it around. Like, are you thinking people dimension? Are you thinking market? Are you thinking finance? People was mostly what I was thinking, but just operationally, I guess, what the biggest shift was as you start scaling in that way? You know, in that road to say 25 million, if you're listening to this and thinking, we don't seem to have all the organs we need.

1:12:54Wouldn't it be great if we had a pancreas and a gallbladder and a stomach you know wouldn't it be amazing if when this kind of problem comes in we had like a an organ that does that we never felt like we had all the organs we needed you know so i would say that's probably true through at least 25 million maybe 50 million you're just not a fully functional body you know it's just you've got you've got heart brain and stomach it's like ah what about all these other things and so you end up with these highly flexible sweeper positions who are picking up problems being flexible not caring about their job title taking on more responsibility you know and so on prioritizing in very efficient startup ways and it's it feels like you're just never on top of it and so hopefully i'll answer this in like an inspiring way for sure by a hundred million but it happens for us it happened before then i just have to figure out the number by a hundred million you feel wow we have a functioning organism and it starts to feel really thrilling you know when this kind of opportunity emerges or this kind of problem comes in or this kind of new horizon needs to be explored or this kind of side project comes on there's always just a place for it um you have your p you know you have your reporting structure pyramids pretty well established by that time there's no more uncomfortable conversations with why you're getting a boss you know the culture is bought in that oh wow we need to scale and grow and think bigger than ourselves and then it becomes um much easier and much more fun but i wish i could say it was by five or ten million that you felt we felt that no way no way it was many years after that.

1:14:48And that's why startup people and startups always look like their hair is on fire. One of your investors defined your culture as smart and humble. I don't know if that was something you guys said internally was like one of the prescriptive cultural values, but how did you think about establishing the Tableau culture? Our CMO, Elisa Fink, coined that term. She was once trying to recruit someone and they said, well, what's the culture of Tableau like, and she said, well, it's humble smart. And so she invented that. But, um, so take one of our founders, Pat Hanrahan. Um, Pat is a storied inventor.

1:15:26He was older than, um, than Chris and I, um, by, I think maybe 10 years and very accomplished, brilliant person award, you know, by the, by the time all of us met him already had, I think two Academy awards, you know, Tenured professor, all of it. And if you were to meet Pat at a party, he would be cooking bratwurst on a grill wearing a flannel. There's just no arrogance. You would never even realize you're talking to someone. You know you're talking to someone very smart. You wouldn't really know. There's no air about it. you know i've never never seen pat put out his credentials or his status or his title as accomplishments in any in any but the most um humble way you know and so i'd have to reflect more on the answer to question but that's like a really specific visualization and so like um i think some set of the company had that spirit themselves just by virtue of their own life journey and then others were inspired by people like pat who had it and it just kind of carried through you know where did you learn the most about hiring people over the course of the tableau journey do you mean at what stage or what just in general interview favorite interview questions just things that you in an interview process and bringing people on board oh well i'll give you i'll give you advice you might not be expecting i'll tell you a story so um there was there's a good friend we used to have dinner with a lot during the hockey stick period of tableau and he was a researcher at the university of washington in in brain science and he just came from a completely different world like i had gone to business school and building this company and we've got all these staff members and money that has to be raised and you know he's applying for grants i think manages one person you know did a phd you know just completely different roles but we're friends you know and so every once in a while we would ask each other well we would ask each other about each other's world.

1:17:37It was just fun to learn what that world was like for him as he's building his career. And he would ask me, and I remember one time he said, oh, how's Tableau? And I'm like, well, we're like 600 people now. And he's like, weren't you like 380 people last year at this time? I said, yeah, it's crazy. And he just goes, and he's a second, he was a trained is a psychologist and he said, how could you possibly hire so many people in such a short amount of time? How do you approach that interview process? And I said, well, I don't know if we have any magical formula. Some things are traditional. We have resumes and interviews.

1:18:27I said, but so far in, if there's one thing that seems to be like a really reliable indicator of whether someone's going to succeed in the job, it's that, and he puts his hand up and he goes, stop, let me guess. And he goes, you have them perform a task directly applicable to the job they're about to take. and i go how how did you know i mean i wasn't going to word it that way but yeah that's the answer and he goes oh this is well established after 20 years of research in academia it's like it's the only finding according to him that paper after paper shows because people have all these weird voodoo beliefs sure about interview how firms your handshake yeah what i want to have a beer with them you know there's like really you know but there's some science it's a studied subject.

1:19:21And it turns out if you look for statistical significance, this is one of the only things. So our version of that, this started with engineers. In fact, I think Microsoft started this in the 90s. This thing started in engineering departments that if you wanted to interview at a company like Microsoft, there was a moment in your process where you had to go to the whiteboard and code. You know, like we're past where you went to college and what beer you like. Okay, like go do a bubble sort. You have to go do it. And so that has now pervaded technology industry. I think virtually every tech company, at least until recently, has been doing some version of this.

1:20:00So you're performing a task directly applicable to the job that's at hand. And then so as Tableau started to grow during these high volume hiring moments, we started to think, how do we apply that to other departments? Because it's like a really good idea. But in a business software company like ours that did direct sales, that's our context, you end up hiring a lot of people in sales, marketing, customer support, and these functions. That's where the big volume of payroll goes, okay, at scale. And we started to make some policies around our interview process. One of which was, if you want to land a position as a professional sales or customer support person at Tableau, As part of your interview process, you need to demonstrate and sell our product to us.

1:20:51No one in the business intelligence industry was doing that, in part because the products were so complicated. That was an impossible ask. But in our new everyone-can-use-a-paradigm, this actually was a workable model. And so you would have people nervously come into Tableau's office, or the good ones were writing questions in advance. They were prepping. they were trying to get they they were they were watching youtube training videos which which is also great for their selection of us because by virtue of preparing they're also figuring out is this the right company for me you know what i mean and um that ended up being just a fabulous tool for figuring out whether someone was going to be good at it so i can tell you about other departments too but that's that's i don't know that's probably all the learning i could pass around um you were one of the first companies uh well you set up a it was pretty active community of folks using the product, a lot of evangelists there.

1:21:42And you, you guys did creative things like put your tutorials on YouTube for onboarding and stuff like that. How did you sort of, were these just necessities of other invention? And so you needed to do it? Or do you recognize that there were different ways of actually lighting these fires and sort of building these circular flywheels? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think founders liked, or and probably VC board members do, We sort of like to tell stories where we look back and say, there I was. I had the lightning strike insight on how it was all going to go down. That wasn't true for us. On so many things, we had some really good founding sensibilities.

1:22:24And then we sort of found our way. So to answer that question, we knew we had this sensibility that there was a new kind of enterprise software selling and customer adoption model. that was going to be an unstoppable wave in all the categories, right? Salesforce did CRM, we did BI, but you can go find a Tableau in every one of them. This was going to be the new way business technology gets adopted and sold. And so we had that sensibility and we were very into it. We were curious about it. We would hire people who came from other disruptors, everything I said, where we had the right sensibility and then we would try things that would seem to be kind of like in the purest version of this philosophy right and usually when we tried one it would work and it would just emboldened us right and so we would try the next one and then we got really confident but we just turned the dial we just took that dial and turned it to 10 like okay we're confident now here's what i mean when we came into the bi industry um the products were sold by professional field sales people they came with expensive training packages so you might sign your invoice for say you know business objects enterprise deployment and right you know it would say soft the license cost and it would say you know $890 ,000 for one department.

1:23:53And then next line down, training package,$50 ,000. Then it would say professional services package, often through a partner, you know,$890 ,000. It would often match the license cost, you know, just boom, boom, boom, expense, expense, expense, expense. And customers were paying it because that's, that was the available solutions. And we came in and And we're like, okay, new idea. Our software does not require an in-person visit at all. Training, hmm, how about free? We're going to put all of our training for free on YouTube. Just turn it to 10. We're going to have unlimited free downloads of our trial.

1:24:38Turn it to 10. We're going to give all students in the world access for free because all these companies had student interns come in and out. free we're going to give all teachers anyone in academia who works in a teaching or student position free we are going to have um no minimum purchase right like even even some of the savvier competitors who started to get easier to use they say okay fine we've come out with you know business objects light or whatever they're sort of i'm worried about tableau move was and it would say minimum purchase$50 ,000, you know, which was less than 890. But we just turned every dial to 10.

1:25:20We made a free reader, Tableau reader, just like the Adobe reader, free, unlimited. And, you know, Citigroup would go download, you know, 400 ,000 readers free. You know what I mean? And I could keep going, but we just did every dial. And so we had this idea that B2C selling sensibilities are going to take over the b2b industry and again we were followers in that you know we were we did not invent that but we were like we were all in once we started to sort of learn about it and then we started to pioneer some things ourselves and so we just turned it all to 10 and that's when the flywheel went crazy and it just worked and it became a grassroots fire and um inspired people all over companies just like webex would start adopting and telling their friends and presenting Tableau in meetings.

1:26:10And everyone would say, oh my God, what did you use for that presentation? And it would just start to, you know, go viral is a little too strong a sense. I think it gets overused, but customer adoption really started to take off. Yeah. At some point along the way, you actually moved to London to help set up Tableau HQ over there. And one of the things I heard you say was something to the effect of, you need to bend overboard to empower people when they work in a non-headquartered country or area. Why, why'd you move over? Why was that an important decision for you? That's a good question. Yeah.

1:26:44And in fact, it helps me answer one of your earlier questions more intelligently because you were sort of teasing out like, what are the big things that change as you go up this 1 million, 10 million, 50 million, 100 million, billion, you know, what, what, what are the things, what are the big things to change? You know what I mean? So that's an interesting dimension. One thing that I think just most of the business technology companies face on that role that really changes is in the early years, assuming you're a US company, you know, and these days you're probably Silicon Valley, Seattle, you know, San Diego, Austin, you know, like if you're one from these centers that keep producing these amazing disruptive of companies um really all that matters in the early days is the u.s you know i mean the idea of you're trying to hire your first 10 people or get your first product market fit or land your first investor but yet germany is really important to you like this is unlikely yeah you know i mean so a big thing that changes is once you have product market fit once the flywheel starts to go at some velocity, once you feel reasonably capitalized, you sort of got the basics down, you're going to see this huge spotlight come on your strategic dashboard.

1:28:02Maybe because it just occurred to you because of a customer conversation. Maybe it's because of venture. This is a great example where venture investors add great value. They've seen all this before. Maybe it's because a venture investor introduced the topic to you. But if you stay US focused, you will wind up with 40 % of the market you could have had, you know, or three, depending on how you measure, you know, most of the opportunity or at least half of it, to be fair, is not within our shores. In my domain is business technologies. That's what I'm talking about within business software stuff.

1:28:35And so if you're going to get serious about it, you have to make a whole, you have to have a whole new kind of thinking. Every policy you roll out, you have to be thinking, oh, wait, how would this work there? And it's never simple. And then you've got 14 different countries to start and then all the different languages and now you're thinking about entities and boards and the whole thing becomes much more sophisticated um but i think i've lost my train of thought at this point moving over to london oh yeah so i you know right during that period a few years in it occurred to me that maybe a really good move to go get that right would be to go move to one of our other offices you know really walk the walk so and then on the personal side that that like worked out for me and was attractive to our family.

1:29:21It wasn't any great stress. So I just happened to be in a point where that was a thing we can go pull off. And so we did that. And London was our headquarters for all the EMEA sales. And so working directly with those leaders there, meeting customers there, bringing some attention to that area, having more empathy with their issues than you could possibly have sitting in your San Jose office or for me, your Seattle office, you know, it just goes up. It does. And so it ended up being a positive thing. Yeah. So Tableau ultimately acquired by Salesforce for a little under$16 billion in 2018. Yes.

1:29:58You went public what year? 13. 13. And the business was doing roughly$100 million? At the time of going public? Yeah. When we went public, our trailing, I want to say, was 112 or just slightly over 100, I think. Yeah, growing roughly 100 % or about that. Not quite 100, maybe 70. Okay, got it. Growing super fast and all that. the journey in between there was not necessarily a linear path in the public markets. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like being a public company CEO, like what you learned from that experience between IPO and ultimate sales force? Well, the first thing, you know, so keep in mind, this is a group, none of us had ever done it before.

1:30:42So it was a really fun journey. Once we felt like the company was ready for that kind of thing. So keep in mind, this is year 10 of the company. We started in 2003. We're not even considering going public until 2011. We don't do it until 13. This is like 10 years in. And so for us, I think sometimes companies both get a lot of anxiety about and struggle with IPO stuff because it's one of these so much capital, so fast situations that, well, how did you think it was going to go? And that I think can be common in BDC. And I don't want to judge that because maybe that's just the way it has to be.

1:31:24But in our context, there's a longer road to victory probably if you're a business software company. and um so by the time we're getting there thinking about it you know this this this management team is very established we're well capitalized we have a great customer reputation we have good forecasts you know about the future and that kind of thing and so it it it felt kind of easy in a way uh to go public um and there were elements of it that were um sort of delightful that went better than I thought. For instance, I went into the process with some healthy skepticism about Wall Street firms and the influence they would have and the support they would need and all this kind of thing, because those are the parties you interface with initially.

1:32:09And in more cases than I thought, we met investors who, believe it or not, I know it's hard to believe, but they were more like a venture capitalist than I would have guessed. And so maybe that's where your earlier career was yourself but um i expected something more mercenary and less in touch with growth company needs and culture um whereas you know the venture industry to their great credit like they've got that figured out like that first 10-year journey they know all about the quirkiness and the culture and the patience and all that stuff in for for good vcs um and there there were more of those folks willing to buy ipo stock and to remain shareholders during the whole early years as a public company than I thought there were.

1:32:52So I guess my message is there are some benevolent forces out there and some of those are a great pleasure to work with also. They just become new colleagues. So I think of that as very positive. And then for company culture and for the rewards of the visibility it gave the company, I have a lot of positive thoughts on that. I mean, an IPO for us, you know, in our context of business software, it can put your brand on the map. It is true in a way that no amount of marketing spend could get you, you know, let's just say, let's just say you were to decide, okay, instead of selling 10 % of the company to public investors, we're going to go, you know, take$50 million or whatever you think the appropriate amount, a hundred million dollars and we're just going to go we're going to go buy the same awareness and just skip the event you know my question is great what are you going to do and you come up with some stuff i'm sure you would but okay the super bowl ad's over now they're winning 30 million it's just like i don't know it it's there's there's there's an awareness and credibility with business buyers with i'm they think who our customer is sure i'm not trying to get a a teen on a phone app in Iowa.

1:34:14You know, we're trying to get these companies, Fortune 2000 companies to trust our company and adopt us and hear about us and think about us as a premier provider of solutions, you know, and so, boy, the IPO did that. That worked. I mean, it worked. It was amazing. We saw a jump in awareness and credibility that could never, maybe you could manufacture it with money. I wouldn't know how to do it, you know. I think in a successful company's journey, you all there was one day that was very volatile from a stock standpoint right February 2016 right I think was it 50 percent in a single day I think so 40 or 50 yeah can you can you tell that story and like what the managing a company through that is like for employees and morale and all that stuff yeah well so it came so that was it that was that was on a call where we we had beat our number and just guided down guided down a little bit then there was a guy down i don't think we did i think it's more that sometimes you know so this is on this is on the dark side of ipos there's an element of the public markets you could i mean you can sort of control the ipo process sure who comes in stock we're gonna sell and all this stuff you know but but then there are elements that just become, you know, reasonably outside of your control.

1:35:37So for instance, you just get this huge speculation stuff that goes on. All sorts of funds with their computational modder, or even home investors who are just placing these bets that are not tethered to the guidance you've been giving. They're just not, they're untethered. You know what I mean? And so it turned out there was more of that going on in the market than we understood. You know, we did not announce that earnings. We either meet or slightly beat, but presumably it was not, I'd have to go back and look at my notes, but it was clearly not as much as people were expecting. It's one of those.

1:36:14And so we had a much bigger than expected stock price drop. And it was rough. I would say initially it wasn't so bad because we had such a strong company culture. And again, And by the time we're going public, we've been around for 10 years. This isn't a fly-by-night thing. So there was great trust by customers and the company and the longevity. The company was extremely well-capitalized. That's another thing we had going for us. The company was very well-capitalized. There was no investor worry that the company's going away, or customer worry as well. And so you give reassuring talks. And a lot of the people you've hired, keep in mind, they've all been through it before.

1:36:54you know like the modern technology employee you know now that the industry is so big like most people most of your top people in your companies they've seen this before it happens to everyone you know it's happening to a company today you know it's just a routine part of being a public company and so um it wasn't so bad i will say though that i think when we look back on it we we did see we saw trish and go up our employee trish i think you know there's by the time you're at this scale of employees you know by this time i think we're over 2 000 people and so this is part of the scale stuff we could come back to like things start to change now you have so many people you know there aren't there isn't necessarily as high a portion of people who are absolutely in love with the company and the workplace as when you were say 500 you know in early statistics to statistics that ratio goes up and so um i think there were a number of people who were just sort of freaked out or worried about their options being underwater and not willing to wait the long term for it to come around as it did you know what i mean yeah and so i remember our most devastating thing was that attrition went up and that was that was that and that was rough that that's when we sort of think oh man this being public journey is not all not all roses yeah it's uh yeah it's a uh i mean a crazy day i'm sure i remember where i was linkedin announced earnings the same day it sort of oh yeah linkedin had a similar story yeah i remember that venture market was frozen for like a month after because it pulled down all the yeah and of course funny part is which i you know which i which i which i would set at the time is for all those investors who did not overreact and ignored the speculators and just hung on to the stock how did they do Yeah, what was the, do you remember what the market cap went down to at its low?

1:38:44I don't have the fresh numbers, but let me think. Let's just say the stock went from something like 100 to something like 60, whatever it is. Let's just say you held at 60. Well, if you track that stock all the way through, I think at its peak post-acquisition, it was like 350. Oh, within two and a half years. At that time, you would have been holding Salesforce stock because all this. It was a bottom line for investors. I'm presumably public investors would use this as a case, the long, the long, sure. The long funds probably should use Tableau as a case study, which is sure. If you believed in the business and you believed in the cult following and you believed in the management team and it was well capitalized, there was no cash crunch.

1:39:23You know what I mean? Like, why don't we just hold for like five years? This thing's going to turn around, you know? And I don't know how long it took, but from a stock perspective, but it was, it was a great outcome for investors. Yeah. at some point along the way you made the decision not to continue to operate as ceo what were the inputs into that no i'm glad you asked because presumably for some of your listeners this will be relevant at some point in their journey um the anxiety so there came a time when um it was two of us chris my founder crystal the the the two main main five chris and i were work we were equal owners of the company me chris and pat but um pat was a little more distant by that time so chris and i were the main daily operators of the company um and there came a time when we both we through conversations we were having as friends and colleagues that we both decided i think i might be done with this job not with the company we wanted to go forever but like you know we we held jobs ceo and cdo you know i mean and we decided we didn't we weren't too excited about doing those jobs anymore and the anxiety we had in our stomach about oh my gosh where would you find someone can you turn over all these stories because i'm sort of a student of technology like you are and in my head i think of all the founder exit stories and how poorly they seem to go they all seem to end with the founder is back two years later yeah they all seem to have that art you know it never seems to go well and there were two people who set me straight on that because i i mean this was chris and i we we went to the board and we said we would like to move on in our in our positions we would just like to make a plan for it and there was some some i think some knew and some were shocked and then over the following weeks we just made a plan and there were two people one board member actually two two board members in particular and the cert the person who ran the search firm who we used those three did so much to bring my anxiety down turns out the cliche story you're picturing of founding ceo retires, company becomes a mess, founding CEO comes back, is not the only story.

1:41:44If you actually look, there's quite a few examples to the contrary. And so that gave us a lot of confidence. One of the board members had seen it successfully before himself, and it went great. And so there's sort of like a pep talk there. And likewise for Chris, the founding inventor and person who runs all of engineering, you know, same anxiety, same worry about how could this person be replaced given the context and their experience and all that stuff. And so we launched, I hired a search firm, this person who was influential, and we ran a process. We did likewise for Chris. Chris was in a position where there was an obvious internal candidate.

1:42:25And so that's, that one was easier. that one had more more to do about the internal culture and workforce dynamics so that one went pretty straight straightforward and chris turned things over to andrew beers and then we did a search we did we didn't have an obvious external candidate so that was part of the stress you know and we we literally did it we did a search when you're doing the search is it confidential or do you announce it well yeah how did we do it we did it we did it confidential in part because we were open-minded to either having a president who reported to me and we just change things around a little bit or we just get a full replacement when we did this search we went into it we were all open to both paths just depending on what the talent was and who was available and then as it turns out um you know we had a we had a great list of exciting candidates you know because you know there it turns out actually this is another founding message turns There's a class of executives out there I didn't even really know about.

1:43:28They view a billion-dollar technology company as a startup. And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is sort of the end. There are people out there, I'm not one, they come into billion-dollar tech companies and say, wow, where could we take this startup? And so one of these is Adam Slipsky. And there were other people too, But Adam was the, Adam won the, won the job and he did, he was great. Yeah. What's it, what was the, you mentioned the anxiety of maybe everything you built going away. Were there other anxieties or concerns about making this transition or is that the, the, the main one?

1:44:13The cliche story is what, you know, is one anxiety and it, you know, it does indeed happen. a second was remember i told you we had that great gelled management team sure you know most of them were still there and so that would be like early moments of shake up of that core team you know what i mean and so there was a lot of anxiety about how we could manage that um i don't know that's about it yeah i mean now i'm sort of assured about the whole thing i don't even remember all of them yeah yeah other stuff yeah um what about the decision to sell so you You got a very nice offer from Salesforce.

1:44:49Was that, did you all, I mean, most companies end up sold at some point, regardless of how big they got. But when did you start thinking about it? How did the conversations play out? Yeah, it's funny because Tableau had been approached with an acquisition tone in the air four or five times. By all different parties? By all different parties. and in every case we bounced it immediately so you you never even get to what the offer would be because you're just like and we're not we're not i don't i don't want to go through that process you know what i mean um especially before you're public we just never felt it was the right time for the company and so so you know some years passed the company is growing and you know now as i like to say it's like we had the you know elementary school we had middle school we had high school we had college you know after five years of being public like now even college is done you know now it's like truly like this is an adult company you know um and so things change and one thing that had changed is um and for me you have to ask every board member because this is a board decision to sell for me um i thought the competitive dynamic looking forward was going to be different and harder than it had been.

1:46:13For all of the evangelism I did about how if you're disruptive and true and patient, things could go better than you think. You might have a more competitive time than you think. The fact is that steamroller will get you. When Microsoft wakes up and puts all their eggs in the basket, right? Yeah, and not just them. Also, if you just look at the whole industry, the cloud compute. The cloud compute wave is coming. And, and, and, and, and by that, I mean, more power was being shifted to the new big platform titans. Like when we started the big platform titans were Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, you know, in the new wave turns out Microsoft figured it out, but obviously it's, it's Amazon, it's, um, Google is Salesforce, whoever I'm forgetting in business tech stuff.

1:47:10And, you know, I, for one, started to feel that like there's going to be more bundling. There's going to be more cloud attached. There's going to be more enterprise deals in these big Fortune 500 purchasing agreements that get signed. And that it could be it now looks moral in our best interest to be teamed up with one of them. in a way I wouldn't have earlier, myself, I wouldn't have earlier considered as seriously. And so when Salesforce knocked, that was interesting, you know. And then it happens that Salesforce also is world-renowned for its great culture, world-renowned for its agility. It had a business model we were admiring, as I said, all the way up about what the new model new model of business software looks like.

1:48:01And so we got into conversations and wanted to hear what they had to say. And then they did a nice persuasion job on, you know, on everyone. And, you know, it's worked out. So I think you're a student of technological cycles, as we've alluded to earlier, like what, as you, as you zoom out on these different trends or different things, businesses you've studied along the way, are there any salient points of advice or anything that you found particularly interesting the one that comes to mind is about halfway through tableau's journey someone handed me innovators dilemma oh yeah and um a few years ago i actually that was about five years ago i think online there was a big debate online within some tech blog forgot which one about whether innovators dilemma is true or false or credible or because this is like um I think he was a Harvard professor, right?

1:48:51Yeah, Clayton Christensen. I read that book and I just could not believe that someone decades before, or a decade before we were even founded, wrote a script about what was about to happen to us. So we, and I'm sure there's great points on both sides of this debate, but we are a textbook example of Innovator's Dilemma because Christensen doesn't just say, something sometimes new things come around and replace old things you know like that's not a thesis it's this very specific five-step process on how young no-name disruptors take over extremely powerful industry incumbents and um i won't take you through all of it but one of the five stages is that after a little bit of market traction the big incumbent players in the industry will look at the young upstart to the extent they even notice it and say that product only does one thing.

1:50:00And the pattern is that a new technology comes along. Of course it doesn't do everything the big incumbent products do. But it does one thing much, much better. and the big incumbents right in his formula will write that one thing off as sort of a sideshow that's not that important so in and the and the phases go on until all the big incumbents are you know if not eliminated they're they're much suppressed in their prior glory you know let's put it that way and the new incumbent has taken over um and for us you know we started with a little a little 1.0 product after we had formed the company that did nothing but make drag and drop at that did nothing but make ad hoc analysis of databases and spreadsheets easier that's it and the visualizations were better you know they were just that that was all it did and the business software to all the engineering departments off there out there you know how long it takes.

1:51:06You probably have some sense of like how long it takes you to go fill in all of this other stuff that a sophisticated buyer would need to deploy your products at scale. But you do not need any of that stuff to make enough inroads to be important and to establish a base to grow off of. And we're just, we're a perfect example. And so I hope that gives some inspiration to those who have a product that does one thing really well and gives them the ambition to stick with it for 10 years and fill out the rest of it. That's great advice. Now, presumably, you are no longer spending your time focused on B2B software quite as much.

1:51:53You have new endeavors that you're spending your time on. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing today yeah i'm on second career so um my wife and i have formed a foundation called the washington neurodiversity project so i am working in a completely different domain now and our mission is to improve employment outcomes and career pathways for neurodivergent thinkers in short people who who traditionally have had medical diagnoses like autism or autism adjacent or severe ADHD or Tourette's and so on. You know, we've had these medical labels for things, which I think in some cases are useful.

1:52:36But they're also a source of identity and greatness for a large portion of the population. And there are changes we can make if things go well, to make our workplaces and our society better equipped to include and get the best of people who are wired a little differently than is considered neurotypical. So that's what we're working on. And that's why I don't have a savvy comment on the latest AI training. I'm working in a different space right now. What does that look like on a daily basis? How do you sort of spend your time? Yeah, that's a great question. So just in the last few months, we've hired our first couple staff people to work with us.

1:53:16And in our case, we've made an ecosystem map of Washington State that describes all of the support services and influencers and evangelists out there who have a role in helping young people move from, say, a high school or college stage to in a very satisfied career setting. And as a foundation, so it's a foundation. So we're a force in the ecosystem. We are there to try to give support to those places in the ecosystem that could be shored up. We're trying to import some ideas that are working in other geographies around the world. And of course, we'll soon be putting out calls of invitation for innovators who want to try to improve this situation.

1:54:02So that's the kind of role a foundation can have in a social problem. So that's what we're taking on. Super exciting. Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah, that's very cool. Well, Christian, thanks for doing this. Yeah, thank you, Logan. This was a fun conversation. It was good to talk about Tableau again. Yeah. Thank you.